I think Engagement Plans in Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Plan stand to be one of the most exciting parts of the platform, but I’ve honestly had a difficult time to date describing them without seeming overly complex. The public Launch Sitecore site (www.launchsitecore.net) has given our team the ability to really see an Engagement Plan in action and to have goals, motivations and paths that are real and meaningful to us. We are able to treat Launch Sitecore as a mock company which provides us with some real-world challenges—great ideas balanced with limited time (although Chris Castle should be the spokesperson for a high-powered energy drink), differing opinions on a feature roadmap, security concerns and more.
Among the many opportunities this site provides us is the capability to see the progression through an Engagement Plan that leads towards our Sales Engineering team goals. Here’s the whole plan:
OK, back to my comment about being confusing.
If we break it down and I describe our motivations for this Plan, it actually becomes quite simple. At Launch Sitecore, we’re trying to
Create hugely successful experiences for organizations evaluating Sitecore.
My previous post describes our discussion around the goals (that our visitors will accomplish) towards that end. An Engagement Plan allows us to truly map out the paths we anticipate our visitors will take as they accomplish the goals we set for our organization. We started by breaking this down to 4 major steps, as shown in the diagram below:
The Campaign Phase.
This phase represents the time when our Sales Engineering team is working to engage with the prospect. This is likely going to be before they’ve ever visited Launch Sitecore. It’s generally the time period when a Sales Engineer has had a detailed tech deep dive with a group of developers and project strategists. The prospect group is really interested in getting their hands on Sitecore and spending some time with the application. We at Launch Sitecore have the perfect evaluation package for that situation. The ways that the prospect can be engaged from here are:
- The Sales Engineer can encourage the prospect to visit www.launchsitecore.net and Register for an account (or login with their Social Network credentials).
- The prospect can click on a Sales Engineer’s Email Signature which has a link to Launch Sitecore (with the appropriate campaign id assigned for each Sales Engineer). I cheated and any link from these blogs uses that campaign ID as well (check the query string in the above Launch Sitecore link).
- The prospect can receive a full Email Campaign Newsletter from a Sales Engineer with links describing the download and install process for Launch Sitecore. Since a prospect may receive an email, we have also included all the default Email Campaign Engagement Plan states (send not complete, message unopened, etc.)
The Active Evaluation Phase.
This is the bulk of the plan, where we check to see if our prospect has downloaded Launch Sitecore and, then, given the team feedback about the experience.
The Evaluation Complete Phase
This is our main decision point where we assess the outcome of our plan. More on this below.
The Decision
This is an exciting roadmap item for us. Since our group is very interested in the outcomes of our prospects’ evaluations, we want to see the results—how many of the prospects that engaged with the Sales Engineering team became happy Sitecore customers….and how many will be back for future discussions 
.
Our first step will be manual. As we assess our customer wins, we will move the various prospects from those customers into the appropriate state or bucket (Happy Customer). Our roadmap item is exciting though—through a connection to our Microsoft Dynamics system, we can tie account results from that system to our Engagement Plan and automate the process of moving these prospects to the appropriate state.
Back to the start, and the Campaign Phase
Each of our campaign phase options (prospect registering on the site, prospect clicking a Sales Engineer’s auto signature, prospect receiving an Email Campaign message) will advance the prospect to the “Evaluator has been engaged” state of the plan.
OK, they’re on the path. Instead of going step by step through the process, let’s review the end game here. We anticipate one of three things will happen with this prospect from here:
- The prospect will download the Launch Sitecore package, spend some fantastic time evaluating Sitecore, come back to our Launch Sitecore site and give us some insightful feedback on how great the experience was (or how we could add to it). Awesome outcome. And in our Engagement Plan terms, this visitor will end up in the Complete Evaluation and Feedback State shown above and below.
- The prospect will download Launch Sitecore and never get back to the site to give us feedback. Pretty good. Download No Feedback.
- The prospect will never leave this “engaged” state because they never download Launch Sitecore. Not good. No Evaluation.
Here’s again how those “semi-final” states look in our Engagement Plan:
So now we just need to map out the possibilities of how they’ll get from point A (being engaged) and point B (one of the 3 outcomes). And since we have a clearly defined optimal outcome, what can we do in these paths (dropping some candy in the right place, if you will) to increase the likelihood they will choose that specific path?
While it’s somewhat interesting to us what the visitor reads articles on our site (see my post on the Launch Sitecore personas), we are really focused on having this prospect download the evaluation package. So, our first decision point is basically, “Have they downloaded or not?”.
This is a condition in the Engagement Plan. It’s an opportunity to take advantage of the Rules Engine to see if something is true or false (see the Yes/No possibilities that branch from this condition). In our case, the evaluation of the condition is simple—has this prospect downloaded the evaluation package. As you can see below, we’re checking whether the “Download Site” goal has been accomplished by the prospect.
In our case, since the Launch Sitecore package is actually part of our Sitecore content tree (in the Media Library), we were able to assign the goal to the Media Library item directly:
The only other thing to keep in mind when wiring this up is to ensure you’ve put an appropriate “Trigger” on the current state the visitor is in when you assess this condition. Remember back that our prospect is in the “Evaluator has been engaged” state. If you click on a state in the Engagement Plan designer, you get an option to define the Triggers for this state. In our case we used the achievement of the goal itself as the spark to assess the condition:
We will add some other Page Events to this (so that we can ensure the condition is tested for those that don’t download the package). To describe our logic from here:
- If a prospect downloads Launch Sitecore, we put them in the “Feedback Path”, where we will check periodically for the achievement of the Feedback goal (a visitor fills in a Web Forms for Marketers form to give our team feedback).
- If a prospect doesn’t download Launch Sitecore, we will wait for 10 days. If 10 days has passed, we will use Email Campaign Manager to send out a follow up email reminding the prospect of the benefits of downloading the package.
- If a prospect has received a follow up email and has still not downloaded Launch Sitecore in 10 additional days, we will drop them into the “semi-final” state I discussed before. This doesn’t need to stop there however as we consider what actions we will take if a prospect is heading down this path. For instance, we can email the Sales Engineering group and suggest that someone reaches out to the prospect to offer some help (maybe something happened with the download process?). As a future feature, we can tie directly to our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and make the sales person on the account aware of the progress.
- All along the way, we have the opportunities to communicate internally (contact a Sales Engineer about the current situation, or to the prospect themselves (either explicitly by sending out an email or having an SE call, or more subtly by changing the prospect’s experience the next time they are on the site based on the current Engagement Plan state they are in).
As we continue to add features to this plan (including full usage of Email Campaign Manager and the Dynamics Connector), I will describe in more detail the strategy and mechanics of these connections. In the meantime, we will have fun monitoring the progress of our prospects through this process and continue to ensure we are doing everything along the way to accomplish our Launch Sitecore organizational goals:
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