Sales Engagement solutions are quickly becoming the way sales teams manage their sales process to close more sales, generate more revenue, and improve customer relationships. While they aren’t replacing CRMs, many SDRs now operate out of Sales Engagement platforms as their primary System of Engagement. This vendor-neutral session discusses the benefits and value proposition of Sales Engagement Platforms, along with tips on evaluating and implementing these platforms.
2. Lynne Trocciola
• Analyst and coach
• Former Product Director in the B2B technology
space having overseen development of Call Center
and Human Capital Management products.
• Her expertise is in how software can drive
productivity, engagement, and behavioral change.
• MBA in Organizational Behavior (University of
Maryland) and an M.S. in Organizational Change
(Northwestern University).
Her mantra is “Do what you love. Love what you do.”
4. What do sales
engagement
platforms do?
• Streamline the sales process while reducing
administrative and account prep work
• Manage and refine sales messaging
• Automate tasks, messages, and workflows
• Enable companies to combine their sales and
marketing efforts to create personalized and
automated sales journeys
• Integrate with existing sales solutions
• CRM, email tracking, outbound dialing, sales
intelligence, sales enablement software, etc.
5. Sales
Organization
Challenges
• Sales process repeatability
• Consistent messaging
• Coaching
• Leveraging best practices
• Sales versus non-sales tasks
• Maintaining authenticity
• Customer renewals
• Increase in top-of-funnel sales activity
• Response rates
• Increase in sales qualified leads
6. How do these solutions
manage your key sales
challenges?
16. Purchasing Considerations
• Capabilities required
• IT: Scalability, Security
• How will the role of your
sales group change?
• Users
• SDRs
• Enterprise Sales
• Customer Success
• Strategic use of AI
22. Others to
Consider
Video Recorded and 1:1
Sales
Intelligence
Sales Leads
Talking Points
Lead Scoring
Lead Routing
Emerging
Chatbots
Meeting Intelligence
24. Future Trends
Just because the capability is there,
doesn’t mean you should use it
Evolving from SDR to other customer-
facing employees
(e.g. Customer Success, Account
Executives)
Components leveraged for internal
activities
(e.g. meeting management, training)
25. Buyer Profiles
GZ Consulting partnered with
Tenbound to deliver a set of
Sales Engagement Buyer
Profiles:
• SalesLoft (Available)
• VanillaSoft (Next Week)
• Freshworks (September)
• SFDC High Velocity Sales (Q4)
• Outreach (Q4)
Streamline the sales process while reducing administrative and account prep work
Manage and refine sales messaging
Automate tasks, messages, and workflows
Enable companies to combine their sales and marketing efforts to create personalized and automated sales journeys
Integrate with existing sales solutions
CRM, email tracking, outbound dialing, sales intelligence, sales enablement software, etc.
The heart and soul of SEP are cadences. Cadences are rules that drive who should be contacted, when they should be contacted, and by what method. These rules are fully automated and you can have different cadences for different products, verticals, account types or even stage of the sales cycle.
The goal of a cadence is to get the attention of the account.
Cadences also include what we call templates which are preconfigured messges that can be used in say an email. The templates again can vary based on product or vertical for example.
Playbook..once you hae their attention, what do you do. A playbook outlines strategies and even templates for driving the lead through the sales process.
SEP also enable consistent messaging whether you are communicating through email, voice, other media. Marketing can define templates that sales can use, which are in line with the market positioning and value proposition.
Although there are templates, there is even automated personalization that can bedone. For example, through the use of snippets.
Snippets: blocks of text or rich text that you can quickly insert into an email. For example, a snippet around a regional event.
It could be something that is verticalized...snippets that speak to specific verticals or functions
Allows you to quickly personalize.
The general recommendation is that 80% of messages to prospect should be based on the templates and sales should personalize 20% or less of the messages to be in sync with their general personality and tone.
SEP also support real time coaching. Supervisors, mentors, or trainers can listen in on sales calls. They can just monitor and coaching after the fact or they could communicate directly with the sales person to help him or her with the meeting. If needed, they can also be part of the call.
There are also lots of meeting tools available. For example, meetings can be fully transcriped and the transcription could be indexed. For example, indexe to identify the key pain points or when the client brings up competition.
Best practices can be crowdsourced so there is what I call collaborative learning available. This can be through the system or available when one person is being coached.
The Opportunity View consolidates open opportunities into a single pane of glass. Reps can quickly update their pipeline before meeting with their sales manager. The two of them can then quickly review open opportunities for account planning and strategy.
Sales Engagement Platforms are really all about leveraging and automating best practices so SDRs can focus on building relationships with prospects.
Even part of the process including onboarding an be fully automated. For example, onboarding cadences can be built to train sales reps including the ability to interact with each other as part of the cadence.
The solutions also support the ability to have data driven decisions. For example, cadences can be tested to determine their effectiveness. Detailed analytics are available for each part of the process, enabling organizations to iterate and adjust as needed.
Many of the capabilieis apply well outside of the sales process.
For example, meeting management and the recordinga nd transcription of meetings. These can be leveraged internally or even further down the customer lifecycle including as part of account management.
Being able to prioritize tasks based on business rules.
AI is available in several ways. This includes transcripting, indexing, and analyzing calls; providing coaching advice to sales reps; and prioritization.
SalesLoft and Outreach have well developed partner app directories. Other vendors do not offer ecosystems but support partner integrations.