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.
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.
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:
Boosting sales team efficiency by automating simple and repetitive tasks
Increasing conversion rates by improving the quality of interactions between sellers and prospects at scale
Optimizing sales engagements by using data to surface what’s working and what’s not
Organizing daily tasks
Tracking activities
Tracking email opens and open rates
Tracking link clicks and click-through rates (CTR)
Tracking attachment activity
Static email scheduling
Dynamic email scheduling
Personalizing templates
Static workflow sequences
Dynamic workflow sequences
Workflows that handle different activity types
Pushing Sales Engagement Platform data back into CRM
Content Management
Call transcription
Activity dashboards
Account-based engagement
A/B Testing
Call transcription analytics
Sales coaching
Suggested enablement documents
Deal health
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.