Integrate Sitecore and Salesforce to Create a Better Shopping Experience

Does your company still consider its CRM and CMS systems separate entities? Your CRM system contains a wealth of data that your company could use to create a personalized, delightful shopping experience. As a separate entity from your CMS system, though, your CRM system doesn’t benefit customers in a tangible way. Meanwhile, your CMS system delivers a “one size fits all” shopping experience that never meets its full potential for new customer acquisitions or repeats business.

It’s time to align your business’s goals and begin thinking of marketing and sales as the interconnected forces that they really are. CRM and CMS systems are the two main pivots of an integrated system that impact today’s competitive inbound marketing and help your sales team to maintain a contextual conversation with the customer.

To help you fully understand the benefits of integrating your CRM and CMS systems, let’s discuss some scenarios involving the two players named as leaders in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant: Sitecore from the CMS space and Salesforce from the CRM space.

Scenario #1: Siloed Systems

A company with disparate CRM and CMS platforms has a sales representative who meets with a prospective client. The sales rep creates a new contact entry for the potential client in Salesforce. The client, however, visits the company’s website while the rep is still busy entering the information. The website records the client’s actions as “anonymous.”

The website and the CRM both contain a wealth of information about the exact same person — but the sales rep doesn’t know because the systems aren’t integrated. The rep engages the customer in a complete marketing cycle without ever knowing that the customer has already done a great deal of research on his own and is very close to converting.

Scenario #2: Integrated Systems

Next, let’s examine how that same scenario could have unfolded if the company had integrated its CRM and CMS platforms. After meeting with the potential client, the sales rep enters the relevant information in the CRM. The website automatically integrates the information and creates a profile for the client. The sales rep can send a link to the client via email. When the client clicks the link, the website — which already has a profile for the client — will track that person’s behavior as he or she explores the website. The website will feed the information back to the CRM platform, empowering the sales rep to close the deal.

The sales rep reviews the customer’s profile in Salesforce. With the information brought over from the website, the rep knows what pages on the website interested the client the most. The website has also linked the client’s past anonymous visits to the website to his or her customer profile. Before meeting with the client, the sales rep can use the information to create a truly personalized pitch tailored to the client’s interests.

Insights Drive Sales

Integrating your company’s CRM and CMS platforms generates deep insights about customers’ interests and behavior. In the first scenario, the company had all of the information necessary to acquire the customer. The CRM software captured all of the customer’s offline touch points — but it didn’t know anything about his or her digital behavior.

In the second scenario, the company has integrated its CRM and CMS platforms. Each platform has the ability to feed the other with vital information. The company’s sales force has an understanding of the customer’s interests and understands how the company’s website content is supporting the customer’s online or offline purchases. With integrated CRM and CMS systems, the company is likely to acquire more new customers. Average order values will likely be higher as well.

Benefits of CRM-CMS Integration

Using a Sitecore connector makes the integration process quick and seamless.
Sitecore is one of the most comprehensive digital marketing platforms in existence. The package includes a full-featured CMS, A/B testing, site personalization and digital analytics. It also has the ability to profile a customer based on both online and offline activities.
Integrating your CRM and CMS platforms allows you to combine your website’s intelligence and analytics with the content segmentation and analysis capabilities of your CRM platform to convert more casual visits into qualified leads. By gaining deeper insights into the behavior and buying patterns of your customers, you’ll also increase the success of your future marketing efforts.
Your website already generates potential leads from website visits and email sign ups. Integrating your CRM and CMS allows your sales reps to use that information to create more compelling pitches.
Integrating allows the two platforms to exchange contextual information. When a submitted web form results in the creation of a new lead, for example, the sales team can track that person’s web behavior to create a more personalized experience.
Integrating creates a single source of data to ensure that vital information is available to the people who need it.
Integrating allows customers registered in your CRM platform to log in to your website and update their contact information.
Integrating allows you to increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns by using information from your CRM platform to create more targeted messages.

TA Digital Specializes in CRM-CMS Integration

As a Sitecore Gold partner and a digital innovation company, we’ve used our experience and expertise to help our clients consistently meet and surpass their sales goals. Does your company currently use a different CMS? Allow us to explain just a few of the ways in which this powerful CMS can benefit your company.

It creates user profiles that allow you to serve up relevant, laser-targeted content that delights your customers.
It includes the necessary framework to migrate the data from your existing website without causing downtime and lost sales.
It has a built-in framework to localize a website for any language.
It allows website administrators to manage multiple websites from a single interface.
It has built-in tools for the creation, testing, and analysis of email campaigns.
It has all of the features necessary to create a website with a rich e-commerce experience.
It gathers extensive analytics to give you a deeper understanding of the customer acquisition process.

Explore Additional Resources

Our Enterprise Solutions Practice works with our clients to recommend the optimum ERP/CRM Application along with the appropriate implementation and configuration.

Our Certified Sitecore Experience Platform and Sitecore MVP’s specialize in helping you deliver seamless contextually personalized customer experiences.

Our Salesforce Expertise help our clients increase their customer and vendor engagement across their digital enterprise by implementing suitable ERP & CRM Systems.

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About TA Digital

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Over the past 20 years, TA Digital has positioned clients to achieve digital maturity by focusing on data, customer-centricity, and exponential return on investment; by melding exceptional user experience and data-driven methodologies with artificial intelligence and machine learning, we enable digital transformations that intelligently build upon the strategies we set into motion. We are known as a global leader that assists marketing and technology executives in understanding the digital ecosystem while identifying cultural and operational gaps within their business – ultimately ushering organizations toward a more mature model and profitable digital landscape.

Recognized in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2020 and 2021 Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, TA Digital is pleased also to share high-level strategic partnerships with world class digital experience platform companies like Adobe, SAP, Acquia, commercetools, Sitecore, and Elastic Path.