Selling is an effort in both marketing and sales. While Sitecore is a powerful marketing system, the visitor journey comes to an abrupt end when the lead is passed to the sales team. During the transference, vital intelligence and interaction opportunities are lost and this impacts sales revenue.
Selling should be a single journey through marketing and sales, collecting prospect intelligence along the way, then combining it to increase engagement and sales revenue. To this end, we pose the question, "What would a CRM look like in Sitecore?".
To quote Douglas Adams, "don't panic!", we've not yet added a CRM to Sitecore but are in the middle of a proof of concept and seeking feedback. In addition to the usual CRM features, we are using the rich vein of web interaction data (Sitecore analytics) to provide the sales team with important pre-sales intelligence. Couple this with our live call interaction innovations and we've got a truly unique and powerful sales system.
Want an example use case? Sales funnels are typically different for every company, so let's just pick an example where a deal is being proposed to a financial services prospect.
1. A visitor arrives on the website. Sitecore tracks the level of engagement indicating the likelihood of a sale.
2. The visitor initiates a call to action by submitting a web form, adding an item to their cart, or chatting with a sales rep. The result is a new lead record in the CRM and an alert sent to a rep by a workflow.
3. A sales rep qualifies the lead and determines the visitor's state of mind by reviewing the Sitecore analytics in the CRM. This lets the rep better prepare for a sales call.
4. The rep selects a proposal by viewing the success of previous proposals and chooses one that matches the lead's requirements and has already won a number of deals.
5. The rep phones the lead and asks them to visit the website. In the CRM, the rep identifies the visitor's Sitecore session and populates a web link that allows the lead to download the proposal. The lead likes the proposal, completes the acceptance page, and sends it to the rep via an upload link on the website.
6. The rep creates a new deal and marks it as won. The winning proposal is assigned to the deal.
7. Deals require compliance acceptance so the rep assigns the deal to compliance users so they can authorize the deal.
Why Sitecore?
As you might expect, Sitecore already has many inbuilt features and tools that take us a long way down the CRM road:
- Sitecore's ability to handle big data with xDB
- Sitecore Cortex and Workflow
- Multiple communication channels (email, mobile, apps, social, print, commerce, etc)
- Marketing automation
- Multi-lingual capabilities
- Easy integration with other software solutions
- Inbuilt CMS with native authentication to provide gated access
- User management and security
- Sitecore Forms to accept leads and set communication preferences
Conclusion
Now is a good time to connect with FuseIT to discuss how the CRM can work for you and when these features can be available - please call us for more information.
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