Sales organizations are continually looking for ways to boost revenue and sales efficiency, but investing in one area often leaves less budget for the other. When it comes to efficiency for both sales and the bottom line, one essential technology should be part of any effort: the sales engagement platform.
A critical part of any sales tech stack, sales engagement platforms are designed to boost sales efficiency and generate more revenue at the same time.
The technology has become commonplace for sales teams in the technology sector, but they are still gaining traction in more traditional industries like financial services, advertising/marketing, healthcare, and higher education. As a result, many sales leaders are still figuring out how to maximize the effectiveness of this powerful platform to boost the productivity and effectiveness of their teams.
Whether you're fairly familiar with sales engagement platforms or are just learning about them, we recommend checking out the following tips and tricks for using them to boost rep productivity and overall sales efficiency.
Tips for enhancing sales efficiency with a sales engagement platform
If you want to empower your reps with sales engagement software, we recommend that you:
Set up auto-logging processes
One of the most convenience-oriented features of sales engagement platforms is the ability to auto-log emails, calls, or meeting information to a CRM like Salesforce.
Traditionally, sales reps have often had to manually log their interactions with customers and prospects. Whether it's inputting meeting information as soon as they conclude a productive call with a prospective consumer or logging a Linkedin Message, every minute spent on administrative tasks can ruin any momentum built up and disrupt workflow.
Fortunately, a sales engagement platform can make this issue a thing of the past by automatically logging each interaction. This automation saves time while also allowing your sales reps to remain focused on more important tasks, like building relationships with prospects and customers.
Automate follow-up tasks
Cutting-edge sales engagement platforms can also allow reps to automate tedious follow-up tasks. Your reps can build custom multi-step workflows that let them effortlessly send out follow-up emails to customers, transmit SMS messages, create tasks for colleagues, and much more. Automating routine follow-up tasks ensures that important activities don't fall through the cracks and gives reps more time for working the next opportunity.
Streamline CRM workflows
By facilitating improved collaboration, increasing the automation of redundant or time-consuming tasks, and giving your team access to dynamic tools, a sales engagement platform can streamline the unique and complex workflows followed by your sales and account teams.
For example, say a rep needs to advance a prospect to a different opportunity stage after holding a discovery meeting. Following the meeting, a sales engagement platform can enable the rep to update the opportunity directly from their calendar without having to log into Salesforce to make the change. By removing steps and saving reps time to do administrative tasks, they can spend more time on revenue-generating activities.
Decrease friction between sales and marketing
The best sales engagement platforms are designed to reduce friction between sales and marketing. Sales leaders can roll out marketing-approved templates, workflows, and sales plays to their teams to ensure consistent messaging and follow-through in every engagement. Marketing can also take advantage of activity tracking and reporting to understand how sales is following up with campaigns.
Ultimately, this facilitates better collaboration and leads to a more enjoyable purchasing journey for customers. When your sales and marketing staff are on the same page, everyone wins, including your business.
Train your staff
Your investment is a commitment to your business as much as your staff. Training your employees to utilize the platform to its maximum potential is essential. Make sure to connect with your vendor, as they can often provide guidance and training resources that will simplify the transition.
By taking the time to familiarize your reps with the capabilities of the sales engagement software, you can help them be more productive while shortening the learning curve.
Conversely, if you fail to train your team adequately, then employee buy-in and adoption will suffer. This oversight will mean that many of the productivity benefits and functionalities will be underutilized, thereby diminishing your ROI.
Use an online meeting scheduler
The online meeting scheduler is another tool found in most sales engagement platforms. This technology eliminates the seemingly endless back-and-forth that is typically required to set a meeting. Instead, your contact can choose the best time for them by simply clicking on a scheduling link that your team can send via email or any other digital channel.
The platform will automatically add this information to the sales rep's calendar when a prospective buyer selects a time and, of course, track the activity. This automation speeds up meeting setting and frees up your reps time to focus on closing deals.
Automate sales playbooks
Each sales rep has their own set of strategies and tactics for nurturing quality leads. Shouldn't your reps have the ability to create personalized and relevant workflows that suit their individual sales style? When you implement a modern sales engagement platform, they can.
Sales engagement platforms include powerful workflow management capabilities that allow sales teams to create playbooks for nurturing leads, responding to customer inquiries, and facilitating maximum prospect engagement. They can automate multi-channel ad campaign workflows that are designed to produce real results.
Leverage revenue intelligence software
Finally, you should be sure to leverage the revenue intelligence capabilities that come with top sales engagement platforms. This software provides unparalleled transparency between sales reps and department managers.
Your organizational leadership can seamlessly access vital performance data, review sales pipelines, and collaborate on account lists. In short, revenue intelligence capabilities enable you to review accurate real-time reporting to understand what's driving your business.
Groove: Increasing sales efficiency to drive results
While the tips above can certainly help you boost sales efficiency to generate more revenue, none of these strategies will be effective unless you have the right sales engagement platform in place. That's where we come in.
Groove's Salesforce-native sales engagement platform is unlike anything else on the market. Built for the needs of relationship-based sellers, Groove increases rep productivity, drives Salesforce adoption, and provides revenue leaders with key insights to know what's driving their business.
Interested in learning more? Request a demo.