Skip your next sales hire and instead, invest in a sales engagement platform to skyrocket your sales efficiency.
Are planning to hire a new sales rep, team lead, or manager to improve your sales results? How about your sales efficiency? How do you cope with the no call lists, spam blockers, and over-pitched, under-patient prospects on your list? Before you hire your next team member, maybe you should consider using a Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) to enhance your existing workflows across all of your disparate sales tools - your CRM, inbox, phone, content management system, etc.- to improve your sales efficiency.
Not CRM, not marketing automation
Today almost all sales organizations have a CRM, acting as a central database to keep records of sales relationships. And on top of that, they rely on marketing automation solutions for large-scale outreach across multiple digital channels to prospects, scoring, qualifying and then handing leads off to sales teams. But neither CRM nor marketing automation helps sales actually engage with Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), a circumstance that led to the emergence of sales engagement platforms.
Sales engagement is more about the quality of your sales outreach, the efficiency of prospecting activity, and the effectiveness of conversion efforts. Better sales engagement generates higher close rates and sales revenue, a pretty straightforward correlation.
Elements of a sales engagement platform
A typical SEP encompasses four elements that help management understand the nature of engagements between sales and customers better:- Content Management capabilities that surface the right marketing and sales content at the right time (by role, sales stage, industry, etc.) based on the usage insights, what content sales is using and how effective it is in each context.
- Integrated Communications Solutions for every channel salespeople communicate with prospects (e.g. phone, email, live chat, social media, web conferencing etc.) capturing these engagements objectively and identifying the right content for each of these conversations.
- Engagement Analytics with activity logs & visual summaries to help management and sales reps understand what is happening across the sales funnel, driving a predictive model that points toward optimal sales resource allocation.
- Guided Selling to help reps figure out what to do next in the sales process (e.g., when to reach out, through which channel, what content to offer) by combining engagement analytics with CRM data (such as sales stage) and other sources.
Why should you invest in a sales engagement platform?
1. Let buyers consume information digitally
Today’s modern buyers definitely don’t want to engage sales reps until they absolutely have to. As sales organizations, it’s our duty to let them consume the right information, at the right time, in a digital format. By optimizing and automating your sales process, SEPs guide your sales reps exactly when and how to get in touch with your prospects.
2. Onboard your sales reps quicker
Sales onboarding is all about making sure your new sales rep is ready and confident to connect with your customers and start selling. By providing all the necessary tools, content, information, and guiding them step by step, SEPs help your new sales reps adapt to your sales process much faster.
3. Connect with prospects on a deeper level
Integrated to your existing sales tools (like your CRM, inbox, marketing automation, etc.) SEPs streamline all the ways you communicate with your customers, and let you do it all in one place. In addition, they enable your sales reps to connect and build close rapport with prospects through modern communication methods like sending personalized videos, having a live chat, providing a click-to-call functionality etc.
4. Improve sales efficiency
It’s a fact that your sales reps waste a substantial amount of their time with non selling activities like logging in, switching between programs, tracking their work, and searching for content. By having all of your communications and data in one place, a SEP help your team save time and come into every conversation more prepared.
5. Sell smarter
By tracking, monitoring and analyzing all the interactions between you and your prospects (such as the calls you make, emails you send, or how long and on what pages your customer spent the most time on your sales collateral etc.) SEPs do the planning for you, and tell you when to call again, or what content to send next time, based on a variety of factors like sales stages, persona, and industry. This helps your sales reps take more informed decisions.
6. Manage sales content easily
Identifying which content generates more interest and increases engagement with the prospect will help you determine which assets are working best for you, and which aren’t providing value. Sales development reps use this information to manage sales content and use it to close more deals.
7. Forecast better
Traditionally your sales CRM solution provides the basic pipeline insights. However, by using a sales engagement platform, you can get a better picture of your pipeline, with all the sales engagement data attached to your deals; and therefore make more informed forecasting decisions.What’s next?
Sales engagement platforms help your sales team effectively engage and communicate with today's modern buyer while actually being able to keep track of what they’re doing. If you're looking for the advantages of a shorter sales cycle with better sales engagement, find the right technology that truly works for you.
Want to learn more about Sales Engagement?
Read our Sales Engagement guide here.
