Every sales guy knows that selling is the same as the damn ‘dating’.
If you don’t often follow, engage, and delight, then it’s gone.
It doesn’t mean that you should stalk them all the time, which will make them feel bad.
But a meaningful conversation, just like a good friend, can make a huge difference in everything.
And that's what "sales engagement" truly means in today's sales trend.
You don’t need to be pushy with the buyers, as you are entitled to sell. If you do so, then someone will grab the deal.
Whatever the best product you have, a bad sales engagement can make or break your deal, as it’s the key driving force behind the deal’s momentum.
Let's dive in to learn all about sales engagement, why you need it, and how you can smartly do it in six simple steps that are well-suited to dealing with this modern sales era.
“Sales engagement is simply the interactions that take place between the sellers and buyers from prospecting to deal closure stages in the sales cycle.”
In the modern sales age, these interactions can occur through a variety of channels, including emails, phone calls, video conferences, social media messages, in-person meetups, and digital sales rooms.
Most worldwide sales are happening today online, which allows huge potential to leverage technology to build a scalable and efficient engagement engine to propel the company’s growth with maximum ROI.
Gone are the days where sales representatives were shooting in the dark by engaging everyone tirelessly to find their potential buyers. In today's data age, sales engagement has become so data-driven that it is more focused on effectively connecting with buyers and saving a lot of effort by staying away from the spray-and-pray model.
The right information at the right time is always powerful. A well-structured sales engagement strategy will empower salespeople to produce meaningful engagement with the buyers, which will eventually move the deals forward.
“An average follow-up is better than a no-follow-up.”
Various webinars, whitepapers, competitors' social media posts, and a strict timeline to implement the product are already competing for your buyer's time and attention.
They are struggling to gather accurate information from hundreds of sources in order to make a purchase, feeling completely overwhelmed and frustrated. In this scenario, they would definitely say yes to a person who is willing to help them with some meaningful resources. That’s what a good sales engagement looks like.
It’s all about building a good relationship with new and existing customers, which is far beyond the transactional factor. Sales engagement can be beneficial in both directions, as engaging buyers will get valuable right information where they couldn't find anywhere, and from the sellers end, they will get to know deeper about the buyer's pain points, and get new approaches to understand and sell their solution, if the buyers are in matching need. A proper engagement will improve the quality and loyalty between the modern buyers and sellers relationship.
“Hey, just following up. Are you still interested in our product?” That’s one of the worst ways to follow up with your prospect.
Imagine you got this message, not just one, but nearly around 5-8 from various sellers. Sounds annoying, right? That’s what today’s buyers are probably facing. The follow-up message has turned out to be an unwanted interruption rather than a positive reminder or engagement.
Basically, what’s a follow-up? It's the message you probably send to the people you've already contacted. Unlike a cold introduction, these messages build upon initial contact and aim to fulfill specific objectives or foster a positive relationship. So, it’s vital to set the core tone of a follow-up message and ensure its usefulness to the buyer instead of just transactional selling.
Timing and frequency are the important deciding elements for a follow-up success rate. Sending a follow-up too late is ineffective and leads to a decrease in engagement. Based on the touch points in the buyer journey, fix a certain time limit for each touch to send a follow-up. In terms of frequency, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this aspect. This is purely based on your buyer’s behavioral pattern and their lifestyle, so you need to find your sweet spot on how often you should send messages to your buyer. Considering the average benchmark, 80% of successful sales require a minimum of five follow-ups in the journey.
If you are solely dependent on your champion with great hopes of closing the deal, then it's time to rethink. In today’s sales trend, companies are chasing every stakeholder who is part of the decision-making process in a deal.
It’s so complex that even one of those stakeholders' unwillingness can turn down the deal. That’s why 'multithreading’ is very essential today to move forward your deal without slippage. Multithreading is the process of forming a network around your champion, simply engaging every stakeholder throughout the sales cycle.
However, emails are not the ideal channel to execute this multithreading. To organize every stakeholder in one place and collaborate with them, digital sales rooms and a mutual action plan help a lot. Ensure you are creating multiple advocates for your product rather than focusing on the champion alone.
A deal closure is in the hands of the buyer, not the seller. Therefore, a strategy that does not align with the core buyer journey map will not yield any fruitful outcomes.
Analyze your buyer's journey and determine every touch point along the way. Each of your prospects may be at different stages of the journey. Once you derive the buyer journey and touch points, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of various interactions, enabling you to map each of your buyers to their respective touch points.
Every prospect at various touch points needs different activities to keep the respective deal going forward. So, it is very crucial to map each of your prospects in the buyer journey and take the sales engagement activities accordingly. Otherwise, there are high chances that your sales efforts will go in vain.
Sales folks, you like it or not, marketing is the first touch point of sales on any day. The right coordination with your marketing team may look simple, but many companies are struggling to achieve this factor. Reason? Lack of team collaboration between sales and marketing.
From a sales perspective, marketing is the goldmine source of your buyer's data. They introduce the product to the market and spread awareness about whatever you are selling. On top of that, the marketing team tracks your buyer's behavior and their intent to purchase the product at the beginning of the sales cycle. The sales team can use this data to craft their sales engagement strategy, which will help them create more personalized activities for each prospect.
As a result, it is critical to maintain momentum with your marketing team. Bad marketing will generate irrelevant leads, which is bad for sales. At any time, effective collaboration between sales and marketing will benefit both parties, focusing on the right leads that will eventually close with effective sales efforts.
Today’s B2B buyer’s journey is so complicated. There are new influencing factors called dark social, etc., where you can’t track what they are doing but still influence their purchase decisions. So, it is very important to not limit your multi-channel presence and engagement efforts. It applies to various channels and methods.
Does it mean that I should scatter my sales engagement efforts across every channel that I encounter? Absolutely, not. That’s the worst thing you can do to harm your sales team's productivity. It all begins with strategizing to pick the right relevant list of channels that relate to the majority of your buyers and work best for your prospects.
If your ICPs are online social freaks, then you should consider delivering major sales engagement efforts through social media. The same applies for different channels like email, phone calls, or even mobile messages. To align your sales engagement efforts with your buyer's journey, identify the most likely contact points for your buyers and distribute your efforts across multiple, appropriate communication channels.
Hyper personalization at scale is now one of the hottest topics in the sales industry. Everyone enjoys feeling special and exclusive at all times. Who else will like that damn same email that you will get among the hundreds and thousands? That’s why personalization always works like a charm, and it makes the engagement so deeply connected between the buyer and the seller.
So, can anyone do it and sell better? Nope. It’s not easy. Personalization at scale was merely impossible a decade ago. But in today’s data age, with various sales engagement platforms pairing up with the right digital sales rooms (Get your digital sales room by signing up for free) you can know exactly what your buyers are doing using engagement analytics. Based on that data, you can craft your sales engagement activities that are relevant and connected to the buyer, unlike just one other email.
Using buyer engagement analytics, you can analyze each buyer account, track their engagement at each touch point, and meticulously craft personalized engagements to win your deals.
This is a no-brainer point in the current trend. If you are not leveraging AI and automation, then someone else is already doing it and outperforming you.
There are hundreds of AI tools for everything out there today. You may think that it’s hard to choose the right one. But the fact is, with clarity in your core buyer journey and the right strategy, it will demand the necessary tools to operate. That way, with clear vision, you can select and implement the right automation tools to cut the manual work for your sales team. At any time, speed is the key, and AI and automation help today a lot to achieve that aspect.
Last, but not least, if you put this aspect at the core of your sales engagement, it will do wonders. Buyers are tired of relentless, pushy sellers who are not at all worried about the concerns they are facing today. They are aware of this kind of seller and are ready to ghost them at any point.
So, sending ten other quantifiable emails won’t work. Instead, you can achieve the desired results with empathetic engagement added up with personalisation. Today, B2B buying has become so difficult. It’s very hard to choose the right product in so much noise.
You might have heard this already: ‘In the world of noise, be the music’. Just be a friendly subject-matter expert with them. Sit with them, guide them, share your knowledge, and direct them to the right destination to which they are willing. This will make their lives easy, and if your product falls into place, deal closure will automatically happen as a byproduct. This should be the core aspect of every sales engagement, and everything else should be treated as supportive tools to execute better.
A sales engagement platform is a tool to manage all the engagement activities across different channels between the seller and prospects by streamlining every salesperson's work through automation, integrations, and other features.
Because sales engagement entails multi-channel activities such as phone, social media, and email, operating through a single platform can improve efficiency. Additionally, it enables the tracking of each engagement activity and ensures a strong connection between execution and the overall sales engagement strategy.
As this platform helps you easily scale up your engagement, it is imperative to use these platforms with caution to avoid annoying your buyers with your engagement. Always remember that these tools are used to deliver the right message at the right time. Not to overwhelm your buyers with an email blast.
Today, B2B sales and buying have become so complex. The primary reason is the number of products in any category, as well as the number of stakeholders involved in the purchase decision. This creates a lot more friction than before, and that’s why buyer enablement platforms have come to the rescue. Buyer enablement platforms provide a frictionless path to ease the buyer’s effort by providing them with the necessary valuable resources to make their decisions easier and faster. With the right choice and combination of a buyer enablement platform and a sales engagement platform, you can surely propel all your sales efforts in the right direction, and all that too without burning up your sales team.
Sign up Buyerstage for free and start enabling your buyers to close deals faster.
Every sales guy knows that selling is the same as the damn ‘dating’.
If you don’t often follow, engage, and delight, then it’s gone.
It doesn’t mean that you should stalk them all the time, which will make them feel bad.
But a meaningful conversation, just like a good friend, can make a huge difference in everything.
And that's what "sales engagement" truly means in today's sales trend.
You don’t need to be pushy with the buyers, as you are entitled to sell. If you do so, then someone will grab the deal.
Whatever the best product you have, a bad sales engagement can make or break your deal, as it’s the key driving force behind the deal’s momentum.
Let's dive in to learn all about sales engagement, why you need it, and how you can smartly do it in six simple steps that are well-suited to dealing with this modern sales era.
“Sales engagement is simply the interactions that take place between the sellers and buyers from prospecting to deal closure stages in the sales cycle.”
In the modern sales age, these interactions can occur through a variety of channels, including emails, phone calls, video conferences, social media messages, in-person meetups, and digital sales rooms.
Most worldwide sales are happening today online, which allows huge potential to leverage technology to build a scalable and efficient engagement engine to propel the company’s growth with maximum ROI.
Gone are the days where sales representatives were shooting in the dark by engaging everyone tirelessly to find their potential buyers. In today's data age, sales engagement has become so data-driven that it is more focused on effectively connecting with buyers and saving a lot of effort by staying away from the spray-and-pray model.
The right information at the right time is always powerful. A well-structured sales engagement strategy will empower salespeople to produce meaningful engagement with the buyers, which will eventually move the deals forward.
“An average follow-up is better than a no-follow-up.”
Various webinars, whitepapers, competitors' social media posts, and a strict timeline to implement the product are already competing for your buyer's time and attention.
They are struggling to gather accurate information from hundreds of sources in order to make a purchase, feeling completely overwhelmed and frustrated. In this scenario, they would definitely say yes to a person who is willing to help them with some meaningful resources. That’s what a good sales engagement looks like.
It’s all about building a good relationship with new and existing customers, which is far beyond the transactional factor. Sales engagement can be beneficial in both directions, as engaging buyers will get valuable right information where they couldn't find anywhere, and from the sellers end, they will get to know deeper about the buyer's pain points, and get new approaches to understand and sell their solution, if the buyers are in matching need. A proper engagement will improve the quality and loyalty between the modern buyers and sellers relationship.
“Hey, just following up. Are you still interested in our product?” That’s one of the worst ways to follow up with your prospect.
Imagine you got this message, not just one, but nearly around 5-8 from various sellers. Sounds annoying, right? That’s what today’s buyers are probably facing. The follow-up message has turned out to be an unwanted interruption rather than a positive reminder or engagement.
Basically, what’s a follow-up? It's the message you probably send to the people you've already contacted. Unlike a cold introduction, these messages build upon initial contact and aim to fulfill specific objectives or foster a positive relationship. So, it’s vital to set the core tone of a follow-up message and ensure its usefulness to the buyer instead of just transactional selling.
Timing and frequency are the important deciding elements for a follow-up success rate. Sending a follow-up too late is ineffective and leads to a decrease in engagement. Based on the touch points in the buyer journey, fix a certain time limit for each touch to send a follow-up. In terms of frequency, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this aspect. This is purely based on your buyer’s behavioral pattern and their lifestyle, so you need to find your sweet spot on how often you should send messages to your buyer. Considering the average benchmark, 80% of successful sales require a minimum of five follow-ups in the journey.
If you are solely dependent on your champion with great hopes of closing the deal, then it's time to rethink. In today’s sales trend, companies are chasing every stakeholder who is part of the decision-making process in a deal.
It’s so complex that even one of those stakeholders' unwillingness can turn down the deal. That’s why 'multithreading’ is very essential today to move forward your deal without slippage. Multithreading is the process of forming a network around your champion, simply engaging every stakeholder throughout the sales cycle.
However, emails are not the ideal channel to execute this multithreading. To organize every stakeholder in one place and collaborate with them, digital sales rooms and a mutual action plan help a lot. Ensure you are creating multiple advocates for your product rather than focusing on the champion alone.
A deal closure is in the hands of the buyer, not the seller. Therefore, a strategy that does not align with the core buyer journey map will not yield any fruitful outcomes.
Analyze your buyer's journey and determine every touch point along the way. Each of your prospects may be at different stages of the journey. Once you derive the buyer journey and touch points, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of various interactions, enabling you to map each of your buyers to their respective touch points.
Every prospect at various touch points needs different activities to keep the respective deal going forward. So, it is very crucial to map each of your prospects in the buyer journey and take the sales engagement activities accordingly. Otherwise, there are high chances that your sales efforts will go in vain.
Sales folks, you like it or not, marketing is the first touch point of sales on any day. The right coordination with your marketing team may look simple, but many companies are struggling to achieve this factor. Reason? Lack of team collaboration between sales and marketing.
From a sales perspective, marketing is the goldmine source of your buyer's data. They introduce the product to the market and spread awareness about whatever you are selling. On top of that, the marketing team tracks your buyer's behavior and their intent to purchase the product at the beginning of the sales cycle. The sales team can use this data to craft their sales engagement strategy, which will help them create more personalized activities for each prospect.
As a result, it is critical to maintain momentum with your marketing team. Bad marketing will generate irrelevant leads, which is bad for sales. At any time, effective collaboration between sales and marketing will benefit both parties, focusing on the right leads that will eventually close with effective sales efforts.
Today’s B2B buyer’s journey is so complicated. There are new influencing factors called dark social, etc., where you can’t track what they are doing but still influence their purchase decisions. So, it is very important to not limit your multi-channel presence and engagement efforts. It applies to various channels and methods.
Does it mean that I should scatter my sales engagement efforts across every channel that I encounter? Absolutely, not. That’s the worst thing you can do to harm your sales team's productivity. It all begins with strategizing to pick the right relevant list of channels that relate to the majority of your buyers and work best for your prospects.
If your ICPs are online social freaks, then you should consider delivering major sales engagement efforts through social media. The same applies for different channels like email, phone calls, or even mobile messages. To align your sales engagement efforts with your buyer's journey, identify the most likely contact points for your buyers and distribute your efforts across multiple, appropriate communication channels.
Hyper personalization at scale is now one of the hottest topics in the sales industry. Everyone enjoys feeling special and exclusive at all times. Who else will like that damn same email that you will get among the hundreds and thousands? That’s why personalization always works like a charm, and it makes the engagement so deeply connected between the buyer and the seller.
So, can anyone do it and sell better? Nope. It’s not easy. Personalization at scale was merely impossible a decade ago. But in today’s data age, with various sales engagement platforms pairing up with the right digital sales rooms (Get your digital sales room by signing up for free) you can know exactly what your buyers are doing using engagement analytics. Based on that data, you can craft your sales engagement activities that are relevant and connected to the buyer, unlike just one other email.
Using buyer engagement analytics, you can analyze each buyer account, track their engagement at each touch point, and meticulously craft personalized engagements to win your deals.
This is a no-brainer point in the current trend. If you are not leveraging AI and automation, then someone else is already doing it and outperforming you.
There are hundreds of AI tools for everything out there today. You may think that it’s hard to choose the right one. But the fact is, with clarity in your core buyer journey and the right strategy, it will demand the necessary tools to operate. That way, with clear vision, you can select and implement the right automation tools to cut the manual work for your sales team. At any time, speed is the key, and AI and automation help today a lot to achieve that aspect.
Last, but not least, if you put this aspect at the core of your sales engagement, it will do wonders. Buyers are tired of relentless, pushy sellers who are not at all worried about the concerns they are facing today. They are aware of this kind of seller and are ready to ghost them at any point.
So, sending ten other quantifiable emails won’t work. Instead, you can achieve the desired results with empathetic engagement added up with personalisation. Today, B2B buying has become so difficult. It’s very hard to choose the right product in so much noise.
You might have heard this already: ‘In the world of noise, be the music’. Just be a friendly subject-matter expert with them. Sit with them, guide them, share your knowledge, and direct them to the right destination to which they are willing. This will make their lives easy, and if your product falls into place, deal closure will automatically happen as a byproduct. This should be the core aspect of every sales engagement, and everything else should be treated as supportive tools to execute better.
A sales engagement platform is a tool to manage all the engagement activities across different channels between the seller and prospects by streamlining every salesperson's work through automation, integrations, and other features.
Because sales engagement entails multi-channel activities such as phone, social media, and email, operating through a single platform can improve efficiency. Additionally, it enables the tracking of each engagement activity and ensures a strong connection between execution and the overall sales engagement strategy.
As this platform helps you easily scale up your engagement, it is imperative to use these platforms with caution to avoid annoying your buyers with your engagement. Always remember that these tools are used to deliver the right message at the right time. Not to overwhelm your buyers with an email blast.
Today, B2B sales and buying have become so complex. The primary reason is the number of products in any category, as well as the number of stakeholders involved in the purchase decision. This creates a lot more friction than before, and that’s why buyer enablement platforms have come to the rescue. Buyer enablement platforms provide a frictionless path to ease the buyer’s effort by providing them with the necessary valuable resources to make their decisions easier and faster. With the right choice and combination of a buyer enablement platform and a sales engagement platform, you can surely propel all your sales efforts in the right direction, and all that too without burning up your sales team.
Sign up Buyerstage for free and start enabling your buyers to close deals faster.
