The sales engagement platform is the force multiplier firms need to boost efficiency and improve results at every level of the sales cycle, and it’s at the heart of a multibillion-dollar industry. Sales engagement gives insights that boost momentum for every goal in the sales process for sales executives, managers, and reps. It can automate workflows across teams and stages, resulting in interdepartmental synergies and increased productivity for individual reps.
What is Sales Engagement?
It’s vital to completely comprehend what sales engagement comprises and how it varies from other sales concepts before putting it into practice. All contacts (digital, face-to-face, or otherwise) between reps and buyers fall under the umbrella of sales engagement. It’s vital to note that sales engagement encompasses more than just traditional outreach; it also includes the quality of that outreach as well as consistent measures of feedback and data.
Sales engagement technology has exploded in popularity, with 90% of sales leaders indicating they want to invest in solutions to assist their reps to interact with prospects and customers more successfully. This is understandable, considering that organizations that successfully engage customers outperform their competition by 23%, have a 63 percent lower customer retention rate, and have a 55 percent larger wallet share.
Sales engagement might feel like an unachievable goal without the right processes and technologies in place – especially for already-busy sales managers, sellers, and marketing teams. As a result, an increasing number of companies are turning to sales engagement technology to better align their teams, gain better visibility into processes, and predict business consequences.
What is Prospect Engagement?
Prospect engagement, which focuses on the early stages of the buyer’s journey, is a small but powerful component of the broader sales engagement puzzle. The overabundance of competition at this level in the funnel, as well as the recent increase in buyer expectations, can make it difficult for sellers to engage prospects successfully.
Tips for prospect engagement
Identify the Right Buyers – Your first reaction may be to cast the largest net possible, but this can quickly lead to squandering time that could be better spent engaging high-value prospects or closing more business. You may better personalize your engagement tactics for more value encounters if you make an effort to understand your prospective buyers’ pain points, goals, and motivations.
What is a Sales Engagement Platform?
Sales managers used to outfit their reps with CRM systems and marketing automation technologies to help them succeed. However, modern businesses have discovered that, while these technologies are useful in certain aspects of the sales process, they fall short when it comes to successful sales interaction.
As a result, a new type of technology was created to fully handle the issues of end-to-end sales engagement. By optimizing existing procedures, streamlining communications, increasing efficiency, and more—all in one centralized location—a sales engagement software () helps sales teams avoid the challenges that occur with scattered, one-size-fits-all solutions. SEPs include time-saving features that help salespeople stay organized, prepared, and on track to meet (or exceed) their targets.
However, keep in mind that not all sales engagement systems are made equal. Before you go out and buy the first SEP you come across, be sure it has the following features:
- Integrations with Existing Systems – Your team’s existing tools (e.g., CRM, email, marketing automation, sales productivity software, etc.) are valuable and should not be overlooked in favor of your SEP. Alternately, the sales engagement platform must deliver and unite with the current technologies. To transfer between different platforms it must serve as a centralized source. BY doing this reps can plan and carry out their daily task.
- Strategic Outreach – Regardless of where prospects are in the customer journey, a successful sales engagement platform should make it simple to reach out to them.
- Analytics – Some SEPs simply provide data on overall sales performance; however, it’s critical to pick a tool that tracks data across individual sales activity as well. Sales teams may use this kind of granular data to figure out if they’re doing enough sales activities if those activities are successful, and if they need to alter elements of their workflow for better results.
- Prospect Intelligence – Personalizing your conversations with prospects is an important aspect of a successful sales engagement strategy, but it can be challenging if your platform lacks the necessary intelligence. Look for a platform that combines prospect and account knowledge (from different sources) in a single, easy-to-use location for sales reps and management.
- Machine Learning – When used to improve your processes, data is extremely powerful. Machine learning (ML) is a feature of the correct sales interaction platform that analyses the plethora of data points it collects to detect trends and patterns, then recommends the next steps to assist reps to improve their performance.
If you work in sales, you’re probably already aware of the significance of keeping a competitive edge, as today’s global marketplace provides buyers with a plethora of options. However, if your teams continue to rely on SEP alternatives, they’re likely to fall into a downward spiral of underperformance.
Your salespeople won’t be able to achieve their full potential if they’re utilizing inefficient, fragmented processes that require various, disparate platforms to generate funnels, track and manage opportunities, and close transactions. Too often, well-intentioned leaders invest in and install a slew of disparate apps, but this approach fails to deliver a comprehensive, data-driven picture of what’s working and what needs to be done.
The bottom line:-
Sales engagement software helps to create more captivating presentations, personal information, new referrals, driving renewals, and observe the results.
Inefficient sales procedures, poor execution, and disgruntled buyers are all problems that can be mitigated with a strong sales engagement platform. Your sales engagement platform should, in theory, function on top of and alongside your sales process. It uses the same playbooks, milestones, and consumer touchpoints as the rest of the company. The only difference is the quantity of science it injects into your sales efforts, as well as the superpowers it bestows on your sales personnel.
