RevOps Buyers' Guide - Sales Engagement Platforms

Today’s buyers have more information on your product at their disposal and less time to sit through yet another sales pitch. With less patience and more competitors, sales teams need to focus on providing value at every touchpoint with the prospect. This is why creating high-quality sales engagements are key.

What do we mean by ‘sales engagement’?

Sales Engagements are the interactions between a salesperson and a prospect throughout the buyer’s journey.

Touch points like calls, emails, and in-person meetings all serve to nudge the prospect closer to converting into a customer.

Why invest in a sales engagement platform?

Sales engagement platforms aim to scale high-quality sales engagements to drive shorter sales cycles, higher conversion rates, and larger average deal sizes.

The areas where Sales Engagement Platforms can drive impact on revenue are:

1. Boosting sales team efficiency by automating simple and repetitive tasks

2. Increasing conversion rates by improving the quality of interactions between sellers and prospects at scale

3. Optimizing sales engagements by using data to surface what’s working and what’s not

What do sales engagement platforms help with?

Tracking

1. Organizing daily tasks

2. Tracking activities

3. Tracking email opens and open rates

4. Tracking link clicks and click-through rates (CTR)

5. Tracking attachment activity

Automations

1. Static email scheduling

2. Dynamic email scheduling

3. Personalizing templates

4. Static workflow sequences

5. Dynamic workflow sequences

6. Workflows that handle different activity types

7. Pushing Sales Engagement Platform data back into CRM

8. Content Management

9. Call transcription

Analysis

1. Activity dashboards

2. Account-based engagement

3. A/B Testing

4. Call transcription analytics

Action

1. Sales coaching

2. Suggested enablement documents

3. Deal health

What are your options when selecting a sales engagement platform?

Native CRM activity logging

• No additional setup or maintenance required

• Email logging and sending capabilities

• Templatized Emails

Best for smaller teams, low volume outreach, unorganized email cadences, 1-1 email methodology.

CRM Add-Ons

Hubspot Sales Hub, SFDC Sales Engagement:

• Native to the CRM - low to no setup required

• Manual/automated sequencing with limits (number of steps, etc), cadences with calling

• Task queue views and streamlined daily activities

Best for growing teams, early-stage BDR activities, low to medium volume activity, more personalized/manual outreach approach.

Plug-in Tools

(Groove, Apollo.io, Outplay):

• Installs without high maintenance or set-up. Technical resource optional

• Multi-Step Automated Sequencing and Cadences, some features with plug-ins to LinkedIn and other platforms

• Facilitated task managers and calling mechanisms for higher volume

Best for teams without a dedicated resource for maintaining/administering a system, higher volume activities, but less focus on the “bells and whistles” or reporting specifics.

Advanced Tools

(Outreach, SalesLoft)

• Custom advanced integration and field/object mapping with your CRM

• Multi-Step Automated Sequencing and Cadences, plug-in with LinkedIn and other platforms

• Advanced features in sequences such as integrations with other platforms (Linkedin, gifting platforms, intent platforms, etc)

• Advanced reporting such as the ability to see email sentiment, and sequence performance.

• Optional add-ons that support other processes such as call analysis, success plans, and more.

Best for teams with dedicated resources for maintaining/administering a system, a need for more configurable or custom settings, more complex cadences, and detailed reporting abilities.

(Link to G2 on reviews and cross-platform comparison)

Questions to Ask

When choosing a Sales Engagement Platform, it’s important to consider the following:

• What kind of training and setup support does the platform’s company provide?

• Is the platform flexible enough to fulfill my team’s needs?

• How much time will the platform save for my team?

• What is the platform’s learning curve and how will that impact my team’s ability to adopt it into their day-to-day operations?

• How will the platform impact my team’s existing processes?

• How well does the platform integrate with my team’s existing tech stack?

• What are the platform’s reporting and data analysis capabilities?

• Does the platform pass security, risk management, and compliance tests?

Once you’ve narrowed down your platform choices, it’s important to set up a long-term success plan of not only how the tool will be used, but also the data that comes from it.