Technology has touched nearly every aspect of modern business, and sales are no exception. Whereas before, sales reps had to manually choose which leads to follow, schedule their follow-ups, dial their phones and log information – a process as inefficient as it was non-systematized – technology has gifted sales teams a better solution.
It’s called a sales engagement platform, and it’s an easy-to-integrate, easy-to-use software that helps your reps engage and qualify leads with greater efficiency. If your sales team is just operating with a simple SaaS CRM, you only have part of the equation: you need a way to put your CRM’s info into action and push those leads through the pipeline.
Still unsure? Here are three, massive, undeniable benefits of deploying a sales engagement platform.
Enjoy a Boost in Productivity
A sales engagement platform automates reps’ workflow and therefore, increases productivity. You can check out Vanillasoft.com for the stats (for instance, they measured a 94% increase in productivity when using their sales engagement platform) or read client testimonials – either way, the proof is pretty apparent.
How an engagement platform does this is, basically, by removing as much keyboard activity as possible. The auto-dialing and auto-email-population functions of a sales engagement platform save reps a lot of time, as does the queue-based lead routing (more on that below). It allows sales development reps to touch more leads, more often, qualifying more leads for your AEs to close.
Don’t Let Leads Slip Through the Cracks
Without a sales engagement platform, an SDR has to hunt their CRM for their next lead. Inordinately, they will choose the biggest lead in terms of size, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best lead – they overlook the mom-and-pop business hiding in plain sight in the CRM, who just expressed interest in the product, for instance.
A sales engagement platform takes the guesswork out of lead prioritization. With queue-based lead routing it constantly pushes the next best lead up to the top of your SDRs’ lists, meaning that the moment they’re done contacting the last lead, they are onto the next best one. It also means that “speed to lead” is optimized – that is, the time it takes SDRs to make the first contact, a metric that is of crucial importance to successful engagement.
Develop & Automate an Effective Sales Cadence
If you’re unfamiliar, sales cadence is a term used to describe the choreography of touch points a salesperson makes to engage a lead. Together, the number of touches, the type of touch (email, phone, voicemail, SMS, etc.) and the timeline of the touches create a cadence.
Without a sales engagement platform, that cadence can be all over the place, totally at the mercy of an SDRs whims. With one, however, you can automate the cadence, and ensure that each prospect receives the right amount and type of touches, over the right amount of time.
If your sales team isn’t already making use of a sales engagement platform, maybe it’s time to try one out. It’s not simply about modernizing for the sake of modernizing – it’s about better productivity, more qualified leads and an automated sales cadence.
