Sitecore Book: The Connect Guide to Experience Marketing

Sitecore’s new book “Connect: How to Use Data and Experience Marketing to Create Lifetime Customers,” is now available. It was talked about at the Sitecore Symposium last month, and I had a sneak peek at the first three chapters. Written by Sitecore’s own Lars Birkholm, Ron Person and Christopher Nash, this book is based on Sitecore’s own customer experience maturity model.

I talked quite awhile ago with Birkholm about the methodology Sitecore had created and the professional services offering built around it (Sitecore Business Optimization Services team). Birkholm said at the time that customers weren’t leveraging technology to create great experiences because many simply don’t know where to start. The methodology Sitecore created provides that guidance. Now it’s available to everyone in a book.

The book starts off explaining what most realize, but maybe aren’t fully prepared to accept – that the customer is in control and the way marketing works today has to change dramatically to support this shift in control. I think businesses understand this on some level, and there are many out there making big changes to how their marketing departments, and sales and support departments, are working, but it’s not a simple process and it won’t happen overnight.

Brian Solis wrote the forward to this book and there’s a section that is key to highlight:

” Businesses either adapt or die. Ignoring this fact hastens digital Darwinism. Jumping in without understanding or intention is a moon shot without aiming for the moon.

This isn’t just a channel strategy.

This isn’t just a technology strategy.

This is a shift toward a new movement where customer experience now screams for us to “Create experiences!”

Indeed, customer experience happens with or without you.”

Connect will help you find your path to working with customers and prospects. It offers best practices, recommendations, initiatives, step-by-step processes and case studies on how you can design and build your own customer experiences.

The book talks about the importance of trust, and how you must build it with your customers. As you move through the customer journey, trust becomes even more important and is an opportunity to earn more commitment from your customers.

The New Marketing Mandate

Mass personalization. That is what marketers face today and to do it, they need several things.

They need to collect the RIGHT metrics that correlate to strategic initiatives. They need to fully understand their customers “their intent, what motivates them, and stages in their Customer Life Cycle (CLC).” The CLC is not just about the sale, it goes well beyond. Establishing a relationship that goes further than the completion of the sale helps build customer advocacy. Businesses also need to own the experience, not let it happen without them and part of that is understanding the customer’s context and adapting the experience to that context.

The final key the book says is organizational buy-in. There is so much that needs to change across the organization to make this successful, and there’s a chapter in the book dedicated to helping you understand what needs to happen and how you can do it.

The Customer Experience Maturity Model

There are three things that must come together to be successful in customer experience: you need the right mix of people, process and technology. Sitecore’s Customer Experience Maturity Model takes these three aspects into consideration.

Chapter three takes you through an overview of this model and explains at a high level each stage of maturity and what typically happens. The rest of the book goes into detail on each stage, explaining the benefits, providing a customer story and advice for what to do and how to know if you are there.

This is a book I think it worth everyone’s time to read, Sitecore customer or not. The maturity model can apply to other technologies, the people and processes are unique to each company. I look forward to reading the entire book. You can find out more about the book and its accompanying website to decide for yourself. I’d love to hear your perspective on the book once you’ve read it.

Print this article

Share and Enjoy

---

---