Sitecore and Salesforce may seem unlikely companions but each collects information that can make the other much better! In fact, from a sales and marketing perspective, they are like nuts and bolts - perfectly complementary.
Both systems deal with the same individuals but at different stages in the sales funnel. When trying to "know your customer better" why throw out everything you learn in Sitecore when the same individual is transitioned to Salesforce and beyond! Further, 85% of sales reps say having data insights on customers’ propensity to buy makes them more effective in their job.
It's easy to see that integrations like S4S, that share Sitecore data with sales reps make a lot of sense!
Sales-oriented web design
Sales reps need to find out what excites their prospects! The answer is to view their website behavior. Web activity provides honest and reliable insights into a prospect's state of mind when their enthusiasm is at its highest. When a visitor navigates a website they reveal their true aspirations, level of engagement, nuances, and budgetary constraints. Their state of mind can be determined by what they look at, for how long, how many visits, and so on. This is all vital presales intelligence to a sales rep!
Given the obvious value of exposing web activity in Salesforce, the question is, "How do we design a website to accommodate this?". In other words, a sales-oriented design that purposefully invites the visitor to navigate in a way that better identifies their state of mind to the sales team.
The good news is Sitecore personalization does some of this for you however Sitecore pattern cards and Sitecore goals focus more on personalizing web content and creating data for engagement plans not delivering specific intelligence for the sales team.
What does the sales team want?
So what visitor intelligence do sales reps need?
Raw Data - what visitors tell you!
Map Sitecore web form fields to Salesforce leads (or contacts) and voilà, the sales reps have it!
- Name
- Job title
- Company
- Product interest
Social Media Data - what you can easily find!
With a little effort, sales reps can discover more and update the findings in Salesforce
- Social media profiles
- LinkedIn job history
- Shared relationships
- Hobbies and interests
Insight Data - what visitors don't tell you!
Sitecore collects insights as visitors browse the website. S4S pushes it to Salesforce
- Enthusiasm and urgency
- Previous interactions and duration of interest
- Additional products of interest
- Level of subject knowledge
- Language and culture
- Budget
- Anything else you need to know
Insight data and S4S
Discovering what visitors don't want you to know is not the stuff of spy novels. The insights, that collectively indicate a prospect's propensity to buy, can be gleaned from their web-behavior and surfaced in Salesforce but first, let's look at why the insight data is generated.
Companies using Sitecore can choose to personalize their web content for individual users. In broad terms, this is a three-step process:
- Visitor activity is collected (analytics or insight data)
- The visitor is assigned one or more pattern cards
- As the visitor traverses the site, content that matches the pattern card(s) is presented
Alternatively, a Sitecore goal can be assigned to identify a specific browsing action, like downloading a white paper or visiting an "About Us" page. Sitecore has "rules" that read goals (and pattern cards) and assign targeted content to nominated pages. The purpose, therefore, of collecting insight data is to personalize content. It is this insight data that is the rich source of information that S4S pipes to Salesforce so sales reps are better informed.
Design changes
Extrapolating visitor insights from their web behavior may require some clever thinking and design changes. A couple of examples are:
- Discover a prospect's budget: Instead of having a price list, require the visitor to click a link to expose the pricing of specific tiers like "Free", "Budget", "Enterprise". The selection link could be saved in the visitor's Sitecore contact record and S4S automation used to copy the value to Salesforce.
- Discover subject matter knowledge: Make available a technical document that relates to the product. Trigger a Sitecore goal if the visitor downloads the document then push the goal to Salesforce with S4S.
- Discover anything else: Teasers attract a particular ilk and are ideal for differentiating visitors. The clever use of images, videos, links, and other attractants can be irresistible to the target visitor. Assigning a goal to the teaser is an easy way to have S4S automatically move it to Salesforce.
Sitecore has many ways to score web behavior including goals, Sitecore contact facets, pattern card values, and item tree entries. Because S4S can surface these in Salesforce in real-time sales reps can view these visitor insights before and during sales conversations.
Conclusion
When designing a Sitecore website the focus is often web content personalization. This is a powerful way to increase engagement but consideration should also be given to empowering the sales team with insights into the prospect's state-of-mind. After all, when the marketing journey nears the end, the sales journey is just beginning.
To learn about the benefits of systems integration and the features of S4S please contact us.
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