Sales and Marketing

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 ...

Sitecore customers who choose not to implement personalization are only halfway down Sitecore Road. Personalization improves visitor engagement which leads directly to more sales and, it was probably the pivotal reason for buying Sitecore. As if to put another nail in the coffin, some customers use Google Analytics (GA) instead of Sitecore analytics. This makes it even harder t ...

Yes, strong words in the title so if you are dismissive, or short on time, jump to Use Case 3 and read it twice. In the world of sales, these are powerful features. Integrators can get so tied up with the technical detail they lose sight of the proverbial forest. Yes, fitting virtual square pegs into round holes is interesting (and rewarding) but creating value around business ...

Organizations that use Sitecore and Salesforce may want to share information with their customers, partners, staff, students or any other group of users. There are several ways to achieve this - we will look at two. Salesforce Community Cloud "Communities" is a ready-made portal that organizations use to disseminate information like knowledge bases, FAQs, forums, messaging, a ...

Selling is dramatically changing and now there are over 7000 solutions with software products in the Marketing Technology space. It's almost impossible to find technology combinations that align with all your needs. The big challenge is you "don't know what you don't know", and don't have the time to find out. Annoyingly no product or product combination will work perfectly so ...

As an IT company we love technology so much we often get consumed with new features and ideas. Sometimes we forget that customers want to use our products to save and make money. Our fun space is S4S, our Sitecore to Salesforce integration. It's sold all over the world to companies of all sizes. Technically we think it's amazing but in reality, most customers don't want all th ...

Almost every website includes a telephone number. It adds credibility and affirms that real people exist in the business. But what happens if someone actually rings the number!  An operator may be asked questions like: Can you tell me the price of your widget? How does your widget work? Do you ship to my town? What are your payment terms?  Phone calls usually require ...

It's time to panic! An extensive report in 2018 showed 55% of surveyed companies took 5 days or more to respond to lead inquiries. This does not bode well after reading another survey that shows the odds of contacting a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drops 100 times. The odds after 5 days must be horrendous! It's not just statistics - it also makes sense. The sales team ne ...

Personalized websites compel visitors to stay longer and show more interest in your products and services. The act of personalization is also beneficial as it forces companies to look deeply into the types of customers they attract and how to best respond to them. What does website personalization do? It simply changes what each visitor sees by showing more relevant images, te ...

It's embarrassing. We've been using web forms to push Sitecore analytics to Salesforce leads with S4S since 2013 but not for a second thought about not using web forms. Then along came a customer who said, "We need to see web analytics in Salesforce but we don't use Sitecore forms!". What! Who does that?  The use case was a sales rep needing to view, in Salesforce, the website ...