Competition is getting only more fierce with rapid advancements in technology and increasing uptake of new tech.
This makes the sturdy old business model of making a good product and relying on word of mouth rather outdated.
And that’s where sales engagement comes into play.
The sales tactics that worked yesterday might not work today. You need to redefine how you interact with your prospective buyers and when to reach out to them to increase conversions.
According to Forrester, 70% of companies leading in optimizing sales engagement processes are seeing higher win rates.
This guide blog post will help you understand what exactly sales engagement is and how you can design the best sales enablement strategy.
What Is Sales Engagement?
To put it simply, sales engagement is the interaction between the buyer and the seller throughout the buyer’s journey across all channels.
It can include emails, online chat, social media engagement, SMS, and phone calls.
This sales engagement is particularly important to build connections with your prospects and convert them into customers. In other words, it helps drive sales and earn revenue.
For instance, many startups are today selling their products to customers directly on mobile phone chat or call. The company initiates these conversations as soon as the lead (potential customer) gives their consent on the website or social media pages of the brand.
This way, customers are guided through exactly what they are looking for, and chatbots and customer support reps both help make the job easier for the customers.
Using a sales engagement platform, sales reps can send out targeted, personalized messages across channels and easily keep track of each customer.
This kind of sales engagement with the customer is shown to increase both conversion rates and revenues.
EngageBay’s sales tools allow you to segment your audience and run personalized campaigns designed for maximum interaction.
Sales Enablement vs Sales Engagement: What’s The Difference?
Sales teams today are looking for modern solutions that can help them sell faster.
With the rising popularity of sales engagement, many sales teams wonder where it fits in with their current strategies.
They are confusing sales enablement with sales engagement, but these are two different aspects of sales management.
This interrelated system allows you and your team to optimize your business in distinct ways.
Sales enablement is the process of increasing sales by equipping your sales team with the necessary skills, knowledge, and tools needed to do their job.
Sales engagement, on the other hand, is about optimizing customer interactions throughout their buying lifecycle. It involves improving buyer engagement through customer data analysis and strategic communication.
The ultimate goal of sales engagement is to create a customer-centric experience for your target audience and improve the conversion rate.
To simplify it, think of sales enablement as the strong foundation for your sales department needs, and sales engagement is all about interactions.
While sales enablement and sales engagement may be different, they are the two sides of the same coin.
Without proper sales enablement, your sales team might find it hard to engage with your prospective buyers.
The Impact of Sales Engagement on the Salesforce
Sales are getting complex day by day. Customers are tired of impersonal, cold outreach and are looking for genuine personalization and channels that suit them.
Companies are starting to recognize the need for sales engagement strategies in their business. Here’s how it helps.
Personalization of Email Campaigns
After SMS, customers prefer to communicate with sales reps via email.
When running an email campaign, sales engagement goes beyond simply tracking open rates and click-through rates.
It’s crucial to have a deeper understanding of how customers are reacting to the content.
Sales engagement platforms can transform the way you execute your email campaigns by allowing your sales reps to integrate content with customizable templates. You can add a quick, personalized touch and blast emails to your prospects and customers.
Besides, you can limit forwards, restrict downloads, and control content by collecting viewer contact information.
In other words, the sales department can leverage state-of-the-art technology powered by a sales engagement platform and reach out to the audience with content that works for them.
Optimization of Content Management
Despite content being an integral part of the sales process, sales reps still struggle to find the right content.
A study shows that sales reps spend on average 440 hours per year on finding the right content. In fact, most of the time, they rely on the marketing team to provide them the content — which often fails to meet the expectations too.
The solution? The sales team can house all marketing collaterals and other sales-related content on the sales engagement platform. The content should address a simple question:
What messaging will you use to engage with your prospects?
The content should be created based on the sales cycle and must be continuously refined as per the engagement analytics.
Better Time Management with Autolog
Surprisingly, only 35% of sales reps’ time is spent interacting with customers. The rest of the time is spent on administrative tasks such as logging call details, updating the sales pipeline, and others.
The sales engagement platform can help save your sales reps time by automating the capturing and logging activities.
You can automate the process of collecting interaction and engagement data across all communication channels.
You can track all reps’ activity — the content used, online and offline meetings, and more — and auto-log back to the appropriate records.
This will ensure that sales reps have more time to interact with the prospects and nurture them to close more deals.
Detailed Insights into Sales Activities
Forrester reports that over 90% of sales leaders lack confidence in their activity data. Particularly because they aren’t sure about the accuracy of the information track.
However, when you switch to a sales engagement platform that automatically collects data, you get a detailed report on all activities.
In fact, you can get insights into real-time engagement and activity with your CRM data for making smart decisions, fast.
The sales dashboard provides a visualization of opportunity engagement across all stages.
Related blog: Buyer Enablement: Make Your Customers Start Believing & Buying
What Is a Sales Engagement Platform?
A sales engagement platform (SEP) acts as a single interface to efficiently plan, execute, track, and optimize interactions between seller and buyer.
It’s the engagement layer that sits on top of the existing CRM system — automating workflows, syncing data, and measuring and analyzing results.
We talked about how sales engagement platforms can help optimize sales processes and make each step in the buyers’ journey customer-centric.
The sales engagement platform has seen the fastest growth rates of all the technology after the traditional CRM.
In fact, 87% of sales development organizations have adopted a sales engagement platform. And, 92% of sales organizations rank SEP as crucial for their team’s success.
If you are looking to improve your win rates and earn more revenue, you would definitely benefit from integrating a sales engagement platform into your process.
Best Practices for Effectively Engaging Prospects
Now without delay, you should start focusing on building your sales engagement strategy that can create a real impact to accelerate your sales.
Invest in Technology
If you want to effectively implement your strategy, you need the right tools.
You should invest in both sales engagement and a sales enablement platform.
A sales engagement platform will help you build, execute, and optimize your sales engagement strategy.
On the other hand, a sales enablement platform will provide your reps with the right content, training, and development they need to engage with the buyers effectively.
Align with Marketing
Most of your sales elements are interlinked with marketing, especially the content sent via email or social media.
It’s essential that your sales department aligns with marketing efforts to work in proper sync.
One way to do that is by setting up regular meetings to discuss the content strategy and update the editorial calendar. Both the team can exchange feedback, brainstorm ideas, and execute campaigns in alignment.
Add Personalization
With automated workflows, sales reps are often tempted to send a generalized message to all the recipients. But this can go terribly wrong.
Today customers expect personalized conversations to make them feel valued.
So while designing your content, make space for personalizing different elements in your email templates, including first name, subject line, body structure, and so much more.
Optimize Sales Activities Continuously
Once you have executed your engagement plan, you need to track your performance and dive deep into your sales platform analytics.
Look at metrics like view times, open rates, conversion rates, and more.
Don’t miss out on individual-level performance metrics as well.
This will help you understand the impact of your sales engagement strategies and also identify poor performers to work on.
ABV – Always Build Value
Lastly, companies should focus on “ABV” or “Always Build Value.”
This has come a long way from “ABC” or “Always be Closing,” which do not hold the same weight in modern sales.
The former concentrates on the type of messages and information to nurture leads from awareness to discovery and help them with post-purchase evaluation.
Whereas the latter only cared about pushing solutions onto prospects before they are even ready to buy.
This value should be a part of your sales engagement strategy in the form of assistance, information, and convenience.
Wrap Up
With the increasing adoption of technology both by customers and brands around the world, customer expectations are only increasing.
It is no easy task to delight customers these days, but the right tools can make the job so much easier.
Sales engagement software help brands reach out to customers on multiple channels, engage with them, and build genuine relationships, both before and after the sale is made.
Try EngageBay for all your sales engagement needs — this is the world’s most affordable all-in-one sales and customer support automation platform.
It comes with free CRM, Live Chat, Help Desk, and even SMS and phone call support for both domestic and international customers.
All of this and you can pay as little as $1 a day!
