As a salesperson, every last interaction you have with a customer or prospect matters — no matter how, when, why, or where you reach them. Every professional exchange a salesperson has with a potential buyer bears some weight. They’re all opportunities that you have to make the most of.
Every interaction a salesperson has in the interest of selling something constitutes what’s known as a “sales engagement.” And there are rules, strategies, and technology available for salespeople to ensure they get as much mileage as possible out of every engagement they take part in.
Here’s a high-level overview of what sales engagements are, what resources are available to help facilitate them, and how what you can do to make the most of them.
What Is Sales Engagement?
The term sales engagement includes any monetary, personal, professional, or digital exchanges sales reps have with buyers or prospects. Any interaction a buyer has with a property a seller owns is considered an engagement.
That includes actions like clicking on or responding to emails, downloading content offers, attending webinars, or interacting with a company’s social media profiles. Sales engagement also covers in-person interactions, phone calls, and voicemails.
Both marketing and sales departments stand to gain a lot from tracking sales engagement data. Those figures can provide an invaluable reference point for businesses to determine which aspects of their messaging, content, and overall sales strategies are most effective for capturing and converting leads.
But how can you make sense of that data? And how can you turn it into actionable solutions? Sales engagement platforms might be the most prominent, straightforward resource for doing both.
Sales Engagement Platform
Sales engagement platforms improve and sustain cohesion across a sales team’s communication and content messaging infrastructures. They also streamline the sales process by providing reps with data analysis, actionable advice, and guided selling.
Integrated communication
Many sales engagement platforms feature a centralized base for all customer communication. You can usually sync your sales engagement software with both your CRM and preferred email platforms. That connection can give you visibility into all your communication channels and the ability to create effective, targeted communication sequences for prospect and customer outreach.
Content and messaging management
Your company’s content and messaging should have some degree of consistency. You want your business to have a unique voice, message, and messaging cadence. That doesn’t just come from content like web copy, blogs, and marketing collateral.
The language your reps use in cold calls, email subject lines and copy, and support communication all need to be in line with one another.
Leaving reps to their own devices, with no real guidance on how to sound and what to say can undermine sales efforts. That’s why many sales engagement platforms contain resources that allow content and messages to be centrally accessed and edited throughout an entire company, ensuring cohesion in messaging for sales efforts.
Engagement analytics
Many sales engagement platforms offer advanced analytics to measure how engaging and effective your company’s customer interactions are. These analytics can include metrics to identify deals at risk, track team and rep performance, and give insight into your customers’ content engagement
These figures are often conveyed through dashboards, visual summaries, and activity logs to help reps monitor their sales processes and understand how to better hone their efforts and allocate sales resources.
Actionable insights and guided selling
Sales engagement platforms (SEPs) often have tools to assist sales efforts by giving reps recommendations and insights to close deals. Many SEPs can offer actionable advice about content, next steps, and opportunity prioritization to help close deals, specific to different sales stages and deal contexts.
Sales engagement can be a crucial reference point for teams to understand the efficacy of their sales strategies and get a feel for what they need to be doing better. It’s worth keeping careful tabs on it and investing in technology to help facilitate the process. Ultimately, solid sales engagement is a matter of working with and for the customer, above all else.
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