If you’ve read our other blogs, you know what a sales engagement platform is and why it’s a good investment for your company. You also know that you can use it with other important tools like CRMs, automated marketing and sales enablement platforms.
What you may not know is precisely HOW a sales engagement platform can be put to use in your company to get the best results – or how to get your reps to use it.
“Any technology is only as good as the users who adopt and buy-into the benefits of its functionality. It’s critical to involve your reps in the selection of your sales engagement platform, and don’t overlook the importance of change management.” – Delma Lara, Director of Marketing, Hyperio
In this article, you’ll learn:
a) The primary goal of a sales engagement platform
b) How a sales engagement platform will help your sales reps
c) How to motivate your sales reps to use a sales engagement platform
d) How you can strengthen your sales engagement today
The primary goals of a sales engagement platform
Sales engagement technology has several purposes. These platforms are built to help you make sales, by helping you target your audiences effectively, with minimal people-hours funneled into research and outreach. A good sales engagement platform will personalize and automate your messaging to customers so that your reps are free to dedicate their precious hours to higher-value tasks, like closing sales.
A sales engagement platform is also designed to store and measure the interactions between your customers and your sales reps so that your company can track success, evolve from mishaps, and make predictions about where to target your marketing and sales efforts for future projects.
The platform should be keeping track of things like:
a) The number of interactions between customers and your company
This is your measurement of the scale of your marketing efforts. How many people are you reaching with your campaigns? Are customers interested in your content?
b) The length of each interaction
This tells you HOW interested each customer is in the product. The longer they spend researching your product, the more qualified they are, and the more likely they are to later convert. Someone who glances for a few seconds at your product before moving on is probably not as interested, say, someone who spends a full minute or two reviewing your content to learn more about your product or company.
c) Where these interactions take place
These are your channels. Are your customers coming straight to your website or landing page? Are they reviewing your FAQs or customer reviews? Are they subscribing to newsletters and opening your marketing emails? Are they opening webinars or videos? Are they following you on social media? Do they click your links?
d) And what these interactions tell you about your target audience and the market need.
You should not only be noticing these things, but storing and measuring the data so that you can make decisions later on about what this tells you, where you can improve, what you’re doing well, and how you can personalize more messaging to meet people where they are.
It’s hard to be everywhere at once analyzing data from every channel at once – but it’s not impossible. Not if you have the right platform.
It’s not good enough to simply HAVE these touchpoints of engagement, you need to know if customers are actually engaging with them.
Sales engagement platforms analyze all this data (and more!) from every channel at once, which takes a huge load off your sales reps’ shoulders. By automating your workflow systems to handle these tasks for them, all from one conveniently centralized location that they can monitor, you’re going to see be able to improve.
A sales engagement platform is an asset to your tech stack to ensure you have one centralized UI for your sales reps to communicate with other reps, track up-to-date customer data, add and categorize leads and prospects, and flag real-time details.
What are UIs and tech stacks?
Just a quick shift into definition territory. UI stands for user interface.
A user interface is the visual interaction your customers have with your company’s internet presence. UIs are: the screens customer’s see when they log onto your site, the buttons they can click, icons they interact with, etc.
A tech stack – today’s latest buzzword in the sales world – refers to all of the technology that you have working on developing a single project or application.
To get sales, you need happy customers. The first step to that is to create a UI that is easy to engage with. It needs to be easy to find, easy to navigate, easy to buy from. If you can hit all three of these to ensure great sales engagement, then you’re going to see massive rewards in terms of conversions, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and your net income.
How will a sales engagement platform help my sales reps?
Customers love convenience – as do we all – which is why sales engagement platforms are designed with your sales reps in mind.
Instead of having sales reps move back and forth between different platforms to reach different prospects, your sales engagement platform is the hub of all data.
From one convenient interface your sales reps can:
- Come up with strategic plans based on market data
- Execute said plans through every channel (calls, social, email, text)
- Communicate with the rest of your team
- Keep tabs on major market trends
- Track and measure all data that comes each touch point of customer engagement
- Make predictions about future leads and buying commitment based on that data
Whether a lead is reaching out to your website to get pricing details, browsing previous customer product reviews, or opening a conversation with a chatbot to answer more specific questions, the tone of your website and landing page and AI-technology are already equipped with the data and “personality” you want to present with – thanks to your sales engagement platform.
It’s important to make sure your marketing and sales teams are on the same page so that your company presents a holistic image from brand design to check-out, because your customers like consistency as well as convenience.
The more touch points of engagement you can generate, the better it is for your sales because it means you’ve got more people ready at the door, waiting for the right pitch that will convince them to convert.
{Keep an eye out for our blog on quantity versus quality when it comes to lead generation, and how you can maximize the power of both!}
The only thing left for you to do is consider the best sales engagement platform for your company.
How to motivate your reps to use a sales engagement platform
The key to smooth tech adoption starts with good management. Hey, no pressure! You’ve got this.
A sales rep’s job is pretty busy, and they have to move pretty fast to be effective. Change of any kind is going to feel stressful, but you can mitigate that by anticipating hiccups, learning how to troubleshoot problems (or knowing who to call when they come up), and by being patient and ready to help.
Here are a few quick tips to consider before rolling out the new platform:
- Are you making major changes to workflow processes at a busy time?
Try to time big changes for slow months. You don’t want to put a new sales tech in place at your key buying times, like Black Friday or Christmas.
- Have you got senior level staff on board with the plan?
You’re going to need the bigwigs in your corner so that if things are missed here and there, there’s a communal sense of support and understanding. You’re all in this together, after all.
- Ask your team how they’re feeling about the changes.
Sometimes it helps just to discuss as a team the trials of change. Check-in with your team members and find out how they’re handling the adjustments – and how you can help make things easier for them!
For more tips specific to management during tech changes, check out this article!
Let’s get started on strengthening your sales engagement today
Hyperio identifies which targets to work with and when to target them with real-time event-based marketing intelligence. By looking at the behavior of each target, Hyperio determines where leads are in the sales journey, prioritizes when outreach should occur and identifies highly relevant and personalized messages to deliver to them based on current events and their behavior.
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