How to Build a Sales Engagement Plan

Any sales rep will tell you that the sales game has changed. Picking up the phone and sending emails is not enough to close deals anymore. Today, companies must have a sales engagement plan of attack. Here’s how to arm your reps with the content, workflows, and automation they need to succeed.

Why you need a sales engagement plan

Sales reps today connect with prospects across every type of communication method including phone calls, emails, web conferencing, social media posts, and in-person meetings. Sales engagement refers to all of these interactions and how they impact closing deals. 

Even if you’ve never heard of sales engagement, you’re doing it – just without a plan. Unfortunately, you’re leaving your sales reps to craft their messaging strategy, outreach frequency, and follow up plan all on their own. This wastes time, takes reps away from closing deals, and makes it a lot harder to quickly ramp new sales hires. 

A sales engagement plan serves as a roadmap for your sales reps with clear rules and guidelines. It helps align your company with customer expectations around frequent interactions with sales reps across distribution channels. 

Having a plan helps reps prospect at-scale by giving them the tools they need to be their most productive. By collecting the insights from every buyer interaction, your company can create a sales engagement framework that increases the quality of your cold outreach and improves lead conversions.  

How to build your sales engagement plan

To get started on a sales engagement plan that works for your reps, you need to first engage your internal stakeholders, especially sales and marketing. Without alignment between these two departments, you run the risk of sales reps rejecting marketing qualified leads.

You should include these key stakeholders: 

• Sales leadership: Your plan should align with the larger goals of the sales organization, not just revenue targets. For example, bringing in more new logos or growing existing accounts. If your sales engagement plan doesn’t have the buy-in of your sales leaders, they won’t hold reps accountable to your metrics. 
• Sales enablement: Sales engagement and sales enablement may have different mandates but they work best when they collaborate. Sales training, a key part of enablement, should prepare reps to follow sales engagement best practices.
• Marketing: If your marketing team is creating all of your landing pages, blog articles, case studies, ebooks, and webinars, then they must understand what qualifies as a good lead to sales reps. Otherwise, both teams will be spinning their wheels. 

Content and channel strategy

Once you have your project team ready, do an audit of your existing sales content, processes, and results. Some of what your reps are doing today may work very well, but there’s a chance that much of your content is out of date, not aligned to a buyer persona, or collecting dust. 

While popular content is one part of the equation, the other part is your distribution channels. Outbound email campaigns and phone calls are critical, but what about other channels? Do your reps connect with, follow, and engage with leads on social media? Which platforms show ROI? Hint: LinkedIn is the most effective B2B prospecting platform and should be included in your plan.

Your sales engagement plan should make it easy for reps to know which channels to use, what content to share, and how often to make contact. This lightens their load so they can focus more on relationship building and personalizing their outreach. 

Standardized email templates

Marketing and sales have to collaborate when creating email templates. Start by asking your sales reps to compile their most successful emails. These can be used as a starting point to expand on your template library.

Your sales email templates should balance standardization with personalization. According to Gartner, the most effective emails have 20% of their message customized to the prospects needs. Generic emails tell the prospect that you didn’t do your research and will be easily ignored. 

Effective outbound sales emails must be catchy and to the point. If your email is long, talks too much about your company or product, and doesn’t offer value, remove it from your sales engagement plan. To help you get started, Wiza put together 11 sales email templates you can use today.

What is pre-sales engagement?

Pre-sales engagement is just as important as other components of your sales engagement plan. According to McKinsey, companies with strong pre-sales capabilities increase their win rates by up to 50% for new business and a whopping 90% for renewal business. 

Your pre-sales strategy should cover all of these activities: 

• How to identify your ideal customer profile
• Which buyer personas to pursue 
• How and where to prospect for leads 
• What qualifies as a good lead
• What value propositions to promote 
• How the market will respond
• What is the competitive landscape 
• What sales stages to include

Pre-sales engagement takes the burden of crafting the perfect messaging off of the sales reps’ shoulders so they can focus on moving prospects through the sales funnel. An effective pre-sales plan can accelerate your pipeline velocity and help your reps engage with more leads. 

Best practices to boost seller engagement 

Sales engagement is more than just creating a playbook and templates and deploying them to your team one time. It’s a continuous process that changes based on your prospects’ behaviors and market shifts. As new competitors come to market and your products change, keep these best practices in mind.

1. Audit your sales process regularly. Buyer patterns change all the time. The type of content that worked a few years ago may seem too aggressive or even cheesy today. Distribution channels can rise and wane in popularity for B2B prospects. The bottom line is that you can’t set it and forget it. 
2. Use high quality leads. The person who was your primary buyer at a target company may have been promoted or left for a competitor. To keep your leads fresh use LinkedIn Scraping and verify the accuracy of email addresses through Wiza’s Chrome Extension. 
3. Do your research. LinkedIn, company websites, news articles, and Twitter have lots of information about your prospect, their job, their goals, and what challenges they’re facing. Use this information to personalize your outreach.
4. Master the art of writing sales emails. Every email you send, including followup emails, should have a catchy subject line, a compelling hook, a value proposition, and a clear call to action. 
5. Follow email best practices. Keep it short and to the point. Prospects receive dozens of emails a day and will only glance at your message. Make sure it’s eye-catching. Follow up and follow up again, it takes many touch points before you can start a new sales cycle. 

What’s next? 

Building your sales engagement plan requires collaboration and a lot of content creation. If you’re going to effectively implement your new plan, you’ll also need a sales engagement platform. We put together a list of our top 15 vendors and some recommendations on how to pick the right one for your team.