The Significance of Strategic Sales Engagement
This article was first published in November 2020 and has been updated to ensure its accuracy and completeness. Making true connections with potential customers is key for any company to grow their customer base or keep people coming back. The problem is, more often than not, the environment in which we try to sell is overcrowded.
Without a compelling way to differentiate ourselves, businesses need effective sales engagement strategies. This comprehensive guide will help you to understand the most critical elements of a sales engagement strategy: the definition of sales engagement and its importance, the difference between sales engagement and sales enablement, what prospect engagement means, what exactly a sales engagement platform is, and different techniques on how to drive sales faster through sales engagement.
Understanding Sales Engagement
Sales engagement is that interaction that goes on between a salesperson and a prospect through the whole cycle of selling. This usually happens over the phone, email, or even social media, hence creating potential for businesses to execute scalable, multi-channel sales engagement strategies that drive revenue growth.
The data could be structured in a way that guides a sales manager to provide a prescriptive framework for salespeople, to guide them on who to reach out to at what time and in what manner. A structured approach gets buyers the right information at the proper time in their journey-so deals keep moving.
Various forms of this include emails, calls, or social media posts. A dedicated sales engagement platform may be adopted to help relieve some pressure from the team with this increased focus.
The Importance of Sales Engagement
Fundamentally, sales engagement is about building valuable relationships with prospects and current clients. It does not involve merely executing transactions but switches over toward the focus on relationship creation. Such customer engagement helps the sales team understand customer needs, preferences, and the challenges they may be encountering.
This will further equip sales professionals to modulate their methodologies in such a manner that the solutions brought forth touch a chord with the clients personally. Conversions can be affected and even contribute to customer retention and loyalty with effective sales engagement administered.
Companies that effectively engage customers perform 23% better than their competitors, have 63% lower customer loss, and achieve a 55% higher wallet share. Moreover, when utilized properly, sales engagement is capable of accelerating the process of onboarding and training sales teams through the discovery of the best sequences for the target audience.
Overview: Sales Engagement v. Sales Enablement
While these may seem like terms that are one and the same, sales engagement and sales enablement point from the opposite sides of productivity. Sales engagement is efficiency-oriented, and most strategies look to increase levels of output from a rep by employing a systematic approach to buyer engagement.
Sales enablement, though, is all about effectiveness. It equips teams with knowledge of what they should know, say, show, and do to make every interaction count. They are powerful tools that, when combined together, can provide you the ability to scale all your sales processes.
Overview of Prospect Engagement
Prospecting engagement is a part of the broader sales engagement process that first discovers the early interaction with the buyer’s journey. Salespeople are supposed to work harder at securing and maintaining prospect’s attention. This can be achieved by formalizing best strategies of engaging buyers formed from past applications and testaments. The best kind of prospect engagement is supposed to be tailored according to the buyer’s requirement and more in line with nature of industry sector.
Application of Sales Engagement Platform
A sales engagement platform is such a critical element of your engagement strategy. It scales up your approach to prospect engagement by guiding representative activities across the customer journey. Sales engagement tools can be rolled out quickly to map a journey for effective engagement across multiple channels, like email, direct mail, phone, and social. Moreover, a well-developed platform allows such activities to be proven effective in order for businesses to make decisions about the overall sales strategy based on data.
Sales Engagement: The Igniter for Sales Processes
The hardening of sales through effective engagement of the sales function blends many strategies and tactics. The most working tactics include personalization, multi-channel engagement, leveraging sales enablement and sales playbooks, using automation tools, solid content strategy, and acting upon insights from data analysis. An effectively run sales engagement campaign provides a guided process in enabling salespersons to walk through their sales processes, finally leading to an increase in sales.
Best Practices to Effectively Engage with Prospects
An effective sales engagement strategy is the one that encompasses alignment with your marketing effort, important technology investments, personalization of approach, striving always for optimization, and the introduction of creative engagement approaches. In truth, all this aims to leave no stone unturned in driving impactful engagements with prospects.
Closing Thoughts
These are core to what every business and seasoned salesperson must have in their professional toolbox. They are essential to establishing and maintaining relationships with potential and existing customers, ensuring that transactions close and businesses come back for more. This becomes very easy and achievable with the use of relevant technology like Flow’s Commission Tracking Software. Ways and means of optimization of your approach to engagement, review, and method-after-method adjustment automatically come to the table. Balancing how much you customize your services and approaches with data-driven decisions could also make all the difference to your bottom line.
