Interacting with prospects and closing deals is challenging. It’s a fact.

If you're a sales veteran (like me), then you know that finding a way to cut through the clutter to make a sale or connect with prospective customers is critical to your business' success. 

The key? An effective sales engagement tool.

Your sales engagement software should connect your sales and marketing efforts, integrate with your communication channels, manage and optimize messaging and tactics throughout the process.

Not only should your engagement software increase your effectiveness, generate more sales, and reduce your sales cycle, but it should also reduce the burden of repetitive administrative tasks by automating repetitive tasks and workflows. 

Sounds too good to be true? It’s not. 

The truth is, if you want to be the best salesperson (and beat the competition), you need the best sales engagement software. 

But what is sales engagement software, and how do you find the best tool for your needs? 

Two players seem to dominate the market, Salesloft and Salesforce. And even though both are solid (spoiler alert), Salesforce's solution, High Velocity Sales (HVS), seems to have made the difference for me — but is it right for you?

Today, we'll take a look at the two market leaders and compare their features to help you select the best platform for your team and company's needs. Ready?

Why Salesloft? 

Okay, okay, I love HVS, but I’ve got to admit, I really like Salesloft too. 

Hands-down, Salesloft is an excellent sales, customer engagement, and lead management cloud platform. Since my first encounter with the product, I've used it to boost the efficiency and profitability of my team. 

Given its combination of advanced communication capabilities and tracking of emails and sales calls, Salesloft has managed to give me the edge over my competitors more than once. What’s more, it integrates with plenty of services, making it the choice of big names, such as Spotify, IBM, and Slack. 

Salesloft supplied me with excellent insights into the amount of growth needed to achieve my goals and what to do next, including prospecting tips and automating tedious tasks.  

What has impressed me the most, though, was the speed of innovation Salesloft was presenting, at least, when I was using it on a day-to-day basis a few years ago. 

Enough chatting, let’s dig into the best features of Salesloft. 

Email Personalization

If you ever have worked in sales before, you know what I mean exactly when I say that thanks to this product, my team and I didn't need to waste time identifying personalization and customization options for telephone and email marketing — everything was available on the platform from the get-go. 

Salesloft is my best friend when it comes to personalizing messages. I’ve used this solution to skyrocket my email strategy since it enabled our team to personalize and customize messages with code snippets, dynamic tags, attachments, or embedded videos. 

On top of that, we used it to prioritize accounts and focus our efforts on higher-value clients. A pretty handy tool, then, right? 

Cadence Scheduling

Salesloft's cadences offer an excellent sales execution guide that equips revenue-generating sales teams with some of the best pipeline execution and nurturing practices. 

In fact, every call, email, meeting, and interaction can be orchestrated and scheduled through the solution before automatically syncing back to the CRM. And, thanks to the cadence scheduling, sales teams can engage customers across the entire journey, from their first response to post-sales events.

If sales are a science, then Salesforce A/B testing capabilities are the grandmaster. By employing them in my operations, I’ve helped my sales team create variants to identify which email template and approach drives the best conversions. Boom!

Integrated Dialer

Have you ever needed a responsive and easy-to-use platform to place calls? 

If you answered yes, Salesloft could be for you. 

Using Salesloft's dialer to place calls from the platform or the mobile app on the go was one of my best experiences using the solution. Not only was the app easy to use on the go, but my team was also able to record calls for training and compliance purposes and use the dialer to take notes that were saved along with call sentiments and dispositions after each call ended. 

Salesloft is an excellent tool for contacting prospects using multiple touchpoints through cadences. The dialer makes it pretty much effortless to reach prospective clients while taking notes during the call. 

Pricing

If one thing is clear, that is that Salesloft is worthy of evaluation for businesses looking to boost conversion rates and need a handy solution to assist them in augmenting their pipeline generation. 

Salesloft has four plans, catering to different needs and requirements: Prospect, Sell, Engage, and Enterprise. 

But, bear in mind that companies have to reach out to Salesloft for a quote, which might be a bummer when you're in immediate need of an answer (and you don’t want to be on the receiving end of the hard sell). 

Why Salesforce High Velocity Sales?

Salesforce is probably the world's best-known CRM platform, and as they've done with other accompanying technologies, they've also released their own sales engagement platform, High Velocity Sales. 

Out of the box, you might notice that High Velocity Sales is similar to Salesloft. Yet, the former combines powerful sales tools and CRM features that are hard to beat. 

Unsurprisingly, as businesses scale, it becomes more challenging for sales teams to track their phone calls and emails, especially regarding responses and timing. 

HVS has a unique approach to cadences by offering organizational tools to complement your existing CRM suite. Without further ado, let’s dive straight into the very best features that will make you jump for joy.

Work Queue 

HVS has a neat feature called Work Queue. But, how does it help you and your sales team?

Work Queue organizes your leads by placing them into the most appropriate funnel while, at the same time, it offers insight into lead scores. You can easily see which leads are hot and those that are not, so you know where to allocate your time and resources. 

In this way, your high-value clients are automatically prioritized, making it easier for your team to focus on more "beneficial" conversions. Or, simply put, less time spent chasing cold leads, more time closing hot deals. 

Sales Cadences 

With HVS, sales managers can create effective sales processes and automate communications to push leads through the sales funnel. 

If you're a Salesforce admin, you’ve probably been overwhelmed with the number of options for automated workflows (I know, I’ve been there!). Opting for HVS might be the better option for you, as thanks to the platform, sales cadences set the pace, even when there is a huge volume of leads to process. 

Lightning Dialer and Sales Console 

Moving on, Salesforce's has a native dialling tool that is placed in the console. This is super helpful, as sales staff simply click to make a call. HVS also automatically logs calls and drops multiple voicemails, with users having everything they need on a single screen. 

Salesforce allows its users to decide what voice platform to integrate with HVS. Based on your workflow needs, you can choose dialer solutions like Salesforce's Lightning Dialer to full Cloud Contact Center solutions, like PhoneIQ. The choice is yours. 

Einstein Lead Scoring and Data Capturing 

Except for a unique and practical approach to task management and cadences, the clearest advantage of HVS to Salesloft is its data integrity. 

More often than not, sales teams are bogged down with data entry and data synchronization between platforms. Admin can be tedious, take time, and even break down. 

But, with HVS, emails, meetings, and anything in-between is captured and sorted automatically, saving precious time. Leads are scored automatically with a click so that sales reps can quickly and appropriately respond to sales calls. Hence, with HVS, you'll never have to deal again with a synchronization issue. 

Simply put, I'd recommend you to make a decision based on this factor alone. Data sync could simply be the most important aspect of a sales team. Period. 

Pricing

Pricing for Salesforce High Velocity Sales is based on each business’s unique needs. It typically starts at around $75 per month. 

SalesLoft vs. Salesforce High Velocity Sales: The Verdict

If one thing is certain, it is that both platforms share many common features. Yet, the main difference between them is that Salesloft focuses on sales engagement, whereas High Velocity Sales is built around the Salesforce CRM and has perfected data synchronization. 

A great thing about Salesloft is that it has an intuitive interface, meaning your sales team (and mine, too) won't have too steep a learning curve. On the contrary, in HVS, users can easily leverage their preferred voice platform, making task management a breeze. 

Whatever your choice will be, I'll be following along to see if the gap between the two solutions will shorten in the near future or if their innovative approach to the market will continue being effective and, honestly, quite unique, too.