A Comprehensive Guide to Sales Engagement Software in 2021

People, technology, and experience have all transformed the way companies sell. Company sales have accelerated recently as a result of the pandemic. Company and sales, in particular, have become more digital as face-to-face meetings have been phased out in favour of digital media interference. As a result, taking advantage of technology and social media to obtain better and quicker results has become a priority for sales teams.

Sales engagement is the practice of engaging targets and customers through all platforms – emails, phone calls, and online chat, to name a few – during their purchase period. Sales involvement is a crucial practice that aids in the growth of sales and income, as well as the maintenance of consumer relationships and the conversion of prospects into customers. With sales engagement, software representatives can create customized communications across platforms, change engagement frequency/cadences, select content based on customer needs, track sales activities to optimize outreach, and more, all while assisting the buyer during the buying cycle.

Sales Engagement tools: Who are they for?

Sales representatives – Sales representatives primarily use interaction software to simplify workflows, reduce admin work, and personalize contact with all prospects in order to optimize selling time.

  • Marketing team – Marketing team relies heavily on messaging and consumer profiling, and communication tools help you do just that. Marketing departments use communication tools to ensure that the right message is sent to the right people at the right time.
  • Sales managers – Sales managers may use communication resources to get a deeper understanding of their sales activities, mentor reps based on their sales engagement activities (which customers to priorities, Listen to call recordings for improved communications, placement, and handling of objections etc.
  • Sales operation – Engagement tools integrate with CRM, allowing sales operations to have all of their data in one location and use it for analytics.

Artificial intelligence in sales engagement software

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad concept that encompasses a variety of technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, deep learning, and others. Both of these innovations, at their heart, are aimed at assisting machines in performing complex cognitive tasks on par with or better than humans.

  1. Uniqueness – In combination with the CRM, sales engagement tools provide a lot of data about customers. They know when messages were sent, when they were received, which ones were replied to, on which channel, and so on. All of this allows the AI to tailor the messaging and cadence to each customer’s priorities, challenges, desires, and needs, improving response rates even more.
  2. Reporting – Customer responses can be read by AI, which can then perform sentiment analysis to determine the customer’s intent. Positive intent responses, which typically require further information and request more interaction, and negative intent responses, which typically suggest the existence of a current solution, may be classified by AI. This allows reps to better prepare their engagement events without having to read through all of the emails, saving them time.
  3. Performance – AI can assist you with everything from controlling your schedule to arranging meetings to evaluating a sales team’s pipeline by either automating these tasks for you or making them significantly simpler by making decisions based on your previous user results. This use case is somewhat close to how some user calendar and productivity apps function, which automatically suggest recurring activities or to-dos thanks to AI.

4 major benefits of Sales Engagement Software

  • High productivity – The average sales representative spends just 36% of their time selling. The remainder of their day is spent on non-deal-closing activities such as arranging meetings, sending emails, and upgrading CRM software. These activities are required, but they are time-consuming and divert attention away from more significant, revenue-generating work. Sales representatives are using ales engagement tools to automate lead contact and make the most of their limited selling time.
  • High Success Rates – Increased efficiency and access to more data would ultimately boost the sales team’s success rates. Your emails would have more effect if you optimize them and automate them to submit at particular times.

Because of these realities, on an average 90% of sales executives intend to invest in sales engagement tools to help their teams communicate with more consumers and close more deals.

  • Additional information – The lifeblood of modern business is data. It is incredibly difficult to sell at volume without knowing the customers and their tastes. Sales engagement software provides sales reps with the information they need to close further deals. Sellers can easily decide which of their leads is most important (in a business sense) and concentrate their attention on them by monitoring engagement metrics like email opens and clicks. Furthermore, the data can be analyzed in order to improve sales strategies in the future.
  • Establishes marketing compatibility – A key component of the enablement method is making the best use of supporting material during the sales process. When sales reps can provide prospects and leads with the right materials at the right time, they are more competitive. As a result, a major aspect of sales enablement is improving the partnership and coordination between sales and marketing, which has several branching benefits of its own.

To assess what works and what doesn’t in sales enablement programmes, sales leaders must be able to identify connections between enablement programmes and business results. MindTickle integrates with a variety of business intelligence (BI) tools, including Tableau, PowerBI, and Excel, to provide data on sales teams’ commitment, expertise, and ability proficiency. Many companies have had to postpone conventional in-person sales activities like QBRs and SKOs because too many sales teams are now operating remotely. The sales communication tools from MindTickle are perfect for hosting virtual and online sales events so that businesses can keep driving ROI. Real-time announcements and gamification, as well as follow-up content for ongoing learning and retention, keep sales professionals involved during every sales case.  One feature that all of the most effective and committed sales teams have in common is MindTickle’s Sales Readiness portal.