Sales are often the driving force behind a business's success, so finding ways to improve this process can significantly benefit your company. A part of this means looking at ways to boost your sales engagement.
We're diving into what sales engagement is, what it can do for your business, and strategies for improvement.
Understanding the Importance of Sales Engagement
Sales engagement refers to the interactions and relationships between your sales team and your customers. It covers a customer's life span, from creating a relationship with potential clients, keeping those relationships alive during the sales process, and ultimately converting people to customers.
The phases of sales engagement include:
- Prospecting: This stage includes gathering lists of potential customers so the sales team has a list of prospects to reach out to in later stages.
- Qualifying leads: Once you have a list of prospects, it is time to separate your qualified leads. These are people who fit the profile of your target audience and thus have a higher chance of converting.
- Connecting: Your sales team will then contact these customers to give them more information about your product or service and determine whether they would be interested.
- Fostering relationships: The final part of sales engagement is managing customer relationships, whatever they may look like. Relationship management could mean contacting people who were about to become clients and then backing out and ensuring that your current customers are satisfied and remain loyal.
The better your engagement process, the more likely you are to convert customers. In that way, sales engagement has a direct impact on your revenue.
Best Practices for Effective Sales Engagement
Explore some practices that you can implement to manage your sales engagement model effectively and potentially boost revenue below.
Create a Strategy
The first step should be to develop a sales engagement plan. Determine your goals, establish clear steps and protocols, and train everyone on your team so they know their role in achieving those objectives.
Also, create an ongoing strategy to follow when customers navigate the different phases of sales engagement. This process is a starting point — you can always adjust once you have more insight into what works.
Collaborate With Other Teams
Your sales department needs to work alongside and get support from your business's other teams. Ensuring everyone is on the same page helps your engagement strategies work more effectively.
For instance, sales and marketing go hand in hand. Start by creating marketing content for social media or email campaigns that you can use to target your qualified leads. Or, consult with the financial department to get a clearer idea of your budget if you're investing in technology.
Integrate Multiple Channels
Your customers likely use multiple platforms to find a potential business to support. If you're only targeting your clients via one channel, you could be missing out on a valuable part of your audience.
Technology allows people to choose between various communication strategies, and you should leverage this by using multiple channels in your sales engagement for all steps of your sales process. For example, you can:
- Use both social media and website traffic for prospecting.
- Reach out to customers via emails, calls, or social media messages.
- Manage these relationships through multiple communication platforms like your website or social media.
Since 73% of businesses plan to use or already use AI chatbots, you can easily communicate with customers via multiple platforms without taking up much time.
Prioritize Great Customer Experiences
One of the most effective ways to boost sales engagement is to show them that you value them. Almost 90% of marketers see an improved return on investment when they personalize their campaigns to their customers. A customized message showing your clients you understand them will likely be more enticing and engaging than a generic message you can send to anyone.
Personalizing a customer experience can be as simple as adding their name to your message. However, the further you get into the sales engagement process, the better it is to spend more time researching your customers and understanding what they need and how you can offer that to them. At this point, it can be helpful to have multiple messages and strategies for different segments of your audience, allowing for a more tailored experience.
Tools and Technologies for Sales Engagement
Finding tools to improve your existing sales engagement strategies is key to drastically boosting your revenue. Using a dedicated platform to enhance your business's efforts is among the best options.
Here are some of the benefits of a better sales engagement strategy:
- More data: Sales engagement platforms collect data about customer interactions so that you can identify patterns and predict what does and doesn't work. You can then use this information to refine your process.
- Increased efficiency: Sales platforms can automate specific tasks, allowing your team more time to focus on the heavy lifting by interacting with customers rather than spending their whole workday on repetitive, administrative jobs.
- Personalized customer experience: Many sales platforms now use artificial intelligence (AI) to collect customer data and tailor messaging to each client.
- Better sales processes: Overall, sales engagement platforms help you identify gaps in your approach and find ways to improve the areas that are lacking.
Key Components of Sales Engagement Tools
If you're considering using a platform to boost your sales engagement, pick one that best suits your needs. However, you need to look out for a few essential components:
- AI integration: In today's modern world, leveraging advanced technologies is crucial for maintaining a competitive advantage, especially in crowded markets. One of the most significant advantages of using a sales platform is that it often has its own AI integrations, giving you access to the latest machine learning. With 27% of Americans interacting with AI daily, utilizing these technologies can be highly beneficial.
- Automated processes: Since an effective way of improving your engagement is to automate processes, finding a platform that offers sales automation can help increase efficiency and boost your conversion and revenue.
- Integrated workflows: Finally, look for a tool with integrated workflows to ensure that your sales team reaches maximum productivity.
Contact Clari for Effective Sales Solutions
Clari is an all-in-one solution for businesses wanting to improve their sales capacity and functionality. Our products are up and running within 30 days so that you can see revenue changes quickly.
Our sales solutions — including our complete sales engagement platform, Groove by Clari — can make your business's process much easier and allow you to engage customers from the first step until they convert effectively. If you are ready to learn more, take a product tour or request a demo today.
