Technology

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 lea ...

Web content personalization seems amazing until you discover how difficult it is to implement effectively! It's not technically that difficult but it is really hard to create and allocate targeted content for specific audiences and Gartner agrees. To be clear, I'm not questioning web analytics which is used to generate individual personalizations. Analytics is a powerful source ...

Your business has problems and you know where they are? You don't need a consultant to borrow your watch to tell you the time! I recommend a holistic approach when examining a problem. Is the problem with a process step or the entire process itself? Classically, don't replace a car battery if the alternator is not charging! It's easy to be distracted by what is immediately in f ...

This article takes a high-level look at some of the problems integration solves. Why is it a high level look? Recently I got lambasted by a somewhat angry group of end-users for talking technical while hosting a round table. In my defense, I'd mentioned something technical and momentum just kicked in. To them, I was disconnected from reality and needed a hard reboot or somethi ...

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 capturin ...

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 provides an extensive suite of marketing tools - no argument there, Sitecore is a winner! But marketing is only one element of a successful business and by providing only marketing features, Sitecore customers must rely on integrations to build an effective fully connected system. In many cases, this passes the challenge to integrators who need skills in both Sitecore ...

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 ...

TRIM, or Micro Focus Content Manager, is the EDRMS benchmark used by around 230 organizations in Australia alone. Departments and agencies have long expressed frustration with TRIM around the manual effort involved in daily recordkeeping and the lingering need to still use paper documents. TRIM is still largely isolated from other systems, so business tasks often require the in ...

Let's look at using syncing to implement some typical workflows in Sitecore and Salesforce. What is syncing? It's the replication of data from one system to another and functionality that tries to keep both data sets up-to-date. The alternative is having a single source of truth and accessing the data when you need it in real-time. Does that mean syncing creates a double source ...