Every salesperson understands how important sales engagement is. In any kind of selling that takes more than just one cold call to close a deal, sales engagement is what pushes prospects through the pipeline. But do you know everything that goes into sales engagement? Or even the ways to develop the best sales engagement strategy? We will touch on all this and help give your team the keys to closing more deals with sales engagement.
What is Sales Engagement?
Essentially, sales engagement is the interaction between the seller and a prospect throughout the sales cycle. Once leads are handed over to sales from the marketing team, it is a seller’s job to see this SQL through to completion. Of course, we hope completion is closing a deal. One way to help this become reality for more SQLs is through sales engagement.
Once handed over, the seller is then tasked with moving the prospect through the sales cycle. This includes everything from connecting with a prospect on LinkedIn to setting up meetings with them to provide a walk-through of your product or service.
Sales engagement is how a relationship with a prospect is built. Not only does the prospect get to know more about your product or service through this process, but they get to learn more about you as well. So, it is essential that your sales engagement plan reflects this by being the best it can be.
Why is Sales Engagement Important?
From what we just laid out; you probably have a good idea as to why sales engagement is important. If a team leader does not consciously think about sales engagement and develop a sound strategy for it, every seller would be trying to nurture leads differently. This, of course, can lead to problems with not closing enough deals, not being able to track the team’s or individuals’ success accurately and uniformly, and sellers letting opportunities slip through the cracks.
For example, without a good strategy, two sellers may take different approaches in leading a prospect through the sales cycle. The first seller may call their prospect every day and talk heavily about a certain feature on the product, regardless of the prospect’s wants or needs. The second seller may email their prospect every two weeks and try to build a personal connection. Which seller is going to be more successful? Where is each prospect in the sales cycle? How do we know which seller is more likely to close a deal?
A sound sales engagement strategy helps address all these questions and can help avoid many issues.
How Do You Develop a Sales Engagement Strategy?
Now that you know having a strategy is important and can help create some order amongst sellers on a team, here are our tips to developing a great sales engagement strategy.
Think About Your Audience
The first step to developing a strategy is knowing your audience. Yes, it is very cliche, but fully understanding your audience is such a crucial part in coming up with a plan. It is not enough to just know the typical user of your service is male and 65+ years old. You must know more.
Think about things such as what industries your audience works in, what job titles they hold, common pain points they share, and what mediums they prefer whether that be email, phone calls, or social media outreach. Once you fully understand these concepts, you will get a much better customer persona to target and from there you can better adapt your messaging and outreach, so it is tailored to those most likely to close a deal.
Create Engaging Messaging
The next step revolves around crafting the right messaging. Going off fully understanding your audience, the next natural step is to put this information into good use. Crafting messaging that is engaging to your target audience is often overlooked. It does not matter how many emails you send or posts you upload if your target audience does not bother to read it, and it must lead them to action.
By understanding your audience first then crafting your messaging around them, you will be better off when trying to reach prospects. If you can get a prospect hooked by just reading your content without a seller having to take the time to get them engaged, it helps draw them in even more.
Systemize a Plan
The next step is to do something with this content. Once you have all your messaging built out and your target audience in mind, you need a way to send the information out. If you know your audience responds well to email and need to be reminded often, you need a consistent way of sending these emails out.
This is where a sales engagement platform can come in handy. Platforms like these help with sales engagement as they can create organized and systematic plans to help sellers connect with prospects. A great example of this is Salesvue. Salesvue helps sales teams create these plans, or cadences, to ensure every seller is following the same path towards nurturing a lead.
Going back to the example before of two sellers going about trying to close a deal in two very different ways, Salesvue can help align their efforts. With Salesvue, both sellers would know to make a phone call on day one, follow-up with a pre-built email on day four, and then send another templated email on day seven that included a video explaining more. This is an example of a very simple cadence.
Now, you would be able to see where in the process each seller is. Or you could even see the success of each step in the process. If both sellers cannot ever get a prospect past the second email, then maybe that is a sign that this email needs to be tweaked.
Use Analytics to Improve Performance
This leads into the final key to a good sales engagement strategy. The importance of using meaningful analytics to help improve performance cannot be stated enough. With good sales engagement platforms, like Salesvue, you can get a picture into how successful a cadence is. If you notice something is not translating to closing more deals, then you can address this specific point in the cadence, rather than scrap the whole thing.
As previously mentioned, if the second email leads to much lower conversion rates, then marketing can help tweak the messaging to better align with your target audience. Maybe you notice that prospects do not answer phone calls as much if you call them three days in a row. All these points and many more can be highlighted through Salesvue.
What is a Customer Engagement Strategy?
After going through all this, it may seem obvious that sales engagement can help get more prospects through the sales cycle until they close a deal. However, it is also important to note how sales engagement can help with current customers as well. Customer engagement can sometimes be just as important as prospect engagement. If you have many recurring buyers, putting them in a cadence as you would a prospect can help keep them engaged with your company and connected to your sales team.
How This All Helps
Trying to navigate the sales cycle without keeping sales engagement in mind can only lead you down a bad path. Having a good sales engagement strategy is essential because not only can it help define who your prospects are, but it also helps bring them through the sales cycle as well. On top of this, it keeps them engaged once you close a deal to keep the possibility of more deals open in the future. There are plenty of platforms that help provide the tools to accomplish this, but we recommend Salesvue. So, check out the link below to find out how Salesvue can help you develop a plan to not only identify new customers, but close more deals with them too.
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