Top Sales Engagement Tips
With every passing day, it is getting more challenging to make sales. What worked a while ago may not be currently relevant, and therefore it is high time to change. One of the most significant changes is to engage prospects. There is no prize for guessing that a strong engagement between sales reps and prospects helps in sky-rocket sales. That is why you have to pay attention to sales engagement.
What exactly is sales engagement?
Sales engagement refers to the interaction between a salesperson and a prospect to convert the prospect into a paying customer. It includes all the interactions between the sales team and the buyer during the sales process.
Sales engagement can be in the form of sending cold emails, making phone calls, leaving voicemails, meeting prospects, and even something as trivial as leaving a comment on their blog post. There can also be automated interactions that prospects have with your business, such as filling forms on your website, interacting with a chatbot, getting added to the mailing list, and using a meeting scheduling tool to schedule a meeting.
When you plan and analyze the interaction, you can improve engagement and build better relationships with the prospect.
Sales Engagement Tips That Can Boost Sales
Here is a list of sales best practices and tips that will help you improve your sales engagement and fetch you the desired results.
1. Align with the marketing team
Marketing involves:
a. Keeping an eye on prospects’ activity.
b. Knowing their buying habits and preferences.
c. The frequency of purchasing.
The marketing team is responsible for building the image of your brand and bringing in quality leads. It also plays a significant role in presenting the company’s vision to a particular segment of the market.
When both sales and marketing teams are not on the same page, there can be a problem. The marketing team may bring in wrong leads, and the sales team may not reach out to the market segment properly. Therefore, the sales team of your business needs to work in alignment with the marketing team. Here’s what you should do,
a. Create an ideal customer profile along with the marketing team. It will make the marketing team target that particular market segment and do the product promotion accordingly. The sales team will then use the proper engagement techniques that resonate well with the prospects.
b. Together, the sales and marketing teams should create a user journey after getting a clear idea of the perfect customer. Both teams must understand the best time to engage with the customers.
c. Allow marketing to take the first initiative and inform prospects about your product or service. Once that is done, the sales team can go ahead with cold calling, cold emailing, and other channels to reach out to prospects. The point is that when a person has some prior idea about your product or service, the chances of you closing the deal are higher.
d. The marketing team has access to what the customers think about your product service and your company. You can make use of that feedback and tweak the sales strategy accordingly. It will help you learn from the mistakes made in the past.
2. Equip team members with the required skills
To be successful with customer engagement, salespeople must know what to talk about to the prospects and present it the right way. Most often, companies don’t pay heed to this and make sales reps sell straight away.
There is a need to train experienced sales reps, too, as your product or service is different, and the rep has to learn how to sell it. Provide complete information regarding your product or service. Additionally, make sure the rep can make cold calls properly and compose compelling emails. Check whether the rep has knowledge of standard selling techniques and whether they need training for the same. Let them join online courses and attend seminars to learn new skills that will ultimately benefit your business.
Most importantly, you have to track their performance and check whether they can deliver the desired results or not.
3. Provide high-quality content
Apart from cold calling and in-person meetings, sales engagement also requires a relevant product copy. Nobody will want to purchase your product if it has a poorly-written copy that sounds boring. You have to look at all your sales material and see whether it can convey the actual value of your product or service. Your sales copy should show how your offering has been helpful to clients in the post. Also, try to remove cliched phrases like “The best product” or “The number one product” from your sales copy.
Revise all the content related to your product or service and ensure that it provides sufficient information and is engaging. Your content is a part of the brand’s identity, and it is crucial in deciding the fate of your product or service.
While creating content, steer clear of formal business language and cliched phrases because you are writing it to engage your prospects, not to push them away. Keep a professional yet straightforward tone throughout, and it will give you a positive response from prospects.
4. Follow-up appropriately
Follow-ups fetch you good results, but at the same time, they are pretty annoying to prospects. The main reason is that their email inboxes have scores of follow-up emails that sound too pestering.
The key to making follow-ups seem optimistic to your prospects is by using them the right way. Most importantly, you have to follow up on time, for example, immediately after a customer clicks on the ‘Learn more’ button in the initial email. Taking action, later on, will make the prospect go cold, and they may not have an interest in your offering anymore. That is why it is important to avoid warm leads from growing cold.
5. Pick the appropriate communication channels
While you may want to reach out to prospects using all the communication channels available, you have to ensure choosing the one that prospects prefer. If they are active on social media, they would want people to contact them on professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Some may want you to contact them on the phone so that they get all the information instantly. Others only want to interact via email.
To choose the right channel of communication to reach out to prospects, you have to know your prospects first. Like already mentioned, creating an ideal customer profile will help you out
6. Use technology to help you out.
Taking a cue from the previous point, you should consider using sales engagement platforms and CRMs to help you keep track of your follow-up process. It is wise to do so as there are so many calls, meetings, and emails conversations to keep track of that it is just not humanly possible.
With a sales engagement tool and CRM, you can manage all your prospects in one place. It will help you determine which rep is taking care of which deal and remind you when it is time to make a follow-up phone call to a prospect. All sales reps must have CRM and sales engagement software.
Using technology is a great way to save time and keep things well-organized. With a sales engagement platform, you can build, optimize, and analyze your sales engagement strategy. It would automate the interactions you have with prospects. A good sales engagement platform helps you create content quickly and offers advanced communication channels and primary phone and email communication. Apart from that, sales engagement software must measure the performance of the sales team and the behavior of customers. Other desirable features of a sales engagement tool include automated lead routing and providing training to sales reps.
While choosing a CRM system for your business, you have to understand your needs. There are chances that you may not need a CRM with truckloads of features. An efficient CRM with just the required features can do the trick without burning a hole in your pocket.
7. Make use of personalization.
When you make someone feel special, they will go out of the way for you. That is what happens when you personalize your email content and make the recipient feel important. Offering something exclusive and making the email look specially crafted for them can do wonders. It can even result in the prospect closing the deal with you straight away.
To personalize the content of the email copy, you have to do some homework and research a bit about the prospect’s interests, preferences, needs, and pain points. Find out what they require and see how your product or service fits into that requirement. Avoid sounding generic in your email as prospects are not interested in your product or service features. They want to know how it can solve their problems.
You can personalize your email by mentioning the prospect’s name a couple of times, including the subject line. If there is a mutual connection, add that as well to build trust. Mentioning a common interest can further help in starting the conversation. Apart from that, you can resort to image personalization to make the email look like you have specially crafted it for them.
8. Recreate potential user journey and identify key touchpoints
As already mentioned in the first point, to create a journey map of the customer correctly, you have to make a portrait of your ideal customer and define their basic details like gender, age, income, and so on. Along with that, you have to mention the interests, preferences, habits of the ideal customer.
After getting the ideal customer profile, you have to imagine what would happen ahead. Will the individual search for your product or service online? Will they ask a friend? Where else would they search for your product or service?
Once you recreate the buyer’s journey, the next thing to do is to identify the touchpoints. Touchpoints refer to the points of interaction between a potential customer and your brand. It may be an online form that the prospect has to fill or an online ad that the prospect views. When you know how and when the prospect is getting in touch with your brand, it helps get in touch with them at the right moment and engage them.
By recreating the customer journey and analyzing the touchpoints, you would avoid reaching out to them at a stage in which they are not ready.
9. Keep an eye on the analytics
Check the analytics to know how things are going. They represent the success of the team. You would require to take a look at both marketing and sales analytics. Marketing analytics provides you with the bounce rate, click-through rate, page visits, and other metrics. Using them, you can find out from which source prospects come from, what draws them to your product or service and what turns them off.
Coming to sales analytics, you would want to see the response of prospects. You can determine whether they like to engage over email or want you to call them personally. Depending on the preferences of prospects, you can tweak your approach. These may be little things, but they do matter a lot in making your sales strategy successful.
10. Monitor team performance
Hold meetings regularly with your team to review team members’ performance and understand what is going right and what is not.
They will help you find the sales engagement methods that you should focus more on and eliminate those not giving good results.
Conclusion
Sales engagement, when done right, can help you get the desired results. Ideally, the sales and marketing teams have to work in sync, and you have to put in efforts in knowing the prospects and clients. Also, it is crucial to reach out to them using the proper channels. Another essential tactic to follow is to keep an eye on the analytics to know how your team is performing.
Not only that, but you also have to train your sales reps well so that they perform their best while interacting with prospects. The bottom line is that you can drive more sales with proper engagement and following sales best practices.
