What Are Sales Engagement Platforms and Why Do They Matter?
5 min
Think of the last contact you’ve had with a brand or one of their sales reps. It can be a phone call, a text, a follow-up after a webinar, a suggested social post…or all of the above. While they are very different in nature, all of these actions are considered sales engagements. Sales engagements are the interactions between a buyer and a seller (or sales representative) that is measurable in time and touchpoints.
These days there are so many channels and methods that can be used to engage your customers and convert them to your products or services that it’s become impossible to manually carry out these tasks at larger scales remaining competitive. Sales engagement platforms can automate many of these important tasks like logging interactions to the CRM, email sequencing, and outbound prospecting, freeing up your sales teams to focus on engagements that really need a human touch. Moreover, these platforms come with a host of other benefits, including the ability to streamline communications and analyze customer behavior in order to make your sales process even more effective.
What Are Sales Engagement Platforms?
Sales engagement platforms sit on top of an existing CRM system in order to maximize its impact by automating tasks, tracking results, and syncing data. They allow teams to plan, track and measure customer interactions across numerous touchpoints and channels. Sales engagement platforms make each step of a buyer’s journey more customer-centric and meaningful, helping sales teams close more deals.
Benefits of Using a Sales Engagement Platform
Many businesses confuse sales engagement with customer relationship management (CRM) tools. In actual fact, sales engagement platforms are designed to complement CRM tools and platforms in a number of ways. Here are just a few of the benefits you can expect from a sales engagement platform:
1. Provides a Centralized Depository For Information
A good sales engagement platform centralizes all the data you need to engage prospects and track their behavior through the entire sales cycle through robust CRM integrations. Reps can access information from all sources to provide a more personalized and targeted experience to prospects.
2. Automation of Prospecting and Follow-up Processes
The real power of sales engagement lies in its ability to automate the more menial (but important tasks) that take up sales reps’ time. Your sales engagement platform can send follow-up SMS texts or emails, set reminders, reach out to prospects on LinkedIn and will automatically log information so that reps are never out of the loop.
3. Surfacing Data For Greater Efficiency
Ever wish that you could combine your CRM with LinkedIn and your inbox? Sales engagement platforms do exactly that. Reps can discover and manage new opportunities by surfacing relevant data at the point of engagement, so there’s no need to switch between different systems to uncover information about your contacts or to personalize your outreach. You can execute highly personalized, relevant, and effective communications over and over again in much greater volumes.
4.Collaborate More Effectively
Sales engagement platforms provide a single, unified space where all teams can align, measure, and optimize customer engagements, including your marketing teams, support staff, and finance teams. This means that there is greater transparency, more data, and new ways of collaborating as an organization - all through sales engagement platforms. Executives can view the engagement data for all departments at a single glance, marketers can measure campaign performance, and sales staff can collaborate and close big deals together.
Top Sales Engagement Platforms To Consider
There are sales engagement tools on the market to consider, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Here are just a few that come highly recommended:
Outreach.io, an email engagement platform that provides granular insight and analytics about cold email outreach campaigns so that users can tweak their prospecting strategies according to results viewed in real-time;
SalesLoft, a sales engagement tool that helps reps executive digital selling tasks, communicate with customers, follow prompts to understand which actions to take, and gather insights to drive customer success;
Salesforce High-Velocity Sales (now Sales Engagement) is a streamlined virtual selling solution and Salesforce add-on that sellers can use to engage customers, automate interactions, and receive insights to prospects in a faster and more effective way, at scale.
Apollo.io is one of the most powerful data-driven prospecting tools on the market. It allows teams to leverage extremely accurate targeting and filtering capabilities to develop the perfect list of prospects, making your outreach more effective.
Woodpecker is an intuitive email told that facilitates cold outreach and relationship nurturing for B2B companies. It has robust email campaign sequences that can be tailored based on responses and behavior through its basic but effective email templates.
5 Questions to Ask Before Buying a Sales Engagement Platform
There are many sales engagement platforms available. Choosing the right one for your business can be challenging. Before choosing a solution, it’s important to consider whether or not it can support all of your needs, save time, and make your team more effective.
Here are just a few of the questions you need to consider before making a decision:
1. Does It Have the Ability to Automate?
Automation is the key feature of any sales engagement platform, but it’s important to choose a solution that automates in a way that will really impact your team’s productivity. Look for a solution that lets teams create multi-step, multi-channel messaging flows and personalization for channels like email, text, meetings, LinkedIn, and calls. You should also have the ability to A/B these message flows so that improvements can be made accordingly. All activities, including calls as well as In- and outbound emails, should automatically log into your CRM.
2. Will It Have the Desired Effect on Our Revenue?
Sales engagement goes much further than just prospecting. To maximize the value of your investment, the platform should support a number of departments within the organization, from account executives to sales development representatives and marketers and support staff. Look for features like workflow management so that team members can collaborate, collaborative activity logs and workspaces, email templates and call scripts, statistics, and account-level engagement reports.
3. What Integration Capabilities Does It Have?
A sales engagement platform may sound impressive on paper, but unless it can integrate with your existing CRM, you are doomed to sync errors and latency issues. Look for a sales engagement platform that is a native integration for your existing CRM. This not only makes it easier to manage, transfer data and use on a daily basis but can unlock advanced capabilities that might not be available otherwise (and improves data security!).
Make sure that reps can manage flows directly from their inbox and that they have in-ap access to all CRM data, such as Salesforce. Data needs to be leveraged effectively, e.g. provide insight into who is calling, why and which line, as well as customer records.
4. Does It Provide Insight When It Matters?
Data that remains silo and difficult to access isn’t useful at all. The best sales engagement platforms place information at your employee’s fingertips, when they need it - in real-time and up-to-date. When a sales rep answers the phone, they need to know who they are speaking to, what interactions they’ve had in the past, what time zone the caller is in, and other information that can contribute to a more meaningful conversation.
5. Does The Platform Enhance or Bloat the Sales Stack?
When purchasing any new technology, you have to consider the benefits it brings to the table. A single-solution use is rarely worth the investment, especially considering that there are so many products that can solve multiple problems at once. Make sure that you choose a multi-faceted tool that provides rich data that can flow seamlessly between departments and functions to enrich and enhance your existing tech stack. Yes, you could purchase a platform for your dialer needs, and another for email, and another to video chat, but this could compromise the functionality of the software down the line. Choose a robust, value-for-money solution that can handle every headache.
Takeaway
Sales engagement platforms can revolutionize the way your teams reach and interact with customers and leads during the entire buyer journey. Make sure that you scrutinize each sales engagement platform carefully before making a final decision. By choosing wisely, you can accelerate sales and productivity dramatically.
