As a salesperson, every interaction and exchange you have with a prospect or customer matters. These interactions — also called sales engagements — impact the buyer’s journey, conversions, loyalty, and your bottom line.
In this post, we’ll explore the importance of high-quality sales engagement. We’ll also share 10 tools that can help you manage these interactions.
HubSpot's Sales Hub is a powerful sales CRM — it includes best-in-class sales analytics, sales engagement, and configure-price-quote (CPQ) tools.
The tool is built for any sales team — whether you have 2 or 500 reps. This sales CRM grows and scales with you, especially since there are four editions of the software with a variety of capabilities (Sales Hub Free, Sales Hub Starter, Sales Hub Professional, and Sales Hub Enterprise).
Sales Hub is unique because it combats the issue of friction which is a natural result of growth. Sales Hub will resolves this problem by:
Mailshake is a sales engagement and automation software. It’s meant specifically for sales and marketing cold email outreach.
With Mailshake, you can send personalized emails at scale, engage prospects over the phone, or reach customers on social media. Plus this platform gathers all information into a single sales cadence and dashboard.
The tool also has various third-party and native integrations, such as HubSpot. This allows you to easily connect to your CRM, contact database, and other email marketing tools.
What we like: With the platform’s automated email campaigns, sales teams can personalize the content and cadence of each message. Personalization makes for a more meaningful conversation with customers.
If your team is looking to create videos and video workflows, consider using Hippo Video. Hippo Video is a platform for video personalization and distribution.
Use the platform to assist with tailored video creation for your account-based selling strategy. Additionally, your videos are a great way to offer support and product education for customers after your sales team finalizes the deal. You can also integrate Hippo Video with HubSpotto send video emails to your prospects seamlessly.
What we like: Hippo Video makes content creation easy. Many teams find that anyone can record and edit a video with just a little training. On top of the easy interface, Hippo Video also has a wonderful customer service team available to answer questions.
Clearbit focuses on B2B lead enrichment, qualification, and scoring. The tool uses data to help reps identify qualified prospects and discover where they can find more prospects like them. Clearbit then lets reps know when they should reach out to those prospects based on real-time alerts. These alerts may occur when a target account visits your website and searches for products.
Additionally, you can use Clearbit Enrichment to add contact information to your HubSpot CRM with the platform’s integration.
What we like: Clearbit provides sales teams with access to more than 200 million contacts, allowing them to identify ideal prospects quickly. Along with its extensive database, Clearbit also continuously updates and enriches contact information automatically, ensuring that inaccurate or incomplete entries are updated.
Alt: Sales engagement platform, Klenty
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Klenty is a sales engagement platform that helps teams with outreach, email personalization, and follow-up automation.
The tool makes the process of tailoring emails for individual prospects simple. It also uses factors like the last time you sent an email to a prospect or what that prospect’s office hours are in order to determine the right time to send them a message. With Klenty, emails will be sure to land in the inboxes of prospects rather than spam.
Klenty can help you integrate sales engagement with your data-based selling strategy. The platform generates data and insights, team reports, and performance metrics. You can sync all of your emails and related actions taken by prospects and customers (e.g., email opens, CTA clicks, email responses, and conversations) in your HubSpot CRM with Klenty’s integration.
What we like: Klenty is a perfect option for companies looking for an all-in-one solution. With the abundance of sales support features and personalization, the platform makes it easy to communicate with prospects. The easy user interface also makes it simple for your sales team to navigate.
Salesloft is a B2B sales engagement platform for businesses focused on sales acceleration and customer interactions. The tool has a wide range of capabilities for your entire team — sales leaders, managers, ops, SDRs, BDRs, account executives, marketers, and customer success reps included.
By pairing Salesloft with a CRM, like HubSpot (which integrates with the platform), you can automate, personalize, and sync rep-to-prospect communication. Sales loft gathers engagement wherever they take place over email, phone calls, social media, video, etc.
What we like: Salesloft was designed for team collaboration, as all communication channels are housed on a single dashboard. This centralized design makes it easy for sales reps to take advantage of features such as one-click dialing and texting with potential clients.
Pipeline is a CRM that manages sales productivity and engagement. The tool organizes all parts of your sales pipelines in a central, customizable list for easy access.
There’s a daily agenda that builds itself to save reps time and ensure they know which prospects they should engage that day. The tool makes all follow-up communication easy, streamlines the processes of crafting emails, and segments your customers. Pipeline is also mobile-friendly, so your remote team can easily access the information they need from anywhere.
What we like: Along with an interactive system for sales reps and customers, Pipeline also has a robust email marketing portion. The platform allows sales reps to create email campaigns and track data, such as open rates and which prospects downloaded company content.
Zendesk Sell combines a cloud-based CRM system with an easy-to-use sales engagement platform. Thanks to mobile capability, high-quality lead generation, and artificial intelligence, Zendesk Sell is perfect for businesses of all sizes.
The Zendesk Sell platform gathers insights to help foster a comprehensive relationship between the sales team and customers. Zendesk Sell also allows team members to understand what communication channels each prospect prefers.
What we like: During the communication process, the system will analyze and collect essential data on each prospect, providing a comprehensive data profile of each customer.
Zoho SalesIQ is one part of the overarching Zoho CRM database. The system is designed to be used with a CRM and integrates all the company’s communication channels. The system also identifies the best time to reach out to prospects.
What we like: Zoho SalesIQ offers a live chat function that allows sales reps to speak with prospects in real time. If the sales team is busy or unavailable, you can create a chatbot to interact with customers and provide basic information.
Freshsales provides support throughout the sales process. The highly flexible system allows companies to modify the prospect’s journey with customizable web forms and email.
In addition to these customizations, Freshsales also makes it easy to bring AI into your sales process. With the help of the platform’s chatbot, Freddy, you can communicate with customers in real time, even when a sales rep isn’t available.
What we like: The Freshsales sales engagement platform lets teams view how prospects interact with the company. That includes their activity on landing pages.
While some salespeople prefer an old-fashioned approach, modern sales platforms have made it possible for teams to maximize efficiency.
Having a sales engagement platform helps streamline the overall communication between your sales team and your clients. These platforms also allow for automation. Instead of spending time manually moving prospects through the pipeline, the system will automatically do it for you.
Here are a few other significant benefits of using a sales engagement platform:
Start by considering how your sales team and customers will interact with the system. For example, if digital communication is a key component of your sales strategy, you’ll want to look for a sales engagement platform that utilizes email as a core channel.
In addition to how your team will work within the platform, look for a system that focuses on the following elements:
There are a number of great sales engagement platforms available today — review their features and capabilities to determine which option aligns best with your team and goals.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.