Sales and Marketing

As an independent software integrator, we've always viewed the big vendors as helping us more than we help them. How silly is that?  I recently asked a vendor, "How come you don't integrate with Salesforce?". He replied, "Our customers have never asked for it". Momentarily that made sense so I thanked him and walked away. But hang on, I belatedly thought, wouldn't you like you ...

Selling is just one step in the sales and marketing process! A weak link in this process is the sales/marketing interface. This is where marketing-generated leads are handed to the sales team and sadly, where important sales intelligence is lost. Further, because the interface is typically primitive and the data flow is in one direction, the sales team cannot influence the le ...

Websites are traditionally "owned" by the marketing team but sales revenue can potentially explode if marketing concedes some ground to the sales team. "Sacrilege, not in my lifetime" I hear marketers say but relax, it's only a few minor concessions. The Case For ten years, FuseIT has been introducing innovative features that let sales reps leverage Sitecore analytics and per ...

Sitecore analytics is the ultimate source of sales intelligence. A lead's website behavior is exactly what a rep needs before making a sales call. But how do we bridge the gap and make this available so they can do their magic! This commentary speaks to teams that guide prospects through the sales process. Sitecore captures web behavior for personalization purposes. By capturi ...

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 ...