Are you still relying on your sales reps' skills to increase the level of sales engagement you have with your customers? With modern solutions, there are multiple ways to achieve that systematically.
Sales engagement can be defined as the interactions that take place between a buyer and seller, and according to CIO.com, it’s more about the quality of your sales outreach rather than the quantity of it (i.e. how many people you are contacting). It focuses on helping sales professionals to communicate effectively with prospects and customers.
Having a robust, cloud-based CRM solution alone, hardly helps your sales team engage with your prospects. Because most CRMs are more like a data repository to store contact information and track sales activities against those contacts. And this is the circumstance that led to the emergence and rise of sales engagement platforms. According to Aragon Research, the market will reach the size of $5 billion until 2021.
A great sales engagement software compliments your CRM, and enables your sales reps in several ways to engage with customers with the right message, at the right time, at every stage of the buyer journey.
1. Automating content usage
According to the Aberdeen Group, sales reps spend 22% of their time searching for the right content. Your sales engagement platform should automatically recommend the right sales collateral for the right prospect (based on the sales stage, role, industry, etc.) and guide the sales rep to the appropriate next step.
2. Tracking customer activity
Your potential customers get engaged with the emails, documents and content your sales team sends them. Modern sales engagement tools provide you granular visibility with real-time notifications on how your customers actually interact with this information: when they read, how much time they spend on each page, whether they print it or not, etc. This enables your sales reps to always hit the perfect timing.
3. Scheduling your emails
Having the perfect timing sometimes requires to send your emails at a specific future date, possibly depending on certain triggers and criteria. Without a system in place, manually following this up is quite impossible. For that reason, best sales softwares are equipped with advanced email scheduling capabilities.
4. Leveraging personalized video
Video is clearly becoming the major communication method, not only for marketing but also for sales. Sending a personalized video to your customer (by email, live chat, SMS, etc.) increases the likelihood that your prospect gets engaged with your proposal by 41%. So, your sales engagement platform should provide an easy way to create and send personalized videos.
5. Reach decision makers faster using video recordings
The average B2B sales process has between 6 to 10 decision makers according to Challenger Inc. This means that if you fail to sell them all, you'll have trouble getting your deal closed. But decision makers are busy, and might not be available for the time of your call. So make sure you record your sales meeting and send it to your customer nicely packaged afterwards, preferably in a way that enables you to track what happens with your video after you sent it. This way you can make sure all the right people get the right information at the right time.
6. Utilizing templates and scripts
Your sales reps spend most of their times writing emails, making phone calls, preparing proposals, or text chatting with potential customers. Utilizing templates (for emails and proposals), and scripts (for phone calls and live chat) not only saves their time, but also increases the effectiveness of your communication. Every sales team uses templates and scripts to some extent, but your sales engagement tool must provide easy ways to utilize them on a regular basis.
7. Harnessing the power of live chat
As salespeople we all know that real-time communication (like phone/video call, in-person meeting, and live chat) is much powerful than asynchronous messages like email or voicemail. Therefore your sales platform should enable you to use every opportunity to have a live chat with your prospect, such as when they re-visit your website, or when they are reading the document you have sent.
8. Easy appointment scheduling
If you don’t use the right technology, finding a common time to schedule an appointment with your clients becomes a nightmare. Although there are basic tools like Calendly, using disparate systems for your sales team is definitely not effective. That’s why your sales engagement solution should either internally provide this functionality or integrate with external solutions.
9. Providing click-to-call ability
Every sales process includes one or more phone calls with the prospects. And instead of making outbound calls, encouraging your customers to call you can change the whole game. Several studies show that providing a click-to-call ability can double your call-to-conversion rate! Make sure your sales engagement platform makes it easy to implement and manage this functionality, not only on your website but also on your sales documents.
Sales technology is developing rapidly, and it’s the right time to consider strengthening your CRM with a sales engagement software that will equip your sales team with a set of tools that will improve the communication with your customers.
Want to learn more about Sales Engagement?
Read our Sales Engagement guide here.
