A Digital Palace full of Sitecore Solutions Seekers at Dreamcore Europe

Dreamcore, Sitecore's Developer and Partner conference is held on a worldwide basis. 2010 is the inaugural year, and the first event in Boston was over-the-top exciting and successful- but now moves to a Digital Palace promising new heights.

Having two Dreamcore' events one month apart across the Atlantic from each other (or should I say on opposite sides of that crazy Volcano),is totally hectic. It's the overlay of major events on top of a hair-on-fire global expansion pace that makes you look somewhere for another gear to shift into.

But there is a bright side advantage. We get to incorporate new ideas and feedback from the first right away into the second Dreamcore Europe event, happening this week in Copenhagen.

We've added an interesting customer presentation, featuring the very popular English soccer club Manchester City and their partner Aqueduct, providing the story behind fostering the fan passion and fueling the on-field success.

The popular Technical track review of three challenging implementations takes on some wonderful local color. The UK's Conservative Party, just recently elected into power features an exciting online success story with their Sitecore website with True Clarity. Then Austrian Airplines and Sitecore partner ecomplexx describe their site deployed for an amazing 56 countries and 22 languages. Partner Eduserve will dish out a number of tips on optimizing SEO with Google while still managing rapidfire changes in your Sitecore architecture.

Then building a bridge across the Atlantic, Partners Pentia and HedgeHog Development are co-presenting on Team Development and best practices- melding their many strong experiences from both Europe and North America.

Sitecore had numerous presenters who drew rave reviews and they are back, such as wild John West, who smoked the stage with his 10 (actually many more) things you didn't know you could do with Sitecore. He has inspired Sitecore bloggers as far away as Australia who are raising the bar to 25 or 50 hidden tips now, a true sign of talent and passion on the web for Sitecore solutions.

There is more content oriented towards business cases for the Online Marketing Suite, along with several talented solution architects with fresh insights into data retrieval techniques, ways to add customized features with Sitecore and more. See the full online agenda here.

With an at-capacity crowd coming from 11 countries around the world, and a Sitecore Community which values transparency and sharing and a passion for innovation, the classical Palace we are meeting in will be rocking amd morphed into a Digital Palace of Web Art and Science!

Putting more sales into your website sales enablement

Here is a real live scenario of 'sales enablement' that I heard from our Sitecore North American VP of Client and partner engagement, Jason Crea. Makes a marketer smile.

Our sales professionals at Sitecore are very skillful at listening. One of the hot requests they have picked up on from their prospects - the marketers, execs and IT pros they work with is this- "show me ways I can learn more about my visitors so I can service them better. Take my anonymous visitors and give them a persona, and even better, if they fill out a form and provide me their info, breathe that information and their interests into my CRM. And use that CRM info to control their web experience."

So the sales team figured it out and responded- "No problem- we'll show you in real time, with your own data!"

It turns out Sitecore's public website uses the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite to help us understand visitor preferences. Working with Sitecore's Web Forms for Marketers, form data is imported into the CRM. In fact, the visitor's entire experience info is collected, associated and imported real time.

Our sales team demos this by using GoToMeeting to show the prospects several things. First, the prospects visits the site , views and downloads a few thing, and then fill out a form. The sales team then logs into the CRM, turns on GoToMeeting, and shows the prospect how they 'ding!' just showed up in their CRM view, along with their website history, as soon as they filled in the form. In fact other prior visits may also show up if the same cookie was still active. That is empowerment!

Then, often there is a technical developer on the conference, who may have signed up on our developer website, called SDN (Sitecore Developer Network). This site has a whole treasure chest of technical insite and materials, and anyone can sign up and get partial access- but not all the jewels. But, on that same GoToMeeting the sales team shows how, by looking up the developer in the CRM from their initial registration, they can click on a few check boxes and gives them full access to all resources. Literally the developer refreshes their screen and a whole new experience opens up with new resources and assets- all controlled by the salesperson from the company CRM.

Real time alerts in response to website visits are another aspect that lights up the sales team. They get an inbound email message, no matter where they are, and clicking a few links they see what content their prospect was looking at. Often the sales team will then reach out directly with related and supplemental info. Prospects are happy to get the 'just in time and on target' info, and they are absolutely amazed at the visibility the team has- and what a compelling demo this makes.

I wish I could say Marketing thought of these demo scenarios, but we didn't. Our web marketing team did have a bit to do with putting the integrations in place, which is relatively easy with Sitecore technology, but Sales gets the kudos and credit for connecting the dots on how to share and extend a vision for their prospect customers.

And Sales also just showed how to put more sales into 'sales enablement'- from your website!