A typical day of a sales rep consists of several interactions with prospective clients, resulting in a sales conversation. Each customer engagement is essential in determining a buyer's journey and building a lifelong relationship of trust and loyalty. All these customer interactions are termed sales engagement. According to a Forbes article, a study done by Aragon Research showed that the sales engagement industry is expected to grow up to 5 million dollars by this year.

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All these facts state that sales engagement platforms can be a great ally in redefining your organic traffic and drive more sales. So, let's try to know every bit and bits of how you can make that possible! 

But, What is Sales Engagement?

Sales engagement is interacting with potential customers to build relationships and ultimately close a sale. It typically involves using various communication channels, such as phone, email, and social media, to engage with prospects and move them through the sales pipeline. Sales engagement aims to establish a connection with the customer, understand their needs and interests, and provide them with relevant information and value that helps them make a buying decision.

What are Sales Engagement Tools and Why do we Need Them? 

Sales engagement tools are software solutions designed to help sales teams automate, streamline and optimize their sales engagement activities. Some standard sales engagement tools include:

✅Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: CRM tools help sales teams manage customer interactions, track customer data and behavior, and monitor the sales pipeline. They typically include contact management, deal tracking, task management, and reporting.

✅Sales Enablement Software: Sales enablement tools provide sales reps with the resources and information they need to engage effectively with prospects and customers. This can include content management tools, sales training materials, and analytics to track the effectiveness of different sales resources.

✅Sales Prospecting and Lead Generation Tools: These tools help sales teams identify and generate leads, build targeted lists of prospects, and automate outreach efforts. They can include web scraping, email scraping, and social media prospecting tools.

✅Sales Automation Tools: These tools automate repetitive, administrative tasks such as email outreach, follow-up, and lead nurturing, freeing up sales reps to focus on more strategic tasks such as building relationships and closing deals. This can include tools for automated email campaigns, lead scoring, and scheduling.

✅Email marketing tools: These tools allow sales reps to send targeted and personalized email campaigns to prospects and customers, helping to build relationships and drive engagement. They can include features such as email templates, A/B testing, and analytics.

✅Sales Intelligence and Analytics Tools: Sales intelligence tools provide insights into customer behavior, allowing sales teams to identify trends, measure performance, and optimize their sales processes. This can include tools for tracking website analytics, lead scoring, and sales forecasting.

✅Communication and Collaboration Tools: Communication and collaboration tools allow sales reps to communicate and collaborate with prospects and customers in real time, using a variety of channels such as chat, phone, and video. This can include tools for video conferencing, chatbots, and phone systems.

✅Social Selling Tools: These tools help sales teams leverage social media to engage with prospects and customers, build relationships, and drive sales. This can include tools for social media monitoring, social media advertising, and social media prospecting.

How to Choose the Best Sales Engagement Platform?

Now that you have known about the various sales engagement tools, it’s now necessary to choose one amongst so many options. People usually get confused while making such decisions and later end up making bad decisions. Therefore, we are here to help you specifically with that. Typically, a good sales interaction platform should have the following key features:

1. Ease of use: The platform should be user-friendly, with a simple and intuitive interface that makes it easy for sales reps to navigate and perform their tasks.

2. Customizability: The platform should be customizable, allowing sales teams to tailor it to their specific needs and workflows.

3. Integration: The platform should integrate with other tools and software commonly used by sales teams, such as CRMs, marketing automation software, and sales analytics tools.

4. Automation: The platform should have automation capabilities, allowing sales reps to automate repetitive tasks such as email outreach, follow-up, and lead nurturing.

5. Collaboration: The platform should support collaboration and communication between sales reps, as well as between sales reps and other teams, such as marketing and customer support.

6. Analytics and Reporting: The platform should provide detailed analytics and reporting capabilities, allowing sales reps to track their performance, measure the effectiveness of their interactions, and optimize their sales processes.

7. Security and Privacy: The platform should prioritize security and privacy, protecting customer data and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations.

8. Mobile Compatibility: The platform should be compatible with mobile devices, allowing sales reps to access it on the go and stay connected with prospects and customers while they are out of the office.

By having these features, a sales interaction platform can help sales teams streamline their processes, increase their productivity, and ultimately close more deals.

What are the Benefits of Sales Engagement Platforms?

Without knowing the benefit of a specific tool, it becomes very difficult to know which one is best. Indeed, sales engagement platforms core role is to bring more sales but its not confined. A sales interaction platform can provide numerous benefits for sales teams, including:

1. Improved Efficiency: A sales interaction platform can automate many repetitive tasks, such as lead tracking and follow-up, allowing sales reps to focus on more strategic activities.

2. Increased Productivity: With all customer information and sales data in one place, sales reps can spend less time searching for information and more time selling.

3. Enhanced Collaboration: Sales interaction platforms can facilitate collaboration and communication between sales reps, as well as between sales reps and other teams, such as marketing and customer support.

4. Better Customer Experience: By accessing detailed customer information and insights, sales reps can personalize their interactions, building stronger relationships and improving the overall customer experience.

5. Greater Insight: Sales interaction platforms can provide detailed analytics and reporting, allowing sales reps to track their performance and identify areas for improvement.

6. Improved Sales Forecasting: With data on lead conversion rates, deal stages, and revenue projections, sales teams can better forecast their sales performance and make more informed decisions.

7. Increased Revenue: By providing sales reps with the tools and resources to engage effectively with prospects and customers, sales interaction platforms can help drive more revenue and improve sales performance.

The Top 5 Sales Engagement You Need to Check Out 

Now that we have discussed the importance and as well as the features of sales engagement platforms, let's have a look at some top notch SEPs available in the market right now. All these tools help your salespeople executive customer interactions that turn leads into customers.

1. Smartlead

If you're looking for a sales engagement platform to help you with email tracking and ensure that your emails always reach their target audience, Smartlead is the right fit. It allows you to connect all your email accounts and auto-rotate all your messages in just one click. Its high-delivery IP service ensures that your emails always land in your lead's primary inbox.

Not only that, but you can also use the platform to automate follow-ups. You can set up custom conditional email sending triggers to create sequences that feel natural and not artificial intelligence generated. It allows you to manage all your emails in one place, which helps in ensuring that you never miss a lead. Its centralized master inbox gives you complete access. 99% of the warm-up emails generated using smartlead landed in the inbox. 

Without compromising on your reputation or the daily limit, smartlead keeps deliverability high through natural email activity and intelligent replies. Smartlead will automatically move your emails from your lead's spam folder to their inbox and mark them as important.

Benefits:

• Connect all your email accounts
• Auto-rotate the messages in 1 click
• Land in your leads primary inbox using high delivery IP servers
• Custom conditional email sending triggers
• Manage all your emails in 1 place without complex email routing

2. Clearbit

‍Clearbit is an affordable all-from-one powerful, flexible go-to-market platform focusing explicitly on b2b businesses. Its unique prospector tool will give you access to over 200 million contacts the platform searches for ideal prospects on its own according to the parameters set by its users. The data the platform provides is updated every 13 days, ensuring that you stay updated with the market trends. It also adds new data directly to your CRM database reducing your workload. You can also keep track of whoever visits your website, and this data is used to generate leads partially. Not only that, but a clear bit also scores these leads and then assigns them to the appropriate sales Rep. 

So, if you're looking for sales Engagement platforms that will help you with lead capture, performance matrix, email marketing, proposal generation, campaign management, and more you should check out Clairebit.

Benefits:

• Focused funnel activity
• Weekly visitor report
• TAM calculator
• Codility

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the most helpful sales engagement platforms out there. It's prevalent among the biggest companies in the world because of its cool features, likely generation, marketing automation, and analytics. The platform also helps its users schedule meetings, make payments, and set up an advanced CPRM. 

It is a CRM platform consisting of all the software, integrations, and resources a business needs. It connects the various departments of a company, like marketing, sales, content management, and customer service, through different tools. It is an amalgamation of powerful tools that seamlessly automate sales.

Benefits:

• Reporting dashboard
• Company insights
• Deal tracking
• Pipeline management 

4. Mailshake

Mailshake is a sales engagement software trusted and used by almost 50 thousand companies. The blueprint, click up, font rocket, sleek note, get on board adjust some of these companies. If you want your message to be seen by prospects, then milkshake is your sales engagement platform. 

It will help you generate surface quality leads with the help of its lead catcher feature, which shows you you are the most engaged leads so that you can focus and prioritize such leads. The platform also provides pipeline-focused analytics, which helps manage the team's performance. 

Its multi-channel outreach feature helps automate personalized campaigns across phone, email, and social media.

You can also send messages automatically on LinkedIn with its LinkedIn automation feature. If you want to send personalized gold emails at a large scale, engage with prospects through different channels, and manage everything from one dashboard, then mailshake will help you.

Benefits:

• Surface quality leads
• LinkedIn automation
• Pipeline focused automation
• Multi channel outreach

5. Pipeline

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The Pipeline is one of the most easy-to-use and functional sales engagement platforms created by salespeople keeping in mind the needs and requirements of salespeople. Automating Your sales process helps your sales team focus on their most valuable tasks. With its email campaigns and tracking feature, you can track all your email messages, opens, clicks, and downloads from your account. 

You can use the platform across different channels and platforms like email providers, marketing, and sales software. It also allows you to understand past trends, which can help you make the correct sales forecasts. You can also use the platform to track commissions, which will help reduce costs and increase transparency for remote sales teams. The best feature of the platform is its unlimited file storage. 

The sales team will get access to unlimited data storage without any data caps. All your documents, images, and communication records can be stored in the same place without any additional charges

Benefits:

• Email performance tracking
• Easy integration
• Free trial for 15 days
• Unlimited storage  

Final Thoughts

A sales engagement software can totally transform your sales activity and sales strategy. If you want to save the precious time of your sales managers and their revenue teams to help them convert more leads into customers, try out the different sales tools of sales engagement platforms. Also, we hope now it's quite easier for you to pick you kind of sales engagement tool that will drive more sales to your business. 

Smartlead, get your email delivered and bring sales 

Make me an outreach pro

Ensure your emails always reach your lead's inbox by using unlimited sender accounts leveraging AI personalization, and implementing email warm-ups.This way, you can concentrate on sealing the deal without worrying about email delivery issues.

Here's how to do it

‍1Sign-up for Smartlead.ai

‍2Upload your lead list.

‍3Start sending emails

P.s. You can also use our pre-built templates available in the app.

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