Sales engagement is all about interacting with your customers, building a rapport with them, and guiding them through the buyer journey till they actually make the purchase decision.
Let’s dive deeper into it.
What is sales engagement?
Sales engagement refers to the interactions taking place between customers and your salespeople.
This includes meetings, sales calls, demos, or even e-book downloads or email click-throughs. Basically, it covers all the interactions that you can measure through a touchpoint or time.
Sales engagement offers you insights into the buyer journey so that your sales team can get a holistic view of the way in which messaging, content, timing, and other elements play together to define your buyer experience. You can then use these insights to step up the quality and the efficiency of your sales process.
Having a sales engagement strategy allows you to create a structure around your engagements, rather than letting your sales representatives randomly take decisions on how they should engage with your prospects and when they should do it.
An effective sales engagement strategy will help you make sure that you always provide your prospects with the information that they need at the stage in the customer journey that they are in at that point of them in order to flow to the next stage.
What is the difference between sales enablement and sales engagement?
Sales engagement tends to be more customer-centric, while sales enablement tends to be more sales-centric. Sales engagement is all about enhancing the way in which your sales representatives engage your customers and prospects by tracking, quantifying, and measuring interactions across touchpoints.
Sales engagement aims to offer vital insights to the buyer journey in order to foster long-term relationships with your customers. It even helps you understand what content, messaging, channels, and tactics are most effective at specific touchpoints.
Sales enablement, on the other hand, focuses on empowering your sales team to do their jobs in the best, most effective way possible. It aims to break silos and provide your sales team with all the information, training, content, and sales collateral that they need to engage with your customers and close the sale.
Both sales enablement and sales engagement focus on improving your sales teams’ interactions with our customers and prospects, but the difference is that while sales engagement focuses on improving the interactions that your salespeople have with your customers, sales enablement focuses on providing your sales team with everything that they need so that it is easier for them to do their job and bring you more sales conversions.
Sales engagement best practices
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You can’t just have a deluge of cookie-cutter template emails flowing to all your prospects. You need to personalize your engagements so that it’s obvious to your prospects that the message is crafted specially for them, with their needs and interests in mind.
And you can’t just fill your prospect’s name into a template message and call it personalization. In a perfect world, you’d want to be able to craft bespoke messages for individual prospects. But that’s not always feasible.
What you could do is use a template, but make sure that there’s a section (preferably at the start of the message) that you leave to be crafted according to the needs and interests of that individual prospect.
Your work isn’t done after you set up your sales engagement strategy and your salespeople are making use of the sequences that you created as well as the tools and the platforms that you have selected to run your sales engagement activities over. At this point, you’ve just done the groundwork and laid the foundations for your sales engagement. Your focus now should be on evolving and optimizing, continuously.
Look at the analytics and metrics both for your sales teams as a whole and for individual sales representatives. Also, if you use solutions such as Kanban board Office 365 and others, make sure your team is familiar with how to use these for best outcomes. Analyze the data about open rates, view times, the number of SQLs, etc. This will help you understand how well your sales engagement activities and tactics are works and will aid you in understanding where you are lagging and what you can do to improve in those areas.
One thing that you always need to remember is that you’re always selling to humans. Even if you’re in B2B sales, you aren’t selling to glass buildings, you’re selling to the humans inside them. So you need to sound human… and fun.
Making small jokes with pop culture references can get your prospects to chuckle, especially if you’ve done your research, know what their interests are, and play on them.
You could also send out personalized merchandise or small gifts that won’t put a hole in your pocket but will put a smile on your prospects’ faces
Your sales team and your marketing department will need to work in sync with each other. After all, your sales team will need to be sending out assets to prospects on social media and email, and who is making these assets? That’s right, your marketing team.
Your sales and marketing teams need to be working in tandem with each other. This allows you to plan better for the content that needs to be created. It even allows your sales team to offer feedback quickly so that your marketing team can create content that aligns with your sales team’s goals and addresses your prospects' queries and concerns.
To scale up your sales engagement, you’re going to need to step away from doing everything manually. You’ll need to invest in automation and other tools. That goes from using a chatbot to answer simple questions, live chat for the complex ones, as well as a sales engagement platform and a sales enablement platform. Moreover, a professional receipt maker will help you expedite the transaction process and enhance sales engagement.
Using a sales engagement platform will help you craft, optimize, and analyze your sales engagement strategy so that you can step it up. Making use of a sales enablement platform will help you make sure that your salespeople always have the content, training, and everything else that they need to interact with your prospects and answer all their questions in the best way possible.
Prospect engagement
Prospect engagement is all about the interactions that you have with prospects during the initial stages of the buyer journey, before they make a purchase and become customers.
Prospect engagement focuses on capturing and holding your prospects’ attention. For some businesses, this may involve quick, frequent communication with an omnichannel approach. Others might have a longer sales cycle and slower communication.
What’s a sales engagement platform?
Sales engagement platforms are tools that assist with the interactions and communication occurring between sellers and prospects or customers. They are used to automate routine tasks, predict future sales, provide structure around daily activities and offer an easier way to record and track results. They even provide you with insights and reports that help you understand and analyze the performance of your sales teams in a better manner.
Some of the elements of sales engagement platforms are:
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