Sitecore Analytics: Get your Money Back

While marketers work with entire populations, the sales team focus on individuals. Marketers tend to view people holistically, seeking patterns and trends to optimize visitor engagement whereas sales work one-on-one so they need what we call the "good oil" on each prospect. In fact, marketers do capture very important web browsing data that would be invaluable to the sales team, if only it was available to them. 

The sales call is not going away. No right-minded prospect is going to buy a high-value product, like a car, penthouse or yacht, without conversing with an expert. There is a basic human need to establish trust and this cannot be created using technologies like AI. This article looks at how these very important sales calls can be boosted using web browsing analytics.

We work with Sitecore CMS or Sitecore Experience Platform^™. Sitecore has features that help companies attract and retain website visitors. Key among these is advanced personalization that helps captivate web audiences and encourages them to express an interest in a product or service, usually via a web form, or eCommerce action. Before website personalization is possible, Sitecore learns about the visitor by tracking their behavior and this is exactly the data the sales team needs prior to any one-on-one conversation or interaction.

So what can information can Sitecore learn about an individual? A great deal and some of it is very powerful in the hands of the sales team: 

• Number of visits to the website
• Average time on the website
• Actual pages visited
• Scroll movement down the page
• Number of visits to each page
• Sitecore goals achieved
• Personalization pattern card matched
• Geolocation of the visitor
• Referral source
• Industry
• and more

This far exceeds the barebones information the sales team normally receives from a web form submission. Let's consider how this information helps a sales rep prior to a sales call!

• Based on web activity, reps can prioritize their time and concentrate on hot leads first.
• Reps can understand the prospect's state of mind and get an indication of their budget.
• By seeing which products were viewed, the rep can do the relevant research and engage with more confidence. 
• Web analytics provides feedback to the sales team on the effectiveness of the marketing message.

Making web analytics available to the sales team makes a lot of sense. After all, without understanding how a prospect is thinking, how can a sales rep really contact a prospect in the best possible position.

Finally, how? How do we expose web analytics to the sales team in a way that fits into their daily routine? One way is to push the analytics into the CRM which is exactly what S4S does with Salesforce. If you want to learn more about how we integrate Sitecore with Salesforce please contact us for more information.