How to Prepare for a Discovery Call with SiteSpect

Choosing an optimization solution suite provider is a daunting task. Especially, if you’re new to the landscape. When vetting solutions, you don’t always know the right questions to ask or what answers to have readily available for the person on the other side of the phone or computer screen.

I’ve been with SiteSpect for over 7 years, having roles in business development, as well as sales. My job is to educate and consult with prospective clients to see if there is a genuine fit. In those initial meetings, I prefer a conversational format with an equal exchange of questions and answers to make sure by the end of the meeting, both of us have an understanding of next steps.

If you’re shopping for a solution like SiteSpect, I thought it would be a good opportunity to break down that introductory meeting. In addition to knowing how many visits or sessions your site(s) and/or apps(s) get on an annual basis, here are some of the key topics that will demystify that call, and help you be better prepared so it’s productive for both of us.

What Do You Know About SiteSpect?

We speak with people with various levels of maturity and experience when it comes to the optimization landscape. I like to ask prospective clients what their familiarity is with SiteSpect. This question can elicit responses ranging from:

• Very Familiar: “I used SiteSpect at my previous employer.”
• Familiar: “I’ve used SiteSpect before but it’s been years.”
• Slightly Familiar: “I’ve heard of you but never used your solution” or “I found you on XYZ site.”
• Unfamiliar: “Not much.”

This allows us from a sales perspective to adjust our approach based on your level of knowledge (or lack thereof), where you are in the education process and buying journey, and how we can best support you.

Optimization Team

One of the things I’ll need from you is all the players involved. What does your optimization team look like? Where do you fall within your company:

• Manager/Director/VP level? Do you have a high influence at your company?
• Practitioner? Will you be the primary person running experimentation? Does that mean someone else at the company has to sign off on the contract?
• Product Marketing/Development? Is your focus on the iteration of product features and pages, QA in production, feature rollouts, and risk mitigation of releases?
• What other people or teams will be involved in your evaluation process as well as potential use of the platform? Is this team centralized, and will this be for one or some of the typical departments in your organization (i.e. marketing, product, development/engineering, UX, analytics, IT and network ops, etc.)?
• Do you use or will you be outsourcing to an agency? Will they need to be involved at any point in our discussion?

As you look at your team, determine who should be at the next meeting(s). It’s so easy to start the process of vetting an optimization solution and having the wrong people representing your company at the meeting.

Pain Points

These could be a professional/role-specific pain point, company-specific, or something you’re trying to solve to improve your customer experience and optimization success. Think about why you are talking with us today.

• You don’t have an experimentation tool or culture
• You’ve outgrown your current optimization solution
• Specific use cases, functionality and limitations
• Data quality including discrepancies, metric limitations, attribution, integrations, etc.
• Site performance such as latency, flicker, SEO and UX issues, especially when it comes to experimentation, number of tests, specific use cases, etc.

Sharing your pain points and why they matter early on helps me understand what is most important in this evaluation. It also helps us know what to focus on during the demo that will resonate with your challenges and objectives in order to establish a business fit. Pain points often align with your goals which I’ve broken out into two categories: business and optimization.

Check out our free Ebook: 17 Compromises You’re Making with Optimization and Personalization

Business Goals

Now that I better understand the role you will play in this evaluation and some of your pain points, I’ll need to know your business goals. If your company is willing to invest in an optimization platform, what do you hope to achieve:

• Increase conversions and revenue?
• Better customer experience (CX), engagement and customer lifetime value (CLV)?
• Improved digital transformation?
• Expanding your digital presence from brick and mortar to a website and mobile?
• Specific use cases and objectives not mentioned, especially for your industry or vertical?

Having these answers prior to our call definitely helps me to know how SiteSpect can help you accomplish your goals.

Optimization Goals

The next thing that helps is understanding your current optimization program. I’ll need to know what your company is currently doing as well as what capabilities you’re looking for in your next solution, and here are some thoughts and examples:

• A/B testing?
• Personalization?
• Feature flags?
• Product recommendations?
• Cart abandonment?
• How many tests do you want to run in the future?
• Specific use cases?
• How many domains will you be testing?
• Will you be testing mobile apps?
• What geo locations do you want to support? (US vs. Global)

Knowing your optimization goals will help me so we can share SiteSpect’s capabilities and value that matter most to you without any speculation. If you come prepared with the above answers we can be more efficient with our meeting.

Tech Stack

Optimization solutions like SiteSpect involve a certain level of technical aptitude. Depending on your role, this next part could be above your technical ability. But I share this to get you thinking and to help me better understand how SiteSpect can integrate.

• Ecommerce and Website Platform
• Content Management System (CMS) / Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
• Single Page Application (SPA), Progressive Web Application (PWA), and JS Library Frameworks
• Analytics
• Additional Data Tools (i.e. Heatmapping, CX Analytics, CDP, DMP, BI, data warehouse, etc.)
• Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Hosting Provider

SiteSpect can integrate across your ecosystem, sending and receiving data to and from a wide variety of tools. Knowing your tech stack today and future-forward helps us understand and build out your potential business case, integrations and onboarding.

Decision Making Process

As we wrap up our meeting, it is my responsibility to know what the next steps are. Did we identify the following:

• Who owns the budget/decision?
• Who are the stakeholders who provide the green light or potential blockers that could cause friction?
• Timeline:
  • When do you hope to have a solution in place?
  • If you are replacing a solution, do you have a contract ending date?
• What is your budget?
• What other vendors and types of solutions are you evaluating?
• What additional milestones are involved in your evaluation and decision process?
• Have I answered all of your questions?

Summary

We’ve had a great discussion and we now know a lot about both companies. We’ve discussed your goals, your team, your tech stack and SiteSpect’s capabilities. By following these tips, I hope you feel more prepared when you schedule your introductory call with SiteSpect.

Looking for more resources? Download our free ebook: Choosing an Optimization Platform.

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