Sales teams are constantly under pressure to generate higher-quality leads, have more conversations with prospects, and close more deals. Tools that can assist productivity across the sales cycle and help with lead generation and outreach are a great way to find an advantage in a competitive environment.
Sales engagement platforms may be the right choice if you’re looking to streamline your sales processes and grow your business. Read more to learn all the ways you can unlock sales potential and drive growth.
What Is a Sales Engagement Platform?
A sales engagement platform connects with your customer relationship management (CRM) software and other communication tools. It acts as a management console for all your customer engagement activities, whether in person, over the phone, or digitally. The platform helps your team plan and execute sales strategies, measure and track performance metrics, and optimize interactions.
Key Capabilities of a Sales Engagement Platform
Sales engagement software transforms your business process, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer-facing efforts through the following capabilities:
- Automation: platforms offer a mix of automated features, including email sync, multichannel messaging flows, online scheduler, A/B testing, and auto-dialing.
- Native integration: data flows seamlessly between your sales engagement platform and CRM, reducing latency and sync errors. This feature enhances collaboration and allows for more advanced automation.
- Adoption by the entire company: the platform’s benefits reach beyond your sales team. Your marketing, customer support, finance, and other customer-facing departments can use this technology to simplify tasks and synchronize strategies company-wide.
Why Are They Important?
Sales engagement platforms offer businesses significant advantages, such as:
- Improving efficiency: it integrates with your CRM data and combines all the tools your sales team uses into one place. Sales reps spend less time switching between platforms, allowing them to save time and close more deals.
- Keeping data current: the platform integrates and syncs data with your CRM, so reps always see the newest information without any manual entry.
- Scaling personalized outreach: the tool’s automation features enable you to generate personalized outreach campaigns at scale with minimal effort.
- Strengthening your CRM: the engagement software enhances the power and efficiency of your CRM, making it more effective overall.
- Measuring performance: the platform can generate daily sales reports for reps, sharing data like the number of prospects called, emails sent, deals they negotiated or closed, and other key metrics to gauge performance.
- Leveraging analytics: the platform enables your business to evaluate sales performance metrics to determine which leads are most valuable, where to focus your efforts, and how to improve your outreach.
How AI Can Be Involved in a Sales Engagement Platform
In a process requiring a considerable amount of personal interaction, you may wonder where AI fits in. While it’s true that AI isn’t a replacement for your sales reps, the technology can take many repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks off your reps’ shoulders. AI automates and streamlines many sales functions in the platform, from capturing and scoring leads to personalized outreach, so your reps can focus on more critical work.
How AI Identifies the Right Target
AI analyzes the preferences and behavior of your leads to identify which ones have a greater chance of converting into a sale. Prioritizing leads helps your team target more favorable prospects so the time and effort devoted to moving them further through your sales cycle is more successful.
The Learning Capabilities of AI
AI’s ability to ingest, evaluate, and summarize data is far greater than any human’s. Salespeople can harness AI to quickly learn about their prospects’ needs, pain points, and preferences without doing the research themselves. AI enhances their productivity and enables them to spend more time on meaningful interactions.
Benefits of a Sales Engagement Platform
Sales engagement solutions align your sales team and streamline how you communicate to build strong customer relationships. The platform’s meaningful benefits include:
Easier Content Management for Playbooks
Most businesses use sales playbooks to guide their sales teams’ actions based on valuable customer information. The sales engagement platform’s built-in analytics further strengthen your playbook through data-driven insights, helping your team enhance their engagement strategy to build better connections with prospects. The tool can help you determine:
- The best time to follow up with leads
- Which content is popular
- Which lead magnets are attracting your target audience
- Which method of communication results in higher responses
- The average number of touchpoints with a prospect before a purchase
Better Customer Lifecycle Support
Managing the customer lifecycle journey can be complex and frustrating for sales reps. They have to navigate each step, from pitching prospects to supporting them after a sale, based on a customer’s individual needs. On top of that, multiple reps from their team may be communicating with a prospect, further complicating the process.
Sales engagement platforms use predictive analytics and guided selling to ease this burden. With access to centralized, real-time engagement data, sales reps can track all conversations across channels, determine customers’ unique needs, and see where they are along the sales pipeline—making it easier to collaborate and offer better customer support.
Improved Outcomes in Revenue and Sales
Having all your sales tools and conversations in one place saves your team time and helps them operate more efficiently. AI-powered automation further enhances sales performance and workflow optimization, resulting in greater sales and revenue.
Sales Engagement Tools Help Companies Sell Smarter
The best sales engagement platforms show you a detailed and bird’s eye view of every customer’s sales journey. You’ll be able to track each call, email, and text your sales team sends and know customers are along the sales process.
These actions empower your sales reps to make data-driven decisions based on what’s working best so you can achieve better outcomes for your company and your prospects. With a sales engagement tool, you’re working smarter—not harder.
The 10 Best Sales Engagement Tools
Top sales engagement platforms align your sales and marketing processes to boost productivity, improve your engagement strategy, and close deals. They go beyond sales enablement to empower reps with communication tools and strategies that resonate with prospects. Explore top-rated tools below.
Zendesk Sell
This all-in-one, cloud-based CRM tool boasts many impactful sales engagement features like workflow automation, analytics and reporting, and AI-powered lead generation and scoring. Sales reps can quickly identify which leads are best to engage with and what communication methods drive success. Its mobile capabilities help it stand out from competitors, allowing sales teams to access information from anywhere. Pricing starts at $19/month.
Clearbit
Clearbit’s marketing data software is designed for B2B businesses, providing up-to-date contact information through CRM integration. This tool also tracks website visitors for lead generation using customizable parameters. It scores leads before routing them to appropriate sales reps. Contact the company for pricing information.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s Sales Hub offers sales engagement and analytics, with many sales automation and personalization features. It offers contact management, lead management, a customer database, forecasting, and configure-price-quote (CPQ) tools to enhance customer engagement and close more deals. HubSpot’s pricing runs from free to enterprise-level, based on your needs.
Zoho SalesIQ
This sales engagement platform integrates with CRMs and other communication channels. Zoho SalesIQ focuses on using lead and customer data to pinpoint the exact time a sales rep should contact them. The tool can also help with content creation. It even offers a live chat feature to communicate with customers in real-time and answer questions on their schedule.
Apollo.io
Apollo.io focuses on using data analytics to improve the sales process. The platform also offers call list management with a prospect search tool to easily filter through your contacts. It even integrates with LinkedIn for prospecting and loads high-scoring leads directly into your CRM database.
Freshsales
With this platform, you can view every lead’s complete interaction with your company’s content. Freshsales supports reps throughout the sales cycle, offering lead nurturing, workflow automation, and event-triggered actions. It enhances internal collaboration tools and integrates with Slack to improve team communication.
Mailshake
This sales engagement and automation software focuses on cold email outreach for sales and marketing teams. The platform lets you automate email campaigns, personalizing the content and cadence of delivery. It also helps you engage with customers on social media and reach prospects by phone. It easily integrates with CRMs, email marketing tools, and contact databases.
Groove
Groove uses automation to streamline sales workflows and improve the effectiveness of your sales strategies. This sales engagement platform features email tracking, multi-channel campaign automation, templates, a sales dialer, and more. Groove offers new users a free trial.
Klenty
This sales engagement tool simplifies email personalization and offers follow-up automation. It syncs data with your CRM, analyzes it, and generates reports so your sales team can make informed decisions. Choose from a startup, growth, or enterprise plan.
Outreach
Outreach is a sales execution platform that uses automation and AI to help teams increase the efficiency of their sales pipelines to predictably close more deals. This unified platform assists with sales engagement by prospecting through sales, offering deal management, and forecasting functionalities. Contact the company for pricing information.
Boost Engagement with Podium
Businesses of all types benefit from our AI Employee, Jerry, who communicate with prospects and can even make sales on your behalf, 24-hours a day. Our AI Employee captures leads across channels, including third-party sites and social media platforms. Jerry then starts meaningful, human-like conversations with leads to drive more conversion. You can even program our powerful AI tool to steer conversations based on your sales team’s goals. See how Podium can help your company enhance sales engagement today.
