About 33% of the customers end their relationship with a company because of a poor personalized experience. A recent Accenture study backs this data. A good sales engagement platform is not about driving more revenue only. It must create an emotional bond between your business and prospective customers. This strong bond will make your customers stay with you for longer, ultimately enhancing your sales figure.
90 out of 100 businesses are planning to invest in technologies that can improve their sellers’ engagement and generate more revenue. Sales engagement activities include telecalls, emails, meetings, and live chat. Numerous platforms are there to help you achieve these things.
SEP: Meaning and Its Objective
A sales engagement platform (SEP) provides a single UI that can help your sales reps to manage their activities, allowing them to update information about their customers, share notes, and communicate effectively. Meaningful engagement may include making calls, sending emails, chatting online, scheduling tasks, and booking appointments. Previously, sales reps had to manage all these activities with different tools. Switching between different platforms was the reason behind their inefficiency and bad sales results. These problems led the way for the innovation of other platforms.
Sales Engagement Strategy: How to Create a Sequence
As you know,SEPs allow users to set up sequence templates that help in proper communication. Sales cadences consist of majorly three things; automation, communication, and personalization. Setting up sequences for different groups can result in better sales results as it increases the scale of operation. And you can easily measure the sequences through analytics to optimize the processes.
Sequences are made up of specific touchpoints, and depending on the sales team’s target, these can be delivered on time.
What are Touchpoints?
Any interaction between the sales team and a prospect is known as a touchpoint. It may include exploring the website, chatting with the bot for any query, calling customer support, using a freemium demo, and engaging on social media platforms. These touchpoints present at different stages of a sales funnel. The sales team uses different touchpoints to complete a sale depending on the product or service.
Here is a list of common touchpoints in a sales engagement sequence.
Phone calls
Telephonic calling is two-way communication, hence the most effective mode of communication. You can direct the conversation the way you want, answer the prospect’s queries and line up a meeting. This touchpoint is best to close a sale. With the recording feature, you can jot down the points or highlight a client’s interests that you may use in future.
Emails
Communicating through Emails is one of the primary modes of communication with users. However, email effectiveness depends on the prospect’s stage in the sales funnel. Examples of email touchpoints are welcome/introductory emails, lead nurturing emails, newsletter subscription emails, subject-oriented emails, re-engagement emails etc.
The main object of email is to lead a prospect to a sale or to close a deal. However, you can communicate with the outbound prospects as well. E.g., A mail is sent with a website link in it. When the person opens the link, they will be directed to the company’s website. Sales reps get the notification and start a chat immediately to convert the prospect into a client.
Social Media
Social media engagement with insightful content can be a powerful tool for the sales team. They can build awareness through connections, conversations and content with new contacts. Like emails, there are different touchpoints in the social media construct. One of the dynamic social media engagement platforms is Linkedin. It allows its users to send connections, and direct messages through InMail, create posts and share opinions.
Measuring the social media touchpoints is also possible. For example, you can track conversion percentage, InMail response rate, and other metrics.
SMS/Text Message
Sending a text message is the quickest way to communicate with a prospect in the sales funnel journey. SMS has high open rate than phone calls and emails. Due to better response, sending a message can move a prospect to the next stage in a sales pipeline. Initially, the sales team can send SMS for lead qualification. Then, they can follow up for meet or call through another message.
SMS/ text messages are best when used with other touchpoints to provide brief information to the prospect.
Benefits of Such Platforms
Save your time
Toggling between different tools takes more time and involves more effort. SEPs allow your teams to save more time by automating processes like multiple administrative tasks and outbound prospecting. For example, sales reps can directly get in touch with multi-channel mediums instead of manually reaching out to their customers.
Effective Communication
Communication is key when you try to engage with your potential customers and existing customers. Messages can be personalized, customized, and sent to the customers as part of the team’s goal. It may be a response to a random query or a follow-up call. SEPs automate crucial processes like template setting, schedules, and sequence follow-up that teams follow daily. The core advantage of using this software is a real-time response to customer queries across platforms. Quick responses may convert a potential sale that a delayed response can lose.
Dynamic Analytics
The team’s productivity is directly proportional to platform integration. Though revenue and performance have more than just productivity, the platforms make the sales team smart. For example, a sales team can make the right calls with a suitable mode of communication with the right persons at the right time.
Every sector is different. So a particular sequence may not work everywhere. However, the best platforms have effective tools and touch every point. Examining these touchpoints helps a team to understand and fix issues quickly.
Improve team performance
Efficiency and effectiveness are two factors that make the difference. A robust platform will eliminate the chances of miscommunications and unnecessary tasks. Moreover, it will help you quickly log in, track communication, share notes, etc. Surfacing relevant data during the call helps reps discover new opportunities. Finally, eliminating multiple tools enables high-quality engagement with a more significant number.
Ahead of the competitors
Working with multiple clients can be chaos for both reps and their managers because you must keep updating and maintaining tracking of multiple clients simultaneously. The process is lengthy, and a powerful AI-based platform can fix all the problems. The advantage of AI-based SEP is that it recommends improving workflow and sharpening communication-based on the pre-analyzed data.
Impact revenue
It makes the lives of other departments like marketing, finance, and the sales team. The entire revenue team can use this unified space to execute, align, track, and optimize their interaction with prospects. You can ensure a high level of transparency across the organization through these platforms. A SEP can monitor campaign progress, account status, and the report even at a higher level. It will help managers to focus on areas that need attention.
SEPs affect revenue in three ways.
Firstly, it elevates the sales team’s efficiency by automating menial tasks.
Secondly, it improves closing rates and creates more opportunities by enhancing quality and quantity.
Lastly, it uses data to boost engagement, collaboration, tracking, visibility, and reporting across all departments.
How to choose the best one?
Here are a few factors you may consider before adopting one.
- Fulfill all the needs
- Easy to use
- Effectiveness
- Time-saving
- Integrate with existing process
- Data security and risk involvement
- Easy to adopt
Final Words
If interaction with every customer and prospect is your organization’s priority, your team will benefit from a solid sales engagement platform. Check all the above mentioned points before you go for it.
