At GetAccept, we believe in the power of relationships, creating personal and engaging interactions in the online business process.
B2B businesses are moving online, adapting to the digital way of selling, with a growing conviction that digital is the way of the future.
By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.
Table of contents
- What is sales engagement?
- What is the difference between sales engagement and sales enablement?
- How do we create sales engagement in digital environments?
- The power of sales engagement
- How to use video in your sales process to increase sales engagement
- How to use chatbots or live chat in your sales process to increase sales engagement
- How to increase sales engagement using your sales collaterals
- Sell as you are and increase sales engagement
What is sales engagement?
Sales engagement is the interaction between salespeople and buyers. These interactions can include anything from sales calls, meetings, email click-through rates, and downloading an ebook.
Sales engagement can be measured, and when you measure, you will gain insights into how the buyer interacts with your brand throughout the buying journey.
Engagement insights are useful when improving the quality and efficiency of the sales process.
What is the difference between sales engagement and sales enablement?
Even though sales enablement and sales engagement complement one another, and both enable the sales team to engage effectively with prospects and customers, each of them has a different focus area.
Sales enablement helps businesses to align their sales process internally with other departments, while sales engagement is more about helping sales professionals to reach, engage, and communicate with their prospects and customers.
How do we create sales engagement in digital environments?
Creating personal interaction and engagement between the buyer and seller is a challenge when selling digitally. It can cause an engagement gap, create trust issues, and make it harder to close deals.
To help and improve the digital interactions that will help you to increase engagement, it's important to work with features that keep the personal and human touch alive.
Since the massive shift to online selling, video and live chat have emerged as the top channels for interacting and closing sales with B2B customers.
Video and live chat are both sales enablement features that can increase engagement with prospects and customers while selling digitally.
So, how do we know that we are running in the right direction by adding engaging content to our sales process with the goal of creating more sales?
According to McKinsey, video and live chat have emerged as the predominant channels for interacting and closing sales with B2B customers.
By analyzing the usage of GetAccept's sales enablement platform, we can see that documents that are sent with GetAccept have an average hit rate of 67% and, when adding engaging communication channels like video, live message, and branded design, the hit rate increased by 30%.
We could also see that:
- Documents sent without any SMS, video, automatic chat, and automatic reminders have an average hit rate of 52%.
- Documents sent with SMS, video, automatic chat, and/or automatic reminders have an average hit rate of 68%.
The power of sales engagement
There is power within sales engagement, especially when you know how to master “it.”
So, how can you bring personal and engaging interactions to the online sales process?
And not to forget the importance of building trust within the digital environment.
Let’s take a look at different sales engagement features that can be used to create and increase your sales engagement throughout your sales process.
How to use video in your sales process to increase sales engagement
Video is the preferred format when it comes to consuming content.
Over 1 billion hours are watched on youtube every day. So, how does that translate into B2B sales?
According to a report published by Forrester, including video in an email leads to a 200-300% increase in click-through rate. And, 90% of users say that seeing a video about a product is helpful in the decision process.
Video fits perfectly into every stage of the sales process. Video allows you to cut through the noise by sending a quick intro. It’s eye-catching, and you’re able to show the prospect that there’s an actual human behind the email.
With video, you are able to quickly clear any confusion there might be around a specific question or terms with the proposal that might have been hard to communicate over an email.
Using video as a part of your sales process will help you to stand out from your competition and create sales engagement with your prospects and customers. A video can be used in many different ways throughout the sales process.
- Send a video greeting to increase engagement when connecting with prospects
- Use video when inviting for a meeting
- Send a video and introduce the agenda for the meeting
- Send a video to recap a meeting
- Add a personal video greeting when presenting proposals and sending out agreements
How to use chatbots or live chat in your sales process to increase sales engagement
Chatbots and live chats are virtual customer services that give representatives and salespeople the opportunity to communicate with people via instant messaging.
But how to use them in your sales process to increase sales engagement?
Sales engagement features like chatbots and live chat can be used throughout the sales process. From lead generation to building client relationships and answering FAQs. Leads qualifying chatbots and live chats have proven to be an asset to each stage of the sales process.
- Awareness: At this stage, establishing a relationship is crucial to moving the prospect through the sales funnel. Either deployed on your website or social media channels, a chatbot can initiate a conversation, causing the visitor to engage with the brand.
- Interest: Your chatbot might suggest products or services based on previously visited pages and the customer’s needs. It can handle many of the preliminary questions, at least the most frequently asked ones. If it’s familiar with the query, it will provide the answer. If not, it will connect them to a sales representative.
- Decision: At this stage, your chatbot can send additional advertisements and information based on past conversations with the lead. By collecting valuable data, you may pre-qualify leads and save the company time and resources.
- Action: After a sale is complete, your chatbot can send scheduled follow-ups based on the stored data. This information can then be used in retargeting the user, creating a loyal customer. There are different tools that you can use e.g. Intercom, Zendesk, or Freshdesk.
How to increase sales engagement using your sales collaterals
Effective branding will differentiate you from your competitors, and doing this will allow you to build a relationship with prospects and your customers. We all know that the sales process can't happen without a document.
Sales collateral can be anything that helps sales teams close more deals, faster. Companies develop content with the aim of moving prospective buyers through the entire sales process.
Content typically comes in different types, targeting every stage of the buyer’s journey, such as product overviews, case studies, ebooks, whitepapers, FAQs, fact sheets, testimonials, how-to slide decks, proposals, executive summaries, quotes, contracts, implementation guides, etc.
But more than how you define it, what matters is how it actually performs and gets your customer engaged.
- Track performance: First things first, stop sending your sales collateral as email attachments and start tracking them with a document tracking solution that uses a link-based system for sharing. What gets measured gets improved.
- Use storytelling: Buyers like to read examples that demonstrate how someone has done what you’re talking about. They use this experience to gain the trust and confidence to try what you offer. For sales collateral, storytelling typically comes in two forms: case studies and testimonials.
- Make it visually appealing: Studies indicate that our brains process visual information 60,000 faster than text. If you want your customers to engage with your sales collateral, you better make sure it has an appealing visual design, along with text that clearly communicates details.
- Cater to the web: Sorry (not sorry), but sending a PDF is not a digital content strategy anymore. You have to make sure your sales collateral can be viewed anytime, anywhere, from any device. This sounds basic, but it's extremely important for driving engagement.
- Personalize content: Last but not least, stop sending those copy-paste proposals. Provide your sales reps with sales enablement platforms to enable more personalized content
Sell as you are and increase sales engagement
With different sales engagement features, tools, and analytics, I’m sure that we can create personal engagement throughout the sales process.
But, not to forget, it's important always to bring your whole self into the sales process and to “Sell as you are.”
The book is designed to give you some clues as to how you can take the best elements of yourself and harness them to wow prospects, find new territories, and become a person who people come to over others to have their business needs solved.
Download our ebook to get inspiration on how to harness your unique qualities to find more success in sales.
