What is Sales Engagement Software?

It can be challenging to navigate the world of sales engagement platforms and sales engagement tools. Many sales teams use them to aid their sales engagement. Other sales managers are at least aware of how they can help the sales process but don't understand all the intricacies involved and the different features available.

How can sales technology help with a sales engagement strategy? What does sales engagement software actually do? And what even is a sales engagement platform in the first place?

We put together this handy guide to help answer all your questions.

What is a Sales Engagement Platform?

Sales engagement platforms provide game-changing technology to help sales teams enhance their existing workflows throughout the entire sales cycle. In a nutshell, they ultimately enable sales leaders and sales reps to make more sales in less time.

It's software that helps sellers engage effectively with prospects and customers across multiple channels. The top sales engagement platforms help sales teams stay organized through sales cadence, automation, and integration with other sales tools.

Some of the usual features of sales engagement platforms include:

• built-in communication tools for automated emailing, phone calls, and sometimes social media interaction to make customer interactions more efficient
• systemized sales processes
• lead generation help to provide prospects and customers with value-added information and relevant content
• an easy-to-use interface to keep everything organized and streamlined
• sales intelligence, team reports, and analysis to track engagement across all steps of the customer journey
• seamless CRM integration

Sales Engagement v Sales Enablement

Though they may look similar, sales enablement and sales engagement focus on two distinct aspects of sales productivity.

Sales engagement focuses on efficiency, whereas sales enablement focuses on effectiveness.

Alright, let's unpack that a bit more.

At its core, sales enablement provides your team with everything they need to close a deal, including all the necessary tools and training.

On the other hand, sales engagement cultivates and optimises customer interactions and improves the buyer-seller relationship.

Combine sales enablement and sales engagement to help scale your sales processes. From the sales rep to the account executives, everybody in the sales team should know exactly how to maximize every customer interaction across the buyer’s journey.

This can be a considerable challenge, but a great sales engagement platform can help provide a solution.

What a Sales Engagement Platform Isn't:

Sometimes, it's helpful to establish what something isn't to better understand a concept.

Sales engagement platforms do not produce leads in themselves - they are not marketing automation platforms. Sales professionals can use marketing automation tools to search out leads and then use sales engagement platforms to facilitate engagement with those leads.

Sales engagement tools are not customer relationship management tools (CRMs). Salesforce is an example of CRM software - a tool that tracks and holds sales and customer data. The sales team then uses the CRM data to measure goals and targets.

Again, CRMs do not help with sales enablement or sales engagement. Sales and marketing teams increasingly rely on sales engagement platforms to take care of all aspects of customer engagement.

Sales engagement platforms serve an alternate purpose to CRMs and, in fact, are designed to work alongside them.

Hopefully, we've established the foundational understanding of what a sales engagement platform is.

Let's examine the nitty-gritty of utilizing sales engagement software in your business to implement a sales engagement strategy.

What is a Sales Engagement Strategy?

Any effective sales team should have a sales engagement strategy. It is fundamental to provide a sales team with an outreach framework to steer them through the entire engagement process.

But what does this look like in practice?

A sales engagement strategy means setting up various sequences made up of simple steps to guide salespeople through the sales pipeline.

The purpose of a sales engagement strategy is to enable sellers to follow set plays from sales playbooks to engage prospects at just the right time, optimize interactions, and effectively engage with the customer at each stage. A team's success depends on how well you can set up and implement these frameworks to make more deals.

Engagement Strategy Example For Sales Teams

Here is an example of a sales engagement strategy:

1. Call prospect
2. Send a sales email
3. Send a follow-up email
4. Contact the customer through social media
5. Send direct mail or a gift
6. Follow-up phone call
7. Final attempt through any channel
8. Recycle lead

Sales development teams used to have to navigate this process all by themselves. Now, they can leverage sales engagement platforms to help them with the process, allowing sales reps to save time, focus their prospecting efforts, and better manage their workload.

With the help of sales engagement platforms implementing strategies, sellers spend less time on administrative tasks, resulting in higher rep productivity and more efficient account management.

Let's unpack those sales engagement software features a bit more to see just how sales engagement platforms can better implement your sales engagement strategy.

What Does Sales Engagement Software Do?

It's quickly becoming a must-have for all sales teams to use the added edge that technology provides to the sales process. Sales leaders see their competitors using a sales engagement platform, and the results are clear - sales engagement platforms help sales organizations close more deals.

How do sales managers actually use this and implement it into the sales cycle? What does it do that actually generates sales? Let's take a closer look at those features:

• A single interface to manage everything in one place. This means sales reps don’t have to question who to contact, what to say, or how to engage prospects - they have it all laid out right in front of them in the easy-to-manage interface.
• Automation through workflows and cadences. Sales processes are automated through the platform - tried and tested hyper-personalized engagement strategies are set up to ensure effective and consistent engagement with customers.
• Real-time data enrichment: The best sales engagement platforms will provide accurate lead data that you need to get deals closed! You also benefit from a variety of reporting that builds of picture of your successes. See who opened your emails, which links were clicked on, and see how your target audience engages with you.
• Email outreach: Automate, manage, and A/B test your strategies with multiple email outreach campaigns set up by the platform.
• Email scoring systems leave your team with no doubt about which leads take priority.
• A sophisticated telephony suite with features like click-to-call, call tracking, voicemail drops, and call recording helps your teams make the most of their phone calls within your sales organization.
• Integration - a good sales engagement platform will fit straight into your tech stack. You should be able to use all the tools at your disposal in combination, so a great engagement tool will fit natively into your chosen CRM.

It should be evident that these features essentially constitute an upgrade to the scalability of your business. Leverage the latest technology to remove friction points in the buyer's journey and create workable frameworks that all your salespeople can follow easily.

These features ensure consistency of service, allow for automation, and give hitherto unprecedented analysis and insights, all in a system that's easy to use.

What are the Best Sales Engagement Platforms?

You should consider your team's needs before selecting a sales engagement platform since there is plenty of choices out there. Different platforms offer various strengths depending on whether you prioritize phone calls over email or social media, or if you use a particular CRM, for example.

You also should think about the level of service you need from your sales engagement platform - many platforms offer different packages with varying levels of support at different price points. It's up to you to decide the level of ongoing support is right for your business, if you are happy to implement strategies yourself or if you need some extra guidance.

Buzz is a fantastic option for those who want an excellent all-around sales engagement platform offering email outreach, LinkedIn automation, real-time data enrichment, and fully customizable pipeline management.

Buzz will slot right into most CRMs natively, including Hubspot and Pipedrive. Developers are always looking for further ways to deliver data seamlessly whenever your team needs it.

The best sales engagement platforms leave no prospect behind - make use of our sales engagement software to engage, manage, and close your ideal clients with simple yet powerful tools that enable scalability for your business.