Best Practices To Implement A Sales Engagement Platform

What Is Sales Engagement?

Sales engagement, in simple terms, is the interaction between a company’s sales team and its customers and prospects. It involves communicating through phone calls, emails, organizing meetings, etc., to increase sales and retain customers.

Manually planning and tracking data, rescheduling, and making calls are time-consuming and less effective when handling many clients. Therefore, it would be more effective to automate these tasks to increase revenue. This is where the sales engagement platform comes in.

Why Use A Sales Engagement Platform?

A Sales Engagement Platform is a technology solution that helps businesses manage and optimize their sales processes. It provides tools for engaging buyers, tracking interactions, and reporting progress. Essentially, it helps companies keep track of what’s happening with potential and current clients, ensuring they are constantly moving closer to a sale.

To simplify, it helps to communicate better and streamlines the information and tasks from different platforms into one single platform. There are many reasons why every company should implement a SEP into their sales process. You can learn more about its benefits by reading this article:

The Top 5 Benefits of Sales Engagement Platforms.

Guidelines To Implement Sales Engagement Platforms

The Sales Engagement platform is the key to success for 92% of sales development organizations, says TOPO Sales Development Technology Benchmark report.[source]

Before implementing a SEP in an organization, there are multiple things to consider. It is better to have the checklist below done or ask yourself these questions before implementing it:

How well does it fit the sales team in your organization?
How does it impact the lead management process for incoming and outgoing leads?
How many teams in your organization can it support?
Does this align with your current organizational strategy?
What tools do the platforms offer for the effectiveness of your organization?
How much time is saved using these tools, and how can it be measured?
Is it flexible enough to support the needs of your organization?
Is it easy to learn and handle by the employees in your organization?
The list doesn’t stop here. There are much more functionalities to consider to increase the efficiency of your organization by implementing SEP, and they are:

Automation tools

Before making a decision, ask the provider about their automation capabilities. A platform that doesn’t offer robust automation will struggle to keep up with today’s fast-paced sales environment.

Therefore, you should choose a sales engagement platform that combines automation features such as automated messaging flows, email sync, advanced activity capture, auto-dial and call log syncing, and an online scheduler.

Performing outside sales team

For it to be truly effective, a sales engagement platform must be flexible enough to support a variety of use cases beyond just sales pipeline management.

It means evaluating the platform for its ability to support everyday use cases across the revenue team – from SDRs, AEs, and full-cycle sellers to Account Management, Customer Service, Marketing, and Finance. Only then can you be sure you’re getting the most out of your investment.

Make sure that this platform helps the sales team but also the entire revenue of the organization by managing workflow using real-time data from CRM, organizing all workflows, maintaining activity logs, and so on. A feature of collaborating an account list with high-quality leads and closing more deals adds more spice too.

Native integration

Native integration is a vital feature to be considered while implementing SEP, as it is the one that reduces the sync errors and increases the advanced opportunities of automation tools, and makes it easy to manage.

In addition, it allows accessing CRM data in Gmail so that you can view, update, and create a new CRM directly from the inbox. Lastly, an accurate report on CRM for forecasting is another essential feature to be checked.

Related: Sales Engagement Platform: Top Tips On Using It

A Strong Platform should eliminate miscommunications and ensure every team is in sync under one single platform in an organization. However, before implementing a solution, make sure it fits the existing way your sales team works to ensure that it can help to increase your revenue and achieve your goals.