Understanding the Sales Engagement Model

At the end of the day, having a phenomenal product doesn’t mean you can sell it well. Your product might be the most advanced in its field, but if you don’t have an effective sales engagement model, it will not matter. A good sales engagement strategy increases company growth by targeting prospective clients, industries, and locations that provide the best chance of closing sales. Understanding sales engagement models and sales engagement strategies to effectively put your own into action is the real key to success.

Let’s take a deep dive into what a sales engagement model is and how to generate your own.

What is a sales engagement model?

Engagement is an important KPI in marketing. Marketing attracts the eyeballs and then brings them in by engaging them through social media, websites, email, and other media channels. Marketing builds content to be engaging on a personal, even emotional level. But there’s a case to be made for integrating engagement into your sales department. Engagement doesn’t take place solely in marketing! With the right tools and the right amount of coaching, you can bring your sales team along on your engagement journey.

Consider this: if you are looking to purchase something, wouldn’t it make for a much nicer experience if you have a helpful sales associate on the other side of the interaction? Your people are your most valuable tools to put on the front line of your sales process.

If you don’t currently have a sales engagement model, there’s no better time to build one! In the early stages of building your sales engagement strategy, you will want to consider a few key aspects:

1. Come up with a clear definition of the best possible sales strategy for your brand to build opportunities and hit goals.
2. Provide a solid foundation for any future growth. Make your strategy scalable.
3. Decide what your ideal customer types are in relation to geography, industry, and company size.
4. Determine how to drive customer awareness to build your pipeline.
5. Map out how to effectively convert revenue opportunities – either directly or through channel partners.

Create the right content for your sales engagement strategy. 

Everyone has their own ideas for how to improve the content that you create for your audiences. There are all kinds of different ways to add value, show your credibility, increase the reach of your content, and discover more about how your audience consumes content. These are all great and necessary considerations to bring into the equation, but they don’t always take into account sales. You need to adjust your content strategy to accommodate both sales and marketing needs.

Consider these 4 pillars when crafting content for your sales engagement strategy:

1. Awareness – Customers should be aware of a service or product that can solve their problem.
2. Interest – You must create compelling content that generates interest in your product.
3. Desire – Create a desire so that customers consider your product as the only real solution to their problem.
4. Action – Customers must be compelled to act i.e. fill out a form, schedule a demo, start a free trial, or buy your product.

The biggest thing to remember is that sales and marketing has to meet the customer where they are in the buying process. If this doesn’t happen, you could deter customers from making that final jump to a purchase. Content needs to be created for each step in your sales engagement model. For example, you can start your prospects at the first stage with a blog or an ebook. After that, you can gradually increase the intensity of your focused content depending on what they need. This means creating infographics, slide decks, case studies, white papers, etc. that can further educate a prospect depending on what kind of information they are seeking or depending on what stage of the funnel they are in.

How to make your content work for your sales engagement model. 

So now that you’ve created your content for your customer sales engagement strategy, you must learn how to utilize it. Work the content into each step of the client journey.

Here’s a breakdown of what the client journey could look like in your sales engagement model:

1. Awareness – Here, be informative and engaging. At this stage, people are aware they have a problem that needs to be fixed. Keep it simple and brief, allowing them to make the decision on their own that they need your product.
2. Interest – Here, you can be a little more specific and direct with what you’re putting out. They have a problem, and you have a solution. Simply present a number of solutions, elaborating on what works and what doesn’t.
3. Desire – Here, you can really dig in. Show the benefits your product has over your competition, and show your strengths as a company. What do you bring to the table? How does your product specifically help them? These are the questions you need to answer with the content you create.
4. Action – Here, you should push for a sale. Whether it’s automated or over the phone, this is your “call-to-action” moment that closes the deal. If it is automated, make sure you have a page that pushes for a purchase.

By incorporating relevant content into each step of your custom sales engagement model, you create an easy client journey that educates and compels prospects.

Looking for more ways to understand a sales engagement model? vidREACH is here to help!