Beginner’s Guide To Buying the Right Sales Engagement Software

It’s getting harder and harder to sell today. 

To reach buyers now, salespeople must venture into the vast clutter of the internet and find a way to stand out. The new ways of sales dictate you have to  

1. Personalize your communication
2. Reach prospects wherever they are
3. Engage with prospects regularly and at scale.

So if you pull back the curtains on what a salesperson does in a day, you’ll find out that their task lists run longer than lengthy, spiralling grocery bills. From personalizing multiple email communications to engaging with prospects across multiple channels, to following up with existing prospects, they have to engage prospects consistently to push them forward in the sales pipeline. 

If salespeople were not already scrambling through their task list to avoid falling behind, they probably would when they have to do it at scale. 

That’s why high revenue generating sales teams have a sales engagement process in place. They accelerate their sales cycle by using an effective sales engagement process.  

But before you embark on the accelerated path to sales success, you've to address the elephant in the room. How to pick the right sales engagement software?

How To Buy a Sales Engagement Software?

Sales engagement is all of the interactions between the seller and the prospect that takes place over multiple channels like email, call, text messages, or LinkedIn. The objective of having a sales engagement process is to engage prospects effectively with personalized, multi-channel touch points and move them through your sales pipeline quickly. 

To execute your sales engagement process, you need a sales engagement software. 

What Is a Sales Engagement Software?

A sales engagement software helps you deliver high-quality, personalized interactions with prospects at scale. By automating the repetitive functions of your sales process like running hundreds of outreach campaigns, multichannel engagement, and analysing engagement metrics, a sales engagement platform helps you focus on meaningful engagement with prospects like building relationships, finding solutions, and closing deals. 

Today, having a sales engagement software is essential if you’re a high-functioning, fast-growing organization. 

With it, salespeople no longer have to work from their gut feeling and pray their strategies bear fruit, instead they can make even the most minute decisions based on data-driven insights churned out by a sales engagement software. For example: Run two outreach campaigns with two sets of email sequences and find out which one's better engaged. And choose the better email sequence for all your prospects to enjoy higher engagement rates. 

Why Do You Need a Sales Engagement Software?

Enjoy Consistent Results With a Centralized Sales Process

Your reps might be working on devising a new strategy every week with trial and error becoming part of their workflow. A lack of a centralized approach to sales engagement means you’re driving your team in the dark, leaving your reps to fend for themselves on the frontlines. 

With a sales engagement software, you can create well-defined and data-driven processes that will deliver consistent results from all your reps. Build a centralized strategy to bring in leads, nurture meaningful relationships with prospects, and close new deals.

Have Richer Interactions With Prospects by Personalizing at Scale

Personalizing your message to a prospect takes time, but doing the same for hundreds of prospects is nearly impossible, leaving reps caught in analysis paralysis. 

But a sales engagement software lets your reps set up multiple sales sequences with hyper-personalized emails, and automated follow-ups to hundreds of prospects every day. Reps can leverage advanced email features of sales engagement software to break through the noise and have multiple one-to-one conversations with prospects that matter.

Reach Prospects Wherever They Are With Multichannel Outreach

If you’re still trying to reach modern buyers through email, you’re light years behind, and missing out on buyers that answer calls, check LinkedIn every other minute or prefer to respond on WhatsApp.

Today, you need to reach out to a prospect where they are, with a message that is relevant to them, otherwise, you’re losing out to those who are already doing it. Make a cold call, follow that up with an email with a video attachment, build trust, send them a LinkedIn connection to reinforce credibility, land a meeting, and convert them into a customer or put them back into a sales sequence to nurture their interest. An intuitive sales engagement software makes it possible.

Time-Saving Automation: Get More Work Done in Less Time

Reps spend most of their billable hours on tasks that a high schooler can do: Keeping your CRM up-to-date with the whereabouts of your prospect, the engagement data, out of office responses, bounces, reading and creating email templates from scratch, prospecting, and toggling between multiple windows to do them all. With a sales engagement software in your kit, let reps do what they were hired to do: Sell. 

With the real-time sync of sales engagement data between your sales software and your CRM, reps don’t have to waste time managing your prospect database, instead, you can add 10+ hours back into a rep’s week by automating all of those CRM-related data-entry tasks. 

Coach the Team Effectively to Close Deals Faster

Coach every rep in your team to perform like the best ones. Know how the best performing sales rep engages with prospects, and what they do to smash their quota every time. With a sales engagement software, you can review all of your salespeople’s activities, spot areas of improvement, and put them back on the right track. Guide new hires with playbooks based on successful strategies so they can hit the ground running and close deals faster.

Here is a list of the best sales engagement tools in 2022 you can choose from to streamline your sales activities.

But How Do You Pick the Right Sales Engagement Software? Here’s a Mini Buying Guide: 

On analysing the data of 3000+ sales engagement software users, we came up with a few factors that people think about before they invest in a sales engagement software. 

- Does It Play Nice With My CRM?

You don’t want your reps to be scratching their heads while trying to use a software that doesn’t play well on their home turf, your existing CRM.  Given the number of tasks reps execute in a day, a poor integration between your CRM and a sales engagement software can be the difference between a successful quarter and a disheartening damp squib. So look out for tools that have native integrations with your CRM. 

- Does It Give Me Multiple Channels To Communicate With Prospects?

People are spending more time on their phones reading emails, checking LinkedIn, and picking up phone calls, so you should be able to leverage features that support multi-channel communication to reach prospects where they are. Choosing the right sales engagement software will help you do that. 

- How Much Should I Pay For It?

Whatever the size of your team, and your appetite for features, you’ll need to invest in a software that doesn’t pin you down in annual contracts; you should be able to cancel the plan at any time at no extra charges. Also, choose a tool that can be scaled to suit your growing needs. 

- Does It Give My Salespeople Superpowers?

Your salespeople are often drowning in many little but important tasks that move the prospect forward in the pipeline. Between important tasks like sending multiple follow-ups, making call backs, dropping email reminders to prospects in demo or trial, the list can go on, to purely administrative tasks like updating the CRM or doing a clean up of the data in the CRM, reps struggle to find time to focus on crafting personalized emails or preparing their pitch or talking to prospects. But powerful automation can put all the data entry work on autopilot. It will also let you set up automated email sequences leaving your reps with ample time to focus on becoming a sales superstar. 

Here’s How To Drive Your Sales Machine in the Top Gear Using Klenty

1. Multichannel Engagement With Prospects

Reach your prospects wherever they are and get more replies.

• Calls: Quickly move through your prospect lists with zero friction by making calls in a single click.
• Cold emails & follow-ups: Send hundreds of emails to new prospects, and automate follow-ups to hundreds or more prospects.
• LinkedIn automation: Automate your outreach on LinkedIn by engaging with prospects on the platform with minimal touchpoints.

2. Next-Level Email Personalization

Win your prospect’s attention using personalized messaging.

• Videos: Add videos to your emails to have one-to-one conversations with prospects.
• Liquid Templates: Dynamically alter email copy based on date, time, persona, and other prospect details.
• Email Text Personalization: Add custom placeholders to edit the name, industry, and other prospect information pulled from your CRM. 
• Preview and Edit: Make crucial edits to every sequence before it goes live.
• Approve Before Sending: Review and add personal touches to emails before sending.
• Delivery Windows: Set the date and time at which emails need to roll out.

3. Never Miss a Follow-up

Automate your follow-ups to nurture every prospect in the pipeline.

• Flexible Step Delays: Schedule multi-channel sequence steps with strategic intervals. Zero minimum gap is required.
• Reminders: Get notified of every task planned for the day.
• Reply In Thread: Send new emails as follow-ups in the same thread.
• Holiday Calendar: Select and skip holidays unique to your prospect list with zero manual work.
• To-do List: Have your entire day planned, and execute tasks like clockwork.

4. Prioritize Your Hottest Prospects With Intent-Based Playbooks 

Execute relevant actions that take prospects at every stage of intent to a booked meeting.

• High Intent: Identify and move engaged prospects into a ‘hot’ sequence full of calls and manual emails. 
• Medium Intent: Add lukewarm prospects to a largely automated sequence till their intent peaks.
• Low Intent: Move uninterested prospects into a fully automated, ‘cold’ sequence so you stay in touch without manual work.

5. Microscopic View of Sales Activities

Stay on top of your sales team and their productivity.

• View email conversations with prospects, durations of every cold call, and what your team members’ days look like.
• Stay on top of your sales pipeline to ensure that deals are not bogged down by roadblocks. 
• Ramp up your sales cycle by knowing when to intervene in the sales process. 

6. Accelerate Your CRM 

Add back 10+ hours to your sales reps’ week.

• Record Updation: Sync multi-channel engagement data to your CRM. Send email copies, replies, calls, and LinkedIn activities automatically to your CRM.
• Event Triggers: Actions in Klenty create corresponding actions in your CRM - create a task for a person/lead or a deal in CRM based on engagement.
• CRM Plugin: Execute sales outreach right from your CRM.

7. Reports for Every Step of the Way

Know what’s up behind the scenes to execute strategies that bear results. 

• A/B testing: Learn which subject line, CTA, or email template gets more engagement, and optimize your open rates based on that data.
• Cadence Reports: Identify sequences that are more engaging so you can double down on what works. 
• Step-level Reports: Find out which steps in your email sequences are working, who is engaged at every step, and optimize the emails that don't work. 
• Team Reports: Find out which reps perform best in their activities and the results they achieve. 
• List Reports: Move prospects into lists based on criteria. Know which lists perform best.

8. Manage Your Prospects Effectively

Track every prospect and never let them slip through the cracks again.

• Reply Detection: Pull prospects out of sequences automatically when they reply.
• Auto-Bounce Detection: Detect bounces automatically and remove those prospects.
• 000 Management: Resume sequences automatically for prospects after a few days of out-of-office replies.
• Built-in Team Permissions: Avoid multiple sales reps colliding on the same prospect.
• Tags and Lists: Effortlessly isolate buckets of prospects based on any criteria and take action.

9. It’s Called Pricing, Not a Jigsaw Puzzle

Flexible and transparent pricing that can accommodate a changing business’ every need.

• A plan for every sales team: Startup, Growth, and Enterprise plans to suit different sizes and needs.
• One tool, diverse needs: Custom pricing plan for agencies. 
• Discounts: Slashed prices for non-profit organizations and those in the accelerator or co-working space.
• Flexible plans: Cancel contracts at any time at no extra charges.
• Free trial: A 14-day free trial with 200 emails, and no credit card is required.
• Emails: Send up to 500 emails per day from one email ID. 

And Here’s What Lies On the Other Side Of the Grass: 

1. Pipecandy boosted response rates by 300%.

Before using a sales engagement platform Pipecandy was suffering poor email deliverability, their sales reps were wasting hours on end on manual data entry tasks, and was lacking real time, detailed reports which kept them from trying and testing new strategies. 

Here’s what happened after: Emails were delivered straight to the inboxes, and reps were able to save 10+ hours every week. Their new reports were so comprehensive, the sales leader could pinpoint which prospects engaged at every step of the cadence. 

Continue reading here to know how Pipecandy turned around their results using a sales engagement software. 

2. Customeer booked a significantly high number of meetings.

Some of their biggest sales challenges were getting through to prospects at scale. To add to that issue, there was no way to execute relevant messaging to prospects. 

Here’s how they rewrote their sales story: With intent-based Playbooks, Customeer could detect and classify prospects based on their intent levels, and execute messages relevant to their intent level. That way they always prioritized hot prospects while continuing to build intent in unresponsive prospects with chained cadences. In the end, every rep booked up to a whopping 5 meetings per week. 

Read here how Customer’s sales team underwent a facelift on using a sales engagement software. 

To Conclude

In short, selling can be easier with the right tool in your sales tech stack. With a sales engagement software, your sales team can move at high speed and in full swing. They no longer have to crib about working between 10 windows or about the mountain of administrative tasks that’s stopping them from focusing on the only thing that matters - selling. 

So buckle up and adopt the new way of selling. Personalize your communication, revamp your messaging based on tried and tested strategies, and plan an effective sales strategy to close more deals using a sales engagement software. But the real magic of this tool lies in the fact that you can do all the above at scale.