What is Sales Engagement?

Sales is complicated. Sellers have to juggle hundreds of interactions with dozens of leads across multiple channels—and that’s just in one week! The most successful sales organizations help their sellers through this process by investing in a sales engagement program that automates many of these interactions, so reps can focus on closing deals. Developing a sales engagement plan is important for every company, no matter the size of your team. 

What is sales engagement and why is it important? 

Sales engagement refers to the many types of communication that sellers have with their prospects and customers. This includes emails, social media posts, phone calls, in-person meetings, and more. Each of these interactions is a data point that helps companies understand their buyers better. 

The goal of a sales engagement program is to take these insights and use them to help sales reps process more leads without skimping on the quality of their outreach. 

In other words, sales engagement is about prospecting at-scale. 

Many companies implement sales engagement platforms to help them with this process. These platforms compile insights about your buyers and what drives them to make a purchase. Using this information, companies can help their sellers improve their sales strategy and their performance by creating a better framework lead conversion.

The difference between sales engagement and sales enablement

Sales enablement and sales engagement sound similar but they actually approach sales strategy from different angles. While sales engagement is all about optimizing interactions with prospects and customers, sales enablement focuses on making the process of selling easier for reps. 

Enablement programs usually include training sessions on sales methodologies and can prepare reps for new go-to-market messaging. They also manage the creation of and access to sales content and playbooks that reps need in their day to day selling. 

Sales engagement programs take all of the data that comes from multi-channel interactions with prospects, and analyzes the information with the aim of improving how and when sellers talk to buyers. It helps reps engage with more leads and gives them the insight needed to move their deals forward. 

How sales engagement and sales enablement work together

It’s helpful to view enablement and engagement as two parts of the same process. They are both trying to combat a major problem for sellers, which is that only 13% of customers think that sales people understand their needs.

This is a big hurdle to surmount, especially since it’s all but impossible to prove value through just one cold email. Sales reps must be prepared to explain, usually in 10 minutes or less, why a buyer should engage with them through a full sales cycle. 

That’s where sales enablement comes in. A sales enablement strategy ensures that each interaction or engagement with a prospect is impactful. When combined with sales engagement, reps can deploy personalization at scale through automating follow up, accessing content libraries, and receiving live recommendations during customer meetings. 

What is sales engagement technology?

The sales engagement platform (SEP) market is booming and projected to grow to $5 billion by 2023. These technologies provide a single destination for planning, executing, tracking, measuring, and optimizing sales interactions.

The most successful sales development teams consider SEPs to be mandatory tools. According to Gartner, 90% of sales leaders are planning to invest more in SEP technology that helps their sellers engage more effectively with their prospects. 

SEPs are also considered one of the most rep-centric tools. They provide direct value for reps in their day to day selling by tracking interactions and metrics like email replies, opens, and forwards. They also display real-time recommendations on next steps to help sellers move their deals forward. 

SEPs work best when integrated with systems of record like marketing automation and CRM solutions. It’s important to choose a SEP that integrates seamlessly with your other sales tools. While some vendors offer all the bells and whistles, the core functionality for SEPs is their trigger-based sales sequences and drip campaigns. Integrating procurement process automation into your purchasing workflow can help streamline and accelerate the acquisition of these tools, reducing delays and improving efficiency.

When deciding on which sales engagement tool to purchase, additional features to consider include sales content management, CRM auto-logging, and analytics and actionable insights. These help codify the strategies of the top performing reps, attach relevant content to next step recommendations, and help uplevel the skills of the entire sales organization. 

Learn more about choosing the right sales engagement platform for your needs here. 

What is the sales engagement process? 

Before you start reaching out to your prospects, you need to prepare ahead by following these sales engagement process steps: 

Planning

First, identify your ideal customer profile. This is your perfect buyer. Determine which pain points your product can solve for this type of customer and map out the typical buyer journey. Think about what objections they may have and how to address their concerns. 

Next, find out which channels your ideal buyers use the most. They may prefer communicating through emails and phone calls. Alternatively, LinkedIn prospecting might be the fastest way to reach them. If not, perhaps attending industry events is the best way to get in front of your ideal customers. Spend your time in the places where your buyers spend theirs. 

Researching 

Generic email templates are the fastest way to your prospect’s spam folder. Instead, use the vast amount of information available online to better understand your prospects. 

• Check out their website including their blog and recent news section. Find out about new funding, changes in executive leadership, and any awards they may have received. 
• Comb through LinkedIn. Check out the company LinkedIn page and click into employee profiles to see what they’re talking about. Follow the individuals that you are most interested in connecting with and reference their posts when you send cold emails. 
• Once you know more about your prospects, look for content that’s relevant to their jobs and interests and start sharing. Ideas include the newest Gartner report for their industry or even content related to their hobbies and passions.  

Prospecting and lead nurturing

Sales reps rarely secure a meeting with their first cold email. Try mixing up your channels; email is a great way to send value-based messaging that informs the prospect about your products, and LinkedIn is a good way to share newsworthy information or respond to your prospect’s posts. 

Finally, set up a powerful email nurturing tool that offers automated follow ups as part of your cold email outreach strategy. Tools like Wiza can pull prospect information from LinkedIn and help you personalize your outreach for each unique lead. 

Closing the deal

This is the final step in your sales engagement process. Once you’ve moved your opportunity and the prospect through your sales stages, you can celebrate a closed deal. Learn more about building out your sales engagement processes and program here. 

Sales engagement best practices

1. Collaborate with your marketing team. Marketing is constantly creating content in the form of whitepapers, infographics, case studies, videos, and more. Ensure that your sales reps can get the most out of this content when speaking with prospects. 
2. Personalize, personalize, personalize. For high value prospects, pull in your research to add personality to your emails. Today’s buyers can easily spot a generic email template and appreciate the extra effort that goes into a personalized email sequence. 
3. Invest in the right sales engagement software so you can automate your engagement process by putting the right content, next steps, and recommendations in front of your reps in real time. 
4. Follow up. Automating your email sequences allows your reps to focus on prospecting and active sales cycles instead of writing emails all day. Your sequence will usually include at least six touches.

Become a top performing sales organization

Sales engagement is an effective and strategic way to help sellers prospect and connect with new leads. When deciding how to reach new customers, make sure to include a multi-channel approach and implement an effective email follow up strategy.