Building Sales Confidence

Sales is a confidence game! Confidence is knowing your products and services and knowing your target prospect. Confidence does lead to more sales.

This is a quick look at how you can understand your prospect better. To illustrate the learning process, we use Sitecore CMS, Salesforce CRM, and FuseIT’s S4S integration as example technologies.

Traditional Research

When it comes to learning about prospects, usually prior to a sales call, traditional research tools are limited:

• Any historical information already in your CRM
• Information and mutual connections from platforms such as LinkedIn
• Other social media channels
• Company websites including communities and blogs
• Search engine tools such as Google or Bing.

Information from these sources will never reveal the prospect's current state of mind. For example, consider how important the following information would be prior to a sales call:

• How often does the prospect view the product page on your website
• How long do they dwell on the page
• How often they return to the website
• The search phrase they entered
• What they did not see – like upsell features and warranty extensions
• Which other product categories and detail pages they viewed
• If they viewed the About Us page
• Where they visited before arriving at the website - the referral source
• What journey led them to the call to action
• Their call to action (web form, click on an email link, etc.)

Having this information in the CRM gives the sales team important insights, allows them to better prepare, and generates huge confidence prior to a sales call. Let’s look at the technologies that facilitate this.

Sitecore Personalization

Website personalization is one of Sitecore’s key differentiators and Sitecore is very good at it. Sitecore websites capture an individual’s browsing data and dynamically adjust what content the visitor sees as they traverse the website. By the end of each visit, Sitecore has compiled an interesting and comprehensive suite of analytical data that reveals the visitor’s persona and current state of mind. Gaining sales confidence starts with making this data available to the sales team.

Into the CRM

It is only when a website visitor makes a purchase or submits a web form, they become a “person” in the system. This is where we create a new lead or contact record in Salesforce and add the form and browsing analytics to the record. With this invaluable data at their disposal, the sales team can set about converting the lead to a paying customer or upselling additional products.

What Else

The next question is, “What else can we do to help the sales team improve their close ratio?”. As you would expect, there are many options such as:

• Pushing specific website events (goals) to Salesforce which can then be used in a CRM workflow to alert the sales team of hot leads. They can then respond to prospects while your product is still front of mind.
• Directly Sitecore web forms to:
  • Nominated members of the sales team to improve response times and auditing
  • Nominated Salesforce campaigns so leads are nicely collected in containers
• Allow the sales team to personalize Sitecore from within Salesforce. Any visitor returning to the website will see exactly what the sales team wants them to see

Technologies

This article is based on FuseIT’s enterprise S4S product which integrates Sitecore with Salesforce. With S4S you can implement all the scenarios mentioned above. If you are using Microsoft Dynamics or another CRM system ask your Sitecore partner to look into getting this working for you – it is well worth the effort.

Conclusion

Sitecore has created an incredible source of visitor information that has many uses beyond Sitecore. In this article, we’ve seen how integrating the two systems can improve sales confidence which leads to increased sales.

FuseIT has developed numerous Fortune 500 Sitecore and Salesforce integrations over many years. To learn more about how S4S can add value to your business please contact us for more information.