Sitecore Product Marketing
Background
I interned at Sitecore in the summer of 2015 when I was a sophomore in college. Sitecore is a an experience management and marketing automation software. It allows marketers to deliver content depending on how customers have engaged with their brand in the past, the channel, and the setting of engagement. Many enterprise customers, such as American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, easyJet, and L’Oréal, use Sitecore to help them deliver personalized digital interactions.
Outside of Sitecore's core experience management product, the company also partnered with other technology offerings to meet all of a client's digital needs. Some examples of these complementary technology offerings included website translation services, digital asset management services, cloud platforms and more. Sitecore sales teams had to be "enabled", meaning equipped to sell technology partners whenever their clients express a need for a technology offering outside of Sitecore's product. Technology partners' offerings often helped Sitecore win sales battles over its competitors. My work here consisted of redesigning the sales enablement process and improving the technology partner on-boarding experience, both of which I will explain further below.
1. SALES ENABLEMENT
Problem
Sitecore sales teams had consistently shown low engagement with the company's technology partners, which were designed to be a value add and a key differentiator for the company's core product. Initially, I was hired to simply create better marketing messaging on these partners. However, after working closely with the sales and marketing teams for half a month, I realized that the key problem wasn't the messaging, but rather the way it's delivered. Like my manager always said, "salespeople hate spending time on anything." The sales teams needed a structured enablement process that they could effortlessly follow on their own schedule.
Action
I started by reading and learning more about all of our technology partners, grouping them into key bucket industries, researching those industries, conducting partner interviews to understand how partners work with each other and Sitecore. To help others understand the complex landscape of technology partners, I visualized each partner's role in relation to the digital experience platform in the journey chart below:
The next step was to organize all the fragmented information in a way that aligned with the sales process. The sales process followed a broad to narrow funnel that can be categorized roughly into the following 3 steps:
1. Become aware of technology > 2. Compare options > 3. Understand specifics
With that in mind, I created an internal SharePoint website that followed this funnel, starting with the home page, which hosts all of our technology partners, grouped by functions. This allows sales reps to see all the technologies and brands offered at one glance.
If a customer were interested in a certain technology category, the salesperson can then go to the next step of the funnel by clicking on an industry title. Each industry had its jargons and nuances - it was important for sales to be able to distinguish between different partners who play in the same industry and know which one to recommend to what various types of clients. By clicking on each bucket name, sales teams would be able to access industry pages. I laid out key competitive characteristics in tables and graphs to help sales teams obtain the most information in the shortest amount of time.
For information further down the sales funnel, I also created individual pages on each partner, which provide contact information, company specific details, white papers, data sheets, and other useful training materials, so that salespoeple can provide necessary details before onboarding their clients onto a particular technology.
Throughout the creation process of this sales internal site - from ideation to pushing the site live - sales directors and partner representatives constantly provided me with useful feedback and recommendations to make sure the system was staying accurate and relevant.
Result
It's rare for intern projects to get public recognition at a firm like Sitecore, where there were no official internship programs. I was surprised and flattered when the VP of Product Marketing invited me to do a presentation at the company's global all-hands sales conference on the enablement tool and content I'd created. After the presentation, individual field sales guys and higher management at the firm gave me really positive feedback and even set up individual meetings to discuss how the tool I created could be scaled globally and for other departments of the company. Their appreciation very much helped validate my idea and efforts. Here's a shortened version of my presentation at the conference:
2. Partner On-boarding
During my first month with Sitecore, I also had the chance to make adjustments to the technology partner on-boarding process, so partners could become a part of the ecosystem more quickly with less friction. On-boarding rate tripled between when I started and ended my internship.
- Automated partner on-boarding process
- Drafted, tested, and finalized industry specific questionnaires used to collect key information from new partners
- Aligned questionnaire responses with sales enablement structure content population to maximize efficiency and allow for future scalability
- Marketing strategy discussion with partners - communicating road shows, symposiums, and online marketing opportunities
- Created standardized press release templates for new partners
Lastly, in my free time at the company, I decided to write my own product launch guide that I thought would be helpful to reference if I were involved in any future technology product launches. I was really lucky to be able to learn about the subject from very experienced marketers who had done multiple launches throughout their careers. Check it out here.