The talk around sales engagement has become louder in the past few years. As more organizations become aware of the need for a solid sales engagement process, it’s time to uncover what exactly goes into creating one.
Sales engagement can be defined as the interactions that take place between a buyer and seller, that are measured in time and benchmark points. For example, you might measure sales engagement by how many prospects opened an email or clicked a CTA.
But how do you consistently track and measure sales engagement metrics?
Enter: a sales engagement platform.
A sales engagement platform is an integrated system of engagement and record. Much like a CRM, a sales engagement platform enables and guides the sharing of high-impact content with customers, tracks data, and delivers insights on the next steps to take.
You might be thinking: “My organization currently has a CRM in place, so we are good when it comes to sales engagement.”
Unfortunately, sales engagement goes deeper than having a marketing automation system or a CRM in place. Sales engagement focuses more on the relationship between your rep and your prospect. It is about cultivating deeper conversations and relationships to turn your prospect into a buyer.
A few fundamental elements of sales engagement include:
- Scientific, scalable, and process-oriented methods
- Human, empathetic, engaging, value-first, and relationship-based methods
- Reactive, adaptive, and customer-centric methods
- Delivery of higher quantity and quality selling time
A sales engagement platform allows your team to embrace these elements of the sales engagement process while enhancing their user experience. At its core, a good sales engagement platform should include the following three things.
Integrated Communication Features
Communication channels look different for every organization. Primary channels include email, phone, text, social media, video, in-app messaging, you name it. Maybe you’ve heard that cold-calling is a dying method of outreach. It’s not. What is true is that having only one method of communication has died. Your prospecting efforts MUST be multi-channeled. For example, if you are only measuring your efforts by phone connect rates, you might say that ‘Cold calling is dead,’ but calls can often drive email replies and follow-up responses. Be sure to look for a sales engagement platform that allows you to engage and track multiple communication channels
Content Management
What would happen if you had all of your reps individually create content for each one of their prospects? Do you think that you would have consistent messaging? This is where many organizations make mistakes. They have reps creating content with who knows what type of branding and language. This produces a major problem for your content team. Having multiple avenues of distribution and multiple varieties of content takes away from the core principles of sales engagement.
By implementing the following three elements into all your content management efforts, your team can better organize the cadence copy that will be distributed to buyers via a sales engagement platform:
- Keep your content customer-centric. Make it easy for your rep to communicate and your prospect to understand. It’s not all about you. It’s about your customer.
- Keep your content prescriptive. Think about ways your product or service can help right now. Communicate that with your content.
- Keep your processes coordinated. Your internal communication MUST be cohesive. Your AE and SDR’s need to be in seamless communication with one another. Your marketing team has to easily communicate and collaborate with your sales teams. This is vital for an effective sales engagement process.
Reports & Analytics
There is something hypercritical by knowing what works and what can be an opportunity for growth in the next step. Start by turning all reports, analytics, and trackable data into action steps.
Depending on the vision for your organization, your sales engagement process will vary. But, the constant for every organization should be to better connect and engage your buyers. Through understanding the data you have collected, your team can begin to build a strategy that will help better equip your reps in their role.
Through understanding each aspect of the sales engagement process your organization is better equipped to identify strengths and opportunities for growth within your own strategies. vidREACH is a sales engagement platform that allows sales teams to automate their engagement processes while keeping personalization at the forefront of your engagement efforts. See for yourself how our team is boosting engagement and response rates every day.
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