Sales Engagement: The Key to Growth

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Sales Engagement is about establishing a relationship with prospects and securing new business. However, telling prospects in our flooded digital sales environment that you’re different is difficult and why having a sales playbook is vital to your success.

How can salespeople distinguish themselves from the competition and have an impactful interaction with prospects in this noisy environment?

The answer is in your sales engagement approach. An effective sales engagement plan, implemented correctly, will ensure that your sellers understand how and when to contact customers without losing any potential customers.

In this post, we’ll tackle the issue “what is sales engagement?” We’ll also highlight specific examples and explore the transformative advantages it can provide.

What is Sales Engagement?

The whole sales process is known as sales engagement from lead through to closing. Today most interactions occur over the phone or the internet via email or social media, allowing businesses to create scalable engagement techniques that boost income.

Here’s how it works: rather than allowing sales reps to make decisions based on their instincts, sales leaders may utilize data to create a structured framework that tells them when and how to interact with consumers. Sales Engagement guarantees that purchasers receive appropriate information at the right time during their buyer’s journey and that salespeople keep deals moving forward.

sales team

Sales Engagement vs. Sales Enablement

Sales engagement and sales enablement, while they may appear to be the same thing, sales engagement and enablement are two distinct aspects of rep productivity. Most engagement solutions speed up a rep’s output by using a systematical approach to customer engagement.

Sales enablement, on the other hand, is concerned with effectiveness. Sales enablement aims to ensure that every business encounter has a positive impact by equipping people with an understanding of what to know, say, demonstrate, and accomplish.

Sales enablement and sales engagement complement one another in helping to scale your sales processes so that every rep, from your SDRs to your account managers, understands how to increase every customer interaction throughout the buyer’s journey.

Take a look at how you may integrate your enablement and engagement plans below.

What is Prospect Engagement?

Prospect engagement is a form of sales engagement that focuses on the early phases of a buyer’s trip. Salespeople will need to capture and maintain a prospect’s attention more than ever before when engaging them. A proven, formalized approach to interacting with buyers may help you achieve this goal.

Depending on your company, you will take a unique strategy. For example, this might imply frequent, quick communications with clients across numerous channels in fast-paced SaaS sales climates. Engaging prospects in traditional industries like financial services may necessitate a slower method over a long sales cycle.

Finally, tailoring your prospect engagement approach to your buyers will be essential for achieving results.

sales-teams

What is a Sales Engagement Platform?

A sales engagement platform is an essential component of your engagement plan. Sales engagement platforms expand your prospect engagement approach by assisting reps throughout the consumer journey.

You may quickly create a plan for effective engagement across email, direct mail, phone, social media, and other channels with sales engagement solutions.

Using a platform allows businesses to measure the effectiveness of these operations to help them make better decisions with their overall sales approach based on data.

Sales engagement platforms typically include:

Automation/Workflow

These tools will allow you to expand your activity plan.

  • Sequencing Emails, Call, and Direct Messages
  • Scheduling Emails
  • Message Templates for Outreach
  • Integration with CRM, CMS, and Email Servers

Analytics

These facets are essential for comprehending how your salespeople and company are progressing.

  • Email open rates and views
  • Content engagement
  • Individual sales rep activity

Calling

These characteristics will increase rep productivity.

  • Call types
  • Click-to-call

Contacts

This functionality enables reps to make wise decisions regarding account-based selling.

  • Manage prospect’s data
  • Account-based selling

However, there is a danger that a sales engagement platform might make it simple to bombard clients with automated communications and inquiries. Make sure your interaction techniques enhance interactions without overwhelming potential buyers.

sales enablement platforms

How to Accelerate Sales with Sales Engagement

So, in practice, what does a sales engagement strategy look like?

An effective sales engagement campaign allows salespeople to use it as an outreach framework throughout the sales process. Take a look at the following sales procedure, for example.

New Business Sales Engagement Strategy

A successful sales engagement campaign may help to speed up new business sales by providing a repeatable outreach framework. It’s a rep’s sales playbook to help them guide prospects through the customer’s journey.

Managers use Salesloft & Outreach to create Cadences or Sequences that are meant to guide salespeople through any sales process: connect on LinkedIn, make a Call, send an Email, and automated follow-ups on LinkedIn & Email.

However, make sure to emphasize that these methodologies, especially if automated, are merely guidelines: as salespeople interact with prospects, it’s critical to keep an eye on buyer engagement. It’s preferable to back off and preserve the connection rather than pushing forward with the sequence if a lead expresses negative sentiments at any time.

sales engagement strategies

Best Practice for Effectively Engaging Prospects

Now that you know what sales engagement is and why it’s essential, it’s time to start developing your sales engagement strategy. Use the ideas below to create a successful program that increases revenue and expands your business.

Align Sales and Marketing Teams

Marketers will create a significant amount of the content that you use to engage with customers. These are the assets that your salespeople will distribute through social media or email. As a result, you and your marketing team must have strong alignment so you can see what’s being produced and meets your team’s demands, but also so you know.

The most straightforward approach is setting up a recurring meeting with marketing to review their upcoming content plan and an editorial calendar and aligning sales and marketing guarantees that you can provide timely feedback and train your teams to make the most of this content when it goes live.

Get the Right Technology

The right tools make it that much easier for you to accomplish your goals, just like any other aspect of your sales approach. When scaling your sales engagement strategy at scale, invest in both a sales engagement and a sales enablement platform.

You can develop, optimize, and analyze your sales engagement plan with a sales engagement platform. On the other hand, a sales enablement platform will guarantee that your representatives have all the information, training, and assistance they require to interact with clients effectively.

Personalize Emails, Calls, Documents

With the capacity to automate processes comes excellent responsibility: Salespeople may be tempted to send a flurry of preformulated emails with sophisticated technology.

However, buyers want and expect personalized conversations and insights from salespeople.

Make it easier for your teams not to make this mistake by incorporating personalization into email templates. After the greeting, a simple solution is to include the phrase %%Personalize%% at the beginning of templates. Businesses should also emphasize personalization through coaching sessions, sales plays, and team syncs.

sales-engagement-software

Optimize Optimize Optimize

The work does not end once your sales engagement approach has been established: When reps have adopted your sequences and are utilizing the required platforms to connect with purchasers, your attitude should change from “launch” to “optimize.”

This entails getting down and dirty with your sales engagement and enablement platform analytics. Examine both high-level statistics, such as aggregate open rates, view times, the number of SQLs, and individual performance indicators.

This will assist you in assessing the impact of your sales engagement procedures while also identifying areas where you can support low performers.

Be Creative

Finally, every sales engagement approach should allow for creativity. After all, buyers are people, and a highly personalized outreach campaign might swing a stale lead into a contract sale.

If you want to keep your prospecting efforts moving forward, try incorporating more creative engagement approaches like giving branded merchandise or (where appropriate) gift cards to local cafés or restaurants.

Creative touches don’t have to be solely financial; an amusing allusion to a popular culture moment, for example, or something a buyer shared on LinkedIn can also work.

sales-technology

Grow your business with Sales Engagement

With the correct sales engagement approach and tools in place, you can ensure that each sales rep is maximizing their potential and helping your company grow. Explore more tips on winning sales strategies with The Agile Sales Process Blueprint.

Get the latest insights from SalesGRID's Blog, every month.

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