With every passing day, it is getting more challenging to make sales. What worked a while ago may not be currently relevant, and therefore it is high time to change. One of the most significant changes is to engage prospects. There is no prize for guessing that a strong engagement between sales reps and prospects helps in sky-rocket sales. That is why you have to pay attention to sales engagement.
Let’s get into the details in this sales engagement blog post.
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Sales engagement can be in the form of sending cold emails, making phone calls, leaving voicemails, meeting prospects, and even something as trivial as leaving a comment on their blog post. Prospects can also have automated interactions such as filling forms on your website, interacting with a chatbot, becoming a part of a mailing list, and using tools to schedule sales meetings.
What Is Sales Engagement?
Sales engagement refers to the interaction between a salesperson and a prospect to convert the prospect into a paying customer. It includes all the interactions between the sales team and the buyer during the sales process.
When you conduct a marketing audit to analyze your audience, you understand how to improve your sales engagement and build better relationships with the prospect.
Let’s move ahead and learn how you can improve sales numbers with the help of handy sales engagement tips.
Sales Engagement Vs. Sales Enablement – Why Is There The Need For Both?
There is often confusion between the terms sales engagement and sales enablement. Sales engagement focuses on making the interaction of salespersons better with prospects and customers. On the other hand, sales enablement content is the continual process of making the sales team capable of engaging with prospects/customers with the help of training and guidance.
Every sales team needs both processes as they complement each other. Both have a role to play in making sales reps handle prospects better and ultimately boost the company’s revenue goals.
- Sales engagement ensures that your interactions with prospects are well-managed, personalized, and data-driven, which can increase conversion rates and build stronger relationships.
- Sales enablement ensures that your salespeople are well-prepared, knowledgeable, and effective in their interactions with prospects, which can lead to more successful sales conversations and ultimately, more deals closed.
Top Sales Engagement Tips To Boost Sales
Here is a list of sales tricks that will help you improve your sales engagement plan and fetch you the desired results.
1. Align with the marketing team
Marketing involves:
1. Keeping an eye on prospects’ activity.
2. Knowing their buying habits and preferences.
3. The frequency of purchasing.
The marketing team is responsible for building the image of your brand and bringing in quality leads. It also plays a significant role in presenting the company’s vision to a particular segment of the market.
When both sales and marketing teams are not on the same page, there can be a problem. The marketing team may bring in wrong leads, and the sales team may not reach out to the market segment properly. Therefore, the sales team of your business needs to work in alignment with the marketing team. Here’s what you should do,
1. Create an ideal customer profile along with the marketing team. It will make the marketing team target that particular market segment and do the product promotion accordingly. The sales team will then use the proper engagement techniques that resonate well with the prospects.
2. Together, the sales and marketing teams should create a user journey after getting a clear idea of the perfect customer. Both teams must understand the best time to engage with the customers.
3. Allow marketing to take the first initiative and inform prospects about your product or service. Once that is over, the sales team can go ahead with cold calling, cold emailing, and other channels to reach out to prospects. The point is that when a person has some prior idea about your product or service, the chances of you closing the deal are higher.
4. The marketing team has access to what the customers think about your product service and your company. You can make use of that feedback and tweak the sales strategy accordingly. Moreover, it will help you learn from the mistakes made in the past.
2. Equip team members with the required skills
To be successful with customer engagement, salespeople must know what to talk about to the prospects and present it the right way. Most often, companies don’t pay heed to this and make sales reps sell straight away.
There is a need to train experienced sales reps, too, as your product or service is different, and the rep has to learn how to sell it. Provide complete information regarding your product or service. Additionally, make sure the rep can make cold calls properly and compose compelling emails. Check whether the rep has knowledge of standard selling techniques and whether they need training for the same. Let them join online courses and attend seminars to learn new skills that will ultimately benefit your business.
Most importantly, you have to track their performance and check whether they can deliver the desired results or not.
3. Provide high-quality content
Apart from cold calling and in-person meetings, sales engagement also requires a relevant product copy. Nobody will want to purchase your product if it has a poorly-written copy that sounds boring. You have to look at all your sales material and see whether it can convey the actual value of your product or service. Your sales copy should show how your offering has been helpful to clients in the post. Also, try to remove cliched phrases like “The best product” or “The number one product” from your sales copy.
Revise all the content related to your product or service and ensure that it provides sufficient information and is engaging. Your content & copy are important aspects of your brand’s identity and will determine the fate of your product or service.
While creating content, steer clear of formal business language and cliched phrases because you are writing it to engage your prospects, not to push them away. Keep a professional yet straightforward tone throughout, and it will give you a positive response from prospects.
4. Follow-up appropriately
Follow-ups fetch you good results, but at the same time, they are pretty annoying to prospects. The main reason is that their email inboxes have scores of follow-up emails that sound too pestering.
The key to making follow-ups seem optimistic to your prospects is by using them the right way. Most importantly, you have to follow up on time, for example, immediately after a customer clicks on the ‘Learn more’ button in the initial email. Taking action, later on, will make the prospect go cold, and they may not have an interest in your offering anymore. That is why it is important to avoid warm leads from growing cold.
5. Pick the appropriate communication channels
While you may want to reach out to prospects using all the communication channels available, you have to ensure choosing the one that prospects prefer. If they are active on social media, they would want people to contact them on professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Some may want you to contact them on the phone so that they get all the information instantly. Others only want to interact via email.
To choose the right channel of communication to reach out to prospects, you have to know your prospects first. Like already mentioned, creating an ideal customer profile will definitely help you out.
6. Use technology to help you out
Taking a cue from the previous point, you should consider using sales engagement platforms and CRMs to help you keep track of your follow-up process. It is wise to do so as there are so many calls, meetings, and emails conversations to keep track of that it is just not humanly possible.
With a sales engagement tool and CRM, you can manage all your prospects in one place. It will help you determine which rep is taking care of which deal and remind you when it is time to make a follow-up phone call to a prospect. All sales reps must have CRM and sales engagement software.
Using technology is a great way to save time and keep things well-organized. With a sales engagement platform, you can build, optimize, and analyze your sales engagement plan. It would automate the interactions you have with prospects. A good sales engagement platform helps you create content quickly and offers advanced communication channels and primary phone and email communication. Apart from that, sales engagement software must measure the performance of the sales team and the behavior of customers. Other desirable features of a sales engagement tool include automated lead routing and providing training to sales reps.
While choosing a CRM system for your business, you have to understand your needs. There are chances that you may not need a CRM with truckloads of features. An efficient CRM with just the required features can do the trick without burning a hole in your pocket.
7. Make use of personalization
When you make someone feel special, they will go out of the way for you. That is what happens when you personalize your email content and make the recipient feel important. Offering something exclusive and making the email look specially crafted for them can do wonders. It can even result in the prospect closing the deal with you straight away.
To personalize the content of the email copy, you have to do some homework and research a bit about the prospect’s interests, preferences, needs, and pain points. Find out what they require and see how your product or service fits into that requirement. Avoid sounding generic in your email as prospects don’t have interest in your product or service features. They basically want to know how it can solve their problems.
You can personalize your email by mentioning the prospect’s name a couple of times, including the subject line. If there is a mutual connection, add that as well to build trust. Mentioning a common interest can further help in starting the conversation. Apart from that, you can resort to image personalization to make the email look like you have specially crafted it for them.
8. Recreate potential user journey and identify key touchpoints
As already mentioned in the first point, to create a journey map of the customer correctly, you have to make a portrait of your ideal customer and define their basic details like gender, age, income, and so on. Additionally, you have to mention the interests, preferences, habits of the ideal customer.
After getting the ideal customer profile, you have to imagine what would happen ahead. Will the individual search for your product or service online? Will they ask a friend? Where else would they search for your product or service?
Once you recreate the buyer’s journey, the next thing to do is to identify the touchpoints. Touchpoints refer to the points of interaction between a potential customer and your brand. It may be an online form that the prospect has to fill or an online ad that the prospect views. When you know how and when the prospect is getting in touch with your brand, it helps get in touch with them at the right moment and engage them.
By recreating the customer journey and analyzing the touchpoints, you would avoid reaching out to them at a stage in which they are not ready.
9. Keep an eye on the analytics
Check the analytics to know how things are going. They represent the success of the team. You would require to take a look at both marketing and sales analytics. Marketing analytics provides you with the bounce rate, click-through rate, page visits, and other metrics. Using them, you can find out from which source prospects come from, what draws them to your product or service and what turns them off.
Coming to sales analytics, you would want to see the response of prospects. You can determine whether they like to engage over email or want you to call them personally. Depending on the preferences of prospects, you can tweak your approach. These may be little things, but they do matter a lot in making your sales strategy successful.
10. Monitor team performance
Hold meetings regularly with your team to review team members’ performance and understand what is going right and what is not.
They will help you find the sales engagement process that works and eliminate those not giving good results.
So, these were the sales engagement tips you should try to follow. Now, let’s move ahead and see what you mistakes you should avoid.
Sales Engagement Mistakes To Avoid
Though sales engagement platforms are a boon for making it easier for you to reach out to prospects across different channels, you make a few common mistakes with sales engagement. It is best to avoid them so that you can get better results. Here are some of the common ones,
1. Sending too many emails
If you send far too many emails than required, it is not going to help you. As a sales rep, you can invest that time in activities that help generate revenue for the company.
2. Not personalizing emails
Most often, people think that the sales engagement platform will take care of the personalization part of your emails. While you do have pre-written templates and tags such as {{First_Name}} and {{Company name}}, it still doesn’t entirely fall in the personalization category.
You have to make sure that you add a personal touch to your email by congratulating the prospect for their new achievement, mentioning how well their blog post is, mutual connection, and so on. In sales, you have to put in efforts to personalize it yourself too, and not depend entirely on technology.
3. Using generic templates from the internet
There are a few fixed templates that a lot of salespeople use. They are repetitive, and the readers now find them boring, and there are higher chances of the prospect ignoring your email. Using the same old templates makes the email look as generic as most other salespeople also use them. So, you have to put in some effort in writing your outreach emails while keeping the prospect in mind.
4. Sending incorrectly formatted emails
Poor formatting of email can ruin your reputation, and the prospect won’t take you seriously. That is why you should try to keep the formatting clear and clean. If you fail to do so, the recipient will ignore your email or mark it as spam and affect your email deliverability.
5. Sending the same email to many stakeholders of an organization
There are times when you have the temptation to send the same email to all the company stakeholders so that at least one of them replies to you. However, it is the wrong approach. You can email the same message to a maximum of 3 stakeholders. If all the stakeholders get different campaigns, you can get their attention, and there is a lesser chance of them marking you as spam. To get better outcomes, try to write several campaigns.
6. Not providing opt-out links
There are legal regulations like GDPR, CASL, and CAN-SPAM to protect the privacy of email users and set rules for commercial emails. The CAN-SPAM acts require you to add a clear opt-out link in your cold emails. Furthermore, unsubscribing from your emails has to be an easy process for the recipients. If you fail to do so, there is a heavy penalty for it.
What To Consider Before Choosing A Sales Engagement Platform?
Though there are many sales engagement platforms in the market, you have to keep certain points in mind when choosing a platform for your business. Whether it is your first time or you are planning to switch the vendor, you have to pay attention to a few things, and you have to do the following,
1. Check whether it fits into the rest of the technology you use
The primary concern for any business purchasing a sales engagement platform would be whether it would be easy to integrate with the existing software you use. This is essential because if it is a misfit, it can affect the work process. As it is all automated, you must ensure that you can integrate the platform you choose into your current tools. Most often, it is your CRM that you have to consider because if the sales engagement platform is unable to communicate with it, it affects the whole workflow. It is, therefore, better to check that right in the beginning so that you don’t have any issues later on. It would be a huge waste of money if the platform doesn’t fit into your tools and you know about it later. Talk to the vendor beforehand about your concern.
2. Know how it benefits the workflow
You have to see how the sales engagement platform benefits you as far as time is concerned. Find out how much time you can save when you complete a set of tasks. Workflow can be manual and automated, and you should consider the time factor. The manual workflow involves looking for ease of use, and for the automated workflow, you should look for accuracy, i.e., checking whether the tool is doing the right action each time. Also, consider the ease of the tool’s setup process. Ask the vendor to give you a complete demo to understand how the platform works.
3. Determine if it personalizes outreach
Creating the content for email messages is a crucial part of sales outreach. You also have to personalize your email to strike a chord with the recipient. That is why you must find out how the sales engagement platform helps you personalize emails at scale. It would help in maximizing your efforts. With well-written and personalized emails, it is possible to get better outcomes.
4. Are your team members willing to face the change?
When you introduce a sales engagement platform in your team that performs tasks using conventional methods, it will be a significant change for them. That means not everyone will welcome the change.
Find out if the vendor can provide a complete sales onboarding, training, and implementation to ensure that the team members adapt to the change.
If you are unsure about team members’ reactions, tell them that you are searching for a platform for sales engagement, and you want them to participate in the evaluation. This way, you will build trust, and the team will be ready to face the challenges of making the switch to the new platform.
Top 5 Sales Engagement Platforms
Here is a list of the top sales engagement platforms and cold outreach tools you should consider investing in,
1. SalesBlink
SalesBlink is not just a sales engagement platform. It is actually a sales outreach automation suite that helps automate cold outreach, and maintain a deal pipeline.
Also, it assists you at every stage of the sales process and reduces the workload considerably. Not only this but it lets you reach out to targeted prospects.
SalesBlink has email templates that you can personalize at scale and track opens, clicks, and replies. SalesBlink also has tools like
3. Free sales commission calculator
4. Free email subject line generator
It also comes with an in-built CRM that helps you manage clients and prospects.
2. Mailshake
Mailshake is a sales engagement platform for cold email outreach. From a single dashboard, you can reach out to prospects through multiple channels like email, phone, and social media. With MailShake, personalized cold email outreach is possible to get better results.
The other features of this platform are campaign management and template management. Plus, you can create emails that are mobile-friendly so that you get better email responses. What’s more, is that you can also integrate the platform with third-party tools like CRM and other email marketing tools.
3. Hubspot Sales Hub
This platform includes tools for sales analytics, sales engagement, and CPQ (configure-price quote). HubSpot Sales Hub suits sales teams of all sizes. You can also automate sales processes and free reps from tedious tasks. In addition, it is easy to look at the team’s success with the help of the metrics made available by the platform.
Sales Hub is a platform that lets you personalize and automate your email sequences while providing real-time notifications of the recipient engaging with the email such as clicking on a link or opening an attachment. The user-friendly platform is also easy to integrate with HubSpot CRM.
4. Salesloft
Salesloft is a sales engagement platform for B2B businesses of all sizes. It has all that each sales team member would require, be it the sales leaders or the customer success reps.
With the platform, sales reps can set up automated email cadences for prospects. Apart from that, there is a collection of data that helps conduct A/B tests. It is the best platform for outreach automation and managing deals.
You can also integrate it with CRMs like Hubspot and keep track of all the communication you have with prospects over multiple channels like email, phone calls, and social media.
5. Klenty
This is yet another sales engagement platform that automates outreach, schedules follow-up, and helps personalize emails. It is easy to tailor emails for prospects individually with this tool.
Klenty keeps deliverability intact by sending emails from your server and makes the sending patterns resemble a human sender. You can also find out how prospects are engaging with your email. It also helps in finding out what is the right time to send an email to prospects. Using Klenty, you can rest assured that your emails enter prospects’ inboxes instead of the spam folder.
You can also integrate with the CRM of your choice, such as Pipedrive, Zoho, Hubspot, and Salesforce.
Get Ready To Improve Sales Engagement!
Sales engagement, when done right, can help you get the desired results. Ideally, the sales and marketing teams have to work in sync, and you have to put in efforts in knowing the prospects and clients. Also, it is crucial to reach out to them using the proper channels. Another essential tactic to follow is to keep an eye on the analytics to know how your team is performing.
Not only that, you also have to train your sales reps well so that they perform their best while interacting with prospects. The bottom line is that you can drive more sales by following the best sales tips and techniques. If you feel low, you can read sales motivational quotes.
And don’t forget to thank us later!
FAQs
Sales engagement refers to the interaction between a salesperson & prospect to convert the prospect into a paying customer. It includes all the interactions between the sales team and the buyer during the sales process.
Sales enablement is the continual process of making the sales team capable of engaging with prospects/customers with the help of training, guidance, tools, information, content etc
Every sales team needs both processes as they complement each other. Both have a role to play in making sales reps handle prospects better and ultimately boost the company’s revenue goals.
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