The Goal Discussion for Launch Sitecore

With our North American team’s www.launchsitecore.net project, we needed to have the fundamental discussions that you or your clients will need to have when taking advantage of all the power of Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform.    There are many places to start this discussion (and I will try to cover most of them in follow-up posts), but one that seems to be a very likely starting point is Goals.  For Goals, there are two main parts to this discussion:

1. What are all the Goals, large and small, that could be accomplished on my site (and how do I identify that they’ve been accomplished)
2. How do I stack / rank those goals in terms of relative importance for my site.

#1 is fairly straightforward.  Sit in a room together and brainstorm—what are all the conversions that I care to track at all?  Figuring out how those Goals will be identified could spark a bit more discussion (and potentially some developer insight) if the Goals themselves are complex and/or  require notifications and communication with external systems.  Some examples—an ecommerce transaction completing but the completion actually occurs outside of Sitecore, a goal that represents a specific path through the site (page A to page B to page Z without going to page C), leaving a video at a certain timestamp, etc. (well, that might be a failure, but you get the point).

For Launch Sitecore, our goals were fairly obvious and straightforward—your discussions or arguments could be more heated.  For us, we are really trying to engage our Evaluators of Sitecore.  Our Sales Engineering team is involved in the whole Prospect—>Partner—>Happy Supported Customer lifecycle.  Most of our time is focused on trying to provide the best software evaluation stage (sometimes a day and a demo, sometimes months of rigorous proofs) in the industry.  Launch Sitecore is a platform that now helps us do that.
So for goals, it’s clear:

1. Talk to our Evaluators (both Business Folks and Developers) about the great features of Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform.
2. Ask them to register at www.launchsitecore.net.
3. Encourage them to download the Launch Sitecore package.
4. Be excellent at supporting their efforts to uncover the power of the platform.

We know if they Download Launch Sitecore (Goal), they have started down the path to success.  We are interested in how many people will engage with us using their social network credentials (and therefore Sitecore’s Social Connected Module) by logging in (Goal).  We want people to Register (Goal, very selfish here, but this is what enters you into our Engagement Plan funnel….more on that later).  We strive for a continual improvement of this offering so we request our Evaluators’ feedback (Goal).  Even reading an article might be important to us (there was some discussion amongst the team here, so I’ll talk about this in terms of Engagement Value next).

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#2 above (how do I stack / rank) is less straightforward.  Now we need to answer tougher questions and apply relevance to the goals we’ve brainstormed.  This will lead to a closer focus on priorities, a reordering and reshuffling of the value of Goals and probably even the throwing out of some of those Goals during the brainstorming session.  In Sitecore’s parlance, this is coming up with a relatively scaled Engagement Value for the Goals we’ve identified.  This can provide for some really interesting (potentially heated) discussions around the main question:  “Why does our site exist?”.
In an ecommerce site this discussion might be short enough to have at 5:00 on a Friday—we’re here to make money, checkout = $.  Done.  In others (or in an ecommerce site considering other goals), it’s not as clean-cut.  How do we value a lead?  Is it important that someone watches a promotional video on our site?  Do we strive for them to Like us?  Is someone that starts a checkout process but than abandons it valuable to us?
For Launch Sitecore our discussion was pretty straightforward, with one important twist:

Read an article:  Something we’re still discussing, but for the time, a Goal.  Notice no Engagement Value placed on this goal…it’s something we currently think we want to track as a conversion, but we aren’t necessarily OPTIMIZING our site for this activity.

Login (social or new account):  We’ve felt that by someone logging in, they’ve felt the Launch Sitecore site is a good place to hang.  They feel they are getting something from the offering (maybe they want to see their favorite articles all in one place, find our pointers to helpful links to be very convenient).  We’re engaging with them and we place value on this.  5 Engagement Value Points.

Registered:  An initial registration is particularly important to us for two reasons:

1. We know that they have probably registered as a result of an SE Engagement (more about campaigns that will tell us for sure later) and that they are doing so to download Launch Sitecore.
2. The selfish reason is that we are using registration as an entry point to the Engagement Plan we’ve built for this site.

10 Engagement Value Points.

Downloaded Launch Sitecore:  The obvious winner for the biggest goal of them all, right?  Wait a minute.  If we think through the overarching goal of our site, the reason we built our site:

Create hugely successful experiences for organizations evaluating Sitecore.

So, we have to think more carefully about the flow.  If someone just Downloads Launch Sitecore, we know they have great intentions of spending some time with Sitecore.  But things happen, people get busy with their full-time jobs.  How do we really know they got the experience we were hoping for?  What if something happened during the download and they never got back to it?  Our team needs to re-engage (as we’ll see in our Engagement Plan) and ensure we are being excellent at supporting this evaluation.  Now if the Goal…

…Gave the Launch Sitecore team feedback about the evaluation is accomplished, now we’re talking.  We can be very confident that the Evaluator actually spent time with the package and has offered up their insights.  Even if these comments are less than complimentary, we have the information we need to meaningfully re-engage.  This is our ultimate (and highest on the Engagement Value scale) goal.

The relative scaling—25 for downloading and 50 for giving feedback—reflects this conversation.
More to come as we continue to look at the Analytics, Multi-Variate tests and Engagement Plans on www.launchsitecore.net.

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(Re)Introducing Launch Sitecore

Register or login (socially) and grab the download at www.launchsitecore.net

If you are evaluating Sitecore or if you’re a partner working on pitching Sitecore to a prospect, hopefully you’ve had a chance to download and experiment with Launch Sitecore.  I wanted to take a moment to explain the motivations behind the project, the current state and the future hopes and dreams.  I plan on doing a series of posts around this growing platform, as our whole team is buzzing with ideas about the directions this could take.

Before continuing, I wanted to take a moment to give credit where credit is due.  Howard Kim and I dreamt this up a while ago and had been brainstorming lots of ideas based on some challenges in our daily work lives.  Our entire North American Sales Engineering team has kicked in with ideas, article writing, proofing, testing and particular areas of expertise.  But I can’t continue without recognizing the heroic efforts of Chris Castle, who took this project on with such enthusiasm and skill that it has taken on a life of its own.  (I would say it’s his baby, but for those of you that know Chris, there’s just no additional room for that).  This was a part time job in addition to an amazingly busy and productive full time job.

The thing I like most about this project is that, while allowing creativity to enter, it has stayed true to its goals:

• Create a package that is easily installable, understandable, self-documenting
• Highlight effective and efficient solutions to common scenarios—reusable content, navigation, configuration, separation of content and presentation
• Provide a consistent and seamless path from initial developer discussion—>self-install and investigation—>follow up deep dives—>successful evaluation
• Provide a clean and extensible starting point for SE team, partner and client proof of functionality / proof of concept activities
• Use the platform in our own “public” site to show real world examples of Digital Marketing System, Analytics, Email Campaign Manager, GeoIP resolution, the upcoming OLAP cube and more.

The motivation for this project has always been clear and concise: 

Create hugely successful experiences for organizations evaluating Sitecore.

Our team believes so strongly in the power of the Sitecore platform that we know absolutely anything you need to do can be done.  From the recent Symposium video from the great folks at Carnival Cruise Lines: “if we can think it, it can be done with Sitecore”.  We also know that with power comes a growing responsibility for the Evaluator.  I can imagine quite a few dictates out there that come close to something like, “go figure out what that Sitecore thing does….and we really need to make a decision by next week”.  Yikes.  In my 5 years at Sitecore, the thing I’m assured of is that I’m going to learn something new every day.

The power of Sitecore doesn’t mean that you’re looking forward to a road of painful complexity.  The amazing thing you’ll see over and over is how things are built from the Core.  This Launch Sitecore package is not an amazingly flashy, feature-laden site.  Nor is it intended to be an ongoing content-based site.  It is intended to highlight the strength of that Core, to let you have a number of ah-hah moments, to get the juices of creativity flowing and to become a vehicle of your ongoing Sitecore learning.

So that’s the Launch Sitecore package—a downloadable Sitecore package (installed with the Installer in the Sitecore Desktop).  But we’re pushing on from there.  Now, a public site:  www.launchsitecore.net.  I’m extremely excited about where this is heading—a real-life Engagement Plan, meaningful Goals and Engagement Value, use of Sitecore Email Campaign Manager throughout, GeoIP lookups and Analytics, available OLAP cube reporting and much more.  Our whole Sales Engineering team will be able to share this story—why we created this site, what were our discussions around Goals, Engagement Values, how did our Campaigns perform, what did we test and how did that improve our Evaluators’ experiences.  And we of course want you to be along for the journey.  Give us some feedback on the site (after all, it’s a Goal and a State in our Engagement Plan).   Or contact any member of the Team (also on the site).

Next Post:  The Goal Discussion for Launch Sitecore