The development of tech has revamped the ways in which businesses drive sales. Customer buying behavior has changed drastically over the years. Buyers are better informed, driven by research, and have massive expectations.
How do businesses cope with this change? The need to stay relevant in today’s fast-paced world is crucial. How can you achieve this?
Sales teams need to revamp their approach towards sales to deliver effectively. The integration of tools and time-saving automation is critical. Sellers are required to have a holistic approach towards their customers’ pain points, goals, and decision-making processes.
This is where sales engagement comes into the picture. Sales engagement platforms have been developed to help streamline the process and facilitate better integration of sales reps with potential clients.
What is meant by sales engagement?
Most people tend to think that sales engagement is software-related. However, it is a comprehensive collection of all the interactions between a sales rep and buyers.
The interaction between the sales team and the target audience spans the entire sales cycle. Meetings, phone calls, emails, and the exchange of ebooks and video tutorials are all a crucial part of customer success. The insights obtained during these interactions can be used to understand the requirements better and lead to improved customer relationship management.
What is a sales engagement platform?
Sales engagement platforms are crucial to sales and marketing teams. They help facilitate better customer interactions.
In collaboration with enablement solutions, marketing automation, and CRM, these systems allow detailed visibility into every stage of the buying process cycle and enable scaled personalization.
Sales managers prefer the integration of a sales engagement platform to analyze the various aspects of a buyer’s journey. They track the impact of direct mail, phone calls, timing, and content during customer interaction on the selling process.
The insights collected are then used by the sales manager, sales team, and account executives to enable sales acceleration. This helps shape the customer journey.
Sales engagement is often confused with sales enablement. It is imperative to understand the difference between both to make sure that they are employed in the right manner to help boost business.
Sales engagement vs. Sales enablement
The two are very similar at the surface level.
Sales engagement and sales enablement typically assist sales teams in developing connections with customers, nurturing prospects through the sales process, and streamlining selling tasks – however, there are some fundamental differences between them.
Sales enablement
Sales enablement, as a notion, arose from the idea that sales reps require specific tools to accomplish their jobs efficiently. Information is often stored in multiple places such as emails, excels, physical files, and content repositories.
The approach is developed to provide sales organizations with the necessary training, materials, and tools to achieve fruitful customer interactions.
The primary goal is to make it simpler for sales reps to sell by providing them with various sales enablement tools. A common strategy is to bridge the gap between the sales and marketing teams. It helps in targeting and identifying more prospects and increasing customer success.
Sales enablement allows users to rapidly identify the needed on-brand information, sales playbooks, team reports, and CRM data.
Platforms for sales enablement comprise the following components:
- Sales content management
- Internal communications
- Sales coaching & training
- Document Automation
Sales Engagement
In contrast to sales enablement, sales engagement is designed to help sales and focuses on customer-centric data over sales-centric data. It allows sellers to engage effectively with customers.
Sales engagement equips sales leaders and sales reps with conversation intelligence across various communication channels. It helps optimize interactions by providing the sales team with engagement analytics and engagement data, which helps improve overall account management.
The key to improving sales productivity is establishing in-person relationships with clients and buyers. This lets teams discover what messages, content, tactics, and channels serve best at each touchpoint in the sales cycle.
Sales engagement platforms comprise the following components:
- Sales email, calls, and message automation
- Sales cadence workflows
- Opportunity management
- Reporting & analytics
Why should you use a sales engagement platform?
From the viewpoint of sales leaders, employing sales engagement software has become increasingly crucial. Most sales organizations have learned that utilizing technology such as sales engagement platforms is the most effective and efficient way to boost operations.
Based on multiple studies related to customer interaction data, it is proven that companies prefer doing business with organizations that have a more robust approach towards customer interactions.
Most customers look for the following features:
- They prefer buying from innovative companies
- They want their business to feature all the latest technology
- They expect an omnichannel approach when it comes to communication channels
- They like an immediate and effective sales engagement process from the company
Who is likely to benefit from a sales engagement platform?
Sales engagement platforms are designed to help sales and marketing teams streamline the sales process making it more efficient and effective. Sales development representatives and account executives rely on sales engagement platforms to serve the purpose of a sales playbook for them.
Top sales engagement platforms allow users to establish sales frameworks that help them convert future prospects. This approach involves the combination of direct email, social media, and video calls. The automation of these processes allows onboarding new employees and familiarizing them with operations more quickly. Check out the key differences, inside sales vs outside sales.
Sales development representatives
The primary focus of sales reps is directed towards outbound prospecting and generating potential leads. Sales engagement platforms serve as an effective tool that helps sales reps understand how and when to communicate with potential prospects.
Using the data generated by the sales engagement platform, the sales representatives gather the necessary customer engagement analytics to help them decide which communication channels are optimal to reach out to customers. The plethora of data obtained by employing sales development software helps sales development teams achieve higher response rates and more revenue.
A revenue team is made of key players from the sales and marketing teams. The entire revenue team is responsible for increasing revenue through traffic, leads, and sales.
Account executives
Their primary focus is to establish and maintain fruitful relationships with current customers and lead conversations to convert future prospects.
The primary task allotted to them involves accurately documenting the various pain points add important information related to customer relationships. The use of sales engagement software helps automate this process by maintaining a log of all important emails and calls.
Features of a sales engagement software that will benefit you
There are multiple benefits of using sales engagement tools. The key features are as follows.
Automation
Several repetitive manual tasks require a lot of time and labour. The automation feature in sales engagement software helps save time for email tracking and documenting basic customer information.
For example, when customers establish a new connection on a social platform, this data is automatically programmed for CRM integration. This helps save time and does not require manual input of the information. This helps improve overall sales rep productivity. Find, how SaaS sales is functioning.
Reports
Sales engagement software provides sales organizations with cohesive data on the various outreach methods being employed. This provides an overview of the success rate of the different techniques.
This makes it simple for an entire team to extract and compile the necessary information on specific outreach tools such as social media, cold emailing and calling.
Email management
Email is one of the primary communication tools used from start to end of the sales cycle. Best sales engagement platforms provide users with a range of premade templates that they can use for cold emailing and outreach.
In addition to this, the sales engagement platform can also track the various metrics associated with direct mail. Sales engagement tools record every step of the process. The software provides data on when a particular email was opened, which allows the sales organization to schedule emails for a specific time and date of their choice.
Whenever there is an exchange of information via an email conversation, sales engagement software automatically records the key points and all relevant information about the customer within the software.
Personalization
It is imperative to personalize the emails during cold email outreach. It helps avoid being flagged as a spam email and increases the potential response rate. Sales engagement platforms allow users to personalize that communication style depending on the customer or future prospect.
The software is AI-powered, which helps determine the apt time for reaching out to a customer. It also provides information on the most preferred communication channel, which helps increase the possibility of getting a response, improving the response rate.
Organizing conversations
Sales engagement platforms also help collect and store all related data at a single location. This means that sales reps do not have to waste time shuffling between various programs searching for specific information.
The cumulative collection of all related data provides sales teams with the library of all necessary information available at the click of a single button.
Helps you sell smarter
The best sales engagement software is built with a certain amount of sales intelligence. Constant tracking of when emails are sent and calls are made a database of knowledge meant for helping sales.
This information was s leveraged to create new strategies and refine the existing sales strategies to help achieve more successful deals.
Lead scoring
Investing the same amount of time on all leads is not advisable to achieve successful sales. It is crucial to identify the current situation before deciding how much time and effort should be invested in it.
Lead scoring ranks various existing leads based on engagement with the business. Allowing sales reps to differentiate active leads from cold ones helps them direct time and sales technology towards the more viable ones. Lead scoring is customized based on the user’s preferences.
The various forms of interactions are ranked based on the user’s choice, which will help differentiate the leads worth pursuing from those that are not.
Seamless CRM integration
Most sales engagement software is designed for easy integration with existing CRM software. Most businesses use CRM software to store all customer-related data. Due to the nature of their functioning, it is imperative for all the customer information stored as CRM data to be seamlessly integrated with the sales engagement software.
All relevant data will automatically be shared across both platforms when this integration is successfully done. This includes calls, emails, customer pain points, and deal status.
Benefits of using a sales engagement platform
Omnichannel outreach
Traditionally business leaders spent most of their time focusing on email-oriented conversations. Today the use of various business-specific media platforms has also become relevant. To keep up with this shift in trend, sales engagement has obtained a more Omnichannel approach instead of focusing on a single channel.
The need for sales representatives and sales teams to optimize their profiles by sharing relevant data in posts has become the need of the hour. This helps them reach out to potential customers on social media platforms.
Employing sales engagement platforms provides sales organizations with business generated via successful business lead channels achieved via different social media. It provides sales teams with valuable insights which help them focus their effort and time to accelerate revenue.
Increased productivity
On average, sales reps are believed to spend less than 36% of their total time selling. Most of that time is devoted to other tasks like scheduling calls, organizing calendars, sending emails, and dating the CRM software.
Although these tasks are essential to sales, they are time-consuming and distract individuals from work, leading to revenue generation. Sales engagement platforms allow professionals to automate most of these processes and dedicate the maximum of that time and effort to actual selling.
More data
Data lies at the core of any business today. Without vital information about customers and their preferences, it is impossible to sell on a larger scale. Sales engagement platforms provide internal teams with the knowledge to facilitate sales at a higher level and scale.
Tracking various engagement metrics such as email opens, clicks, immediate responses, Helps sales reps identify the most valuable leads and focus that I’m I know folks on them. In addition to this, the data can also be used to reform and revise sales strategies to achieve tremendous success in the future.
Improved success rates
It is no surprise that increases in productivity and availability of more data using sales technology lead to higher success rates for the sales team. Studying communication strategies helps identify specific behavioural patterns of various clients and leads.
Scheduling outbound communication based on this data helps drive more impact and achieve more successful conversations. Close to 90% of sales leaders believe in investing in various sales engagement platforms to help their team effortlessly connect more customers and facilitate the most successful deals.
Best practices to employ when using a sales engagement software
Sales engagement software is very beneficial, but only when used effectively; a few factors are integrated to help improve the automated outreach effort. Employing the following tips will help your team benefit mainly from the outreach efforts made using sales engagement tools.
Make it personal
The saying quality over quantity holds in this case. Before putting together a list of individuals, you intend to target using a cold emailing strategy; it is imperative to personalize every email beyond the basics.
In most cases, personalization is done only concerning the individual company name, job title, and other standard details. It is advisable to go a step further, and adding another layer of personalization helps you stand out from the plenty of other emails received in a day.
For example, you can refer to an individual’s LinkedIn profile to get an idea of their likes and interests before sending them an email. You will get the necessary data based on the kind of posts and content they share on their profile.
Incorporating a few lines related to the niche will help you stand out from the crowd. It portrays your level of research and understanding of the client before reaching out to them. Shows effort and genuine curiosity. Outreach is all about building relationships. People do business with people, and therefore a little bit of personalization goes a long way.
Make it genuine
Most people tend to use a premade stock template when curating the emails for the outreach process. one is interested in spending their time on a generic mail that does not provide them with anything of considerable value.
It always helps to be genuine, honest, and human when sending emails. It helps sellers engage effectively with prospects. If you refer to any of their previous work or recently shared posts, do your homework and incorporate relevant pointers as part of your email. Lack of sincerity and competency are the two major red flags for customer outreach.
Try to stand out
As discussed above, prospects receive hundreds of emails on a dai y basis. To get noticed, you need to dare to be different to gain complete visibility among the crowd. In addition to personalizing your message, a few more elements can be incorporated to achieve the same.
The trend of incorporating videos and images as a part of sales emails is quickly picking up. The incorporation of meme content is also soon on the rise to facilitate more successful and enriching conversations.
There are no hard and fast rules for crafting a creative email. Let your imagination guide you and focus on incorporating elements that will help you capture the attention of your prospect over other contenders. Check out the guide, sales pipeline stages.
How to choose the right sales engagement software?
To reap maximum benefits of the best sales engagement platforms entirely relies on choosing the one which suits your goals, vision, and team size.
There are multiple sales engagement tools available to choose from. Moreover, it is essential to note that a single sales engagement platform is sufficient to help you achieve your goals as long as it is the right fit for your requirements.
Mentioned below are the primary factors to look for when making a choice.
- Proper integration with the existing CRM system
- Availability of robust features for your communication of preference
- In line with the sales strategy that you have in place
- Must be a perfect match with your sales organizations experience and maturity
Conclusion
Investing in a sales engagement platform is beneficial to business in multiple ways. Evolving sales landscape requires firms to adapt continuously. Marketing efforts help drive the revenue team in achieving their targets only to a certain extent.
Integrating your business with a sales engagement platform helps develop a more detailed database of sales cadences that can be employed as a part of customer interaction.
Sloovi is the apt place to begin for your sales tech stack, but to truly transform the sales process, it is imperative to incorporate digital selling tasks to optimize the process.