Sales Engagement is a Piece of Cake

You must have heard of so many terms such as "sales engagement", "sales enablement", "sales process", and many more. While so many terms may be confusing you, selling is still basically the same thing - find a product/service that other people want, provide it at a good price, and reap profit.

So why are sales reps and sales professionals going through so many complicated sales processes to optimize interactions and achieve more revenue? It's simple.

It is more difficult to reach customers now. You are not sitting in a marketplace anymore or if you are, that is not the sole place you exist. Most businesses are on the web now and with all the noise competing for the attention of potential buyers, it is harder to engage the buyer in what you are offering.

We don't believe in things such as a definitive guide, but we can definitely discuss best practices that can help you build better relationships with your customers so that sales engagement reaches new heights.

Sales engagement refers to the practice of getting into a two-sided conversation with a prospect through multiple channels including email and social media to move the potential buyer along the sales cycle. However, the only way sellers engage effectively with buyers is if they are experts in customer behavior and customer communication - and it's about talking to the buyer at the right time with the right message.

Also Read: How to Send a Follow Up Email After No Response

Engaging with prospects has become easier now with sales engagement tools that improve the sales cadence and take sales communication up a few notches.

However, before we get into that, let's look at common sales engagement mistakes and how to correct them.

What you are doing wrong in sales engagement

You have a sales engagement plan in place and you plan to make 1000 phone calls a day, hoping to maybe convert 1 of them or at least get customer data for future campaigns. Unfortunately, this strategy is outdated.

Here are common mistakes sales reps and professionals are making with prospects:

1. No categorization of prospects

In the digital age, marketing teams know that the answer lies in personalization. The answer to what? The answer to succeeding at their jobs. However, what they do not know is that you need to delve deeper than that. I personally loved the strategy Reply uses to categorize prospects: Perfect customers, almost perfect customers, and everyonelse.

The prospects who are perfect customers deserve more attention and multiple touches of personalization. The sales team should also reach out to them on multiple channels to ensure sales success. Perfect customers are those that are highly likely to purchase from you so it is important to have the right sales engagement strategy.

The prospects who are almost perfect customers also deserve plenty of attention from sales reps and a high degree of personalization but maybe a little less than perfect customers.

Everyonelse are those people you are not sure about or who do not exactly fit the perfect customer profile but are still worth a shot. They definitely shouldn't be ignored. In fact, the sales team should work hard on them but the degree of personalization in messages can be a tad bit low. Sales teams should work on saving time by pushing more prospects through the sales pipeline instead of personalizing emails for people who may be at the top of the funnel and not very aware or not in need of the product/service at that time.

2. No process innovation

If you are not using sales engagement technology, that may not be that big of a blunder, but if your sales teams are still using the same sales process that you were using 5 years ago or even a year ago, you might be hampering customer interaction.

Phone calls may be a great way to get in touch with prospects who have already expressed an interest in your product/service but they are intrusive and not a great way to explain how your product/service attends or caters to the pain points of customers.

Direct mail used to be great, but it's not the first thing a prospect looks at every morning and it takes a while before your message is delivered.

Depending on your product/service, you might want to choose the channels you use more effectively such as using social media engagement, email, and perhaps virtual coffee meetings to discuss solutions in detail.

Speaking of coffee, some sales teams ask prospects whether they would prefer tea or coffee and then have their preference delivered to them before the meeting. While this used to work, it is now being overused by sales reps in many companies, so it is important for sales leaders to remain top-of-the-game.

Therefore, sales development requires innovation regularly.

3. Going crazy over marketing and sales tools

If you are using the right tools for marketing and are also using a sales engagement platform, then there is no need for sales leaders to believe that customer success means investing in more sales engagement technology.

If your sales rep has all the skills needed, rep productivity is maximized, and your sales organization has invested in sales engagement software, there is no need to waste time on vetting all of the sales engagement platforms or letting your sales team purchase every tool ever created to help with sales engagement.

A lot of sales engagement is about writing the right content or copy and providing the right materials to convince or persuade the potential customer.

4. Not providing sales enablement material

Sometimes you have the right product, you write a message that is very convincing and your sales engagement strategy is great. Your sales engagement software ensures that you are able to get in touch with your prospects through different channels, but your product/service is a little complicated and you do not have sales enablement material to support the discussion with the potential customer.

Sometimes, you may have multiple stakeholders involved in the decision-making process and you need material to encourage customer adoption based on their particular requirements. This plays an integral part in sales communications.

Sales enablement material is essential for the sales engagement strategy and can be in the form of a sales deck, demos, videos, blogs and articles, tutorials, etc. Your sales rep has to be equipped to answer any and all questions thrown at him/her regarding the business, the USP, and the product/service.

5. Using email templates over and over again

If your sales reps and marketing team do not know how to write good copy or write an engaging sales pitch, they probably are not very good at their job. Re-using email templates and sending potential customers the a different version of more or less the same message over and over again is one of the worst practices for customer engagement.

It is important to create a customized drip campaign and use your chosen sales engagement platform to get in touch with potential buyers at the right time. Keeping track of the behavior of leads is important for a business so they can decipher a warm lead from a cold lead and see which leads they need to engage further with and which should be left alone.

Email messages need to be customized based on where the lead is in the customer journey. That is how buyer engagement is maximized. In fact, account executives need to stay in touch with customers after making a sale as well - to ensure the business is providing great customer service and that customers are likely to purchase again.

6. Not using a sales engagement platform

Yes, we mentioned above that going after too much technology is also a farce but not using any at all isn't good either. You cannot engage with buyers one by one, you need to create a whole system that automatically helps you accelerate the process and helps your organization achieve customer success.

A sales engagement platform is a unified platform that allows sellers to create and implement processes that are beyond their regular customer relationship management system. The system automates manual tasks, interprets data, and then records engagement metrics and provides results to the business so they can re-design and implement better engagement strategies. The better the sales engagement strategies, the higher the potential revenue.

Your sales engagement platform helps you target customers on different platforms, and social sales are skyrocketing this year, so sales organizations cannot ignore social media as a platform for contacting buyers. Phone calls, email, and virtual demos may all be part of the package, but sellers must also re-engage on social or find their prospects on social if they have not responded on other channels.

Even if someone isn't answering their phone, they are probably still posting on social - so that's where you find them. Sales engagement platforms make this possible by sending an email to a high-value prospect and if they do not respond to that in a particular timeframe, following up with them on LinkedIn or other channels.

What else do sales engagement platforms do?

Sales engagement platforms are NOT CRMs, but there are other advanced functions that they take care of, such as:

1. Automating tasks such as message flows

2. Personalizing messages

3. Providing insights into rep productivity and performance

4. Telling you which sales cadence is performing better (or worse!)

5. Features such as click-to-call, voicemail templates, etc.

6. A/B testing of messages and optimized message-sending times

7. Providing clear and thorough insights on your sales activities and customer behavior

Therefore, a sales engagement platform makes the professional lives of sales reps much easier and organized.

Bottom Line

Sales plays a pivotal role in how well the business does - in fact, it plays the main role. Therefore, to ensure you strike it big with potential clients and make a strong impression, it is necessary to pay proper attention to sales engagement. You should also pay attention to other complimentary processes with sales engagement which include content management, marketing and advertising, lead generation, and sales enablement.

Sales engagement can be a piece of cake, if you master the process, apply the skills, and create a great sales engagement strategy. It is mainly about reaching the right person, at the right time, with the right message - and doing it as quickly as possible.

Speaking of engagement, you won't be able to engage your audience if your emails keep landing in spam. Pribox can help you there!