Integrating Everything

What if we could integrate everything! Well, not exactly everything but integrate the essential software that every enterprise should be using. According to Gartner, the likely candidates are: 

• Sitecore CMS: Leader in the Digital Experience Platforms quadrant
• Salesforce CRM: Leader in the CRM Customer Engagement Center quadrant
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Leader in the Digital Marketing Hubs quadrant

These systems all process prospects so it makes real sense to share data and create continuity throughout the entire -  attract, acquire, engage, convert and retain process. At its simplest this could look like the following:

1. Prospects visit the website and receive a personalized experience that encourages them to complete a lead form
2. Saving the form creates a new Salesforce lead that includes the form data and history of the prospects website activity
3. Sales contact the prospect and use powers of persuasion to further engage the prospect
4. When the prospect makes a buy decision, sales convert them to a customer (or a Salesforce contact)
5. To retain the customer's interest, for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, sales add the customer to an automated engagement plan. This uses social media, email, SMS, or other mechanisms to regularly update the customer with new information

This relatively simple process would require an integration between all three enterprise systems, Sitecore, Salesforce and Marketing Cloud. Individually, the systems have their own sets of data about the same prospect. This means sales and marketing need to transition between the different systems to learn everything about the prospect e.g. Salesforce operators need to access Sitecore to find out if the prospect has recently visited the website.

Integration provides many benefits, for example, FuseIT's S4S enables the following:

• Sitecore web forms can be quickly built and mapped to either Salesforce or Marketing Cloud objects with a mapping wizard
• Sitecore tracking and personalization data can be pushed to Salesforce where it will be of great interest to the sales team
• The website personalization data in Salesforce can be modified and pushed back to Sitecore so returning visitors get a better and more focused browsing experience
• New leads arriving in Salesforce or Marketing Cloud can be auto-added to campaigns or subscriber lists respectively
• Where possible, S4S promotes Salesforce as the "single source of data". This significantly improves data integrity and reduces the need for data migration and syncing. From a users perspective, it means Salesforce contains almost everything you need to know about a prospect and a wider range of reports can be generated

Integration brings huge rewards and widely impacts individuals across an entire organization. As such, it is often organizational sensitive, as it allows other departments to access data silos that are often fiercely protected and defended.

If you need to see these systems working together just let us know and we can arrange a one hour personalized demo.