It’s something you might have heard about at the last convention you attended, or from friends at another sales team. Maybe you have learned all about it from an ISV. Maybe you’ve never heard of it. Regardless of how much you know about sales engagement platforms, there’s one thing you should know for certain: if you run a sales team, you need a sales engagement platform.
It’s that simple. Teams operating with basic CRMs are at an increasing disadvantage in terms of productivity, engagement, speed and organization. Sales engagement software facilitates better quality prospect interactions while increasing productivity to save time and money. In other words, it makes money as it saves money.
To learn how, it’s best to take a closer look at some of the unique solutions it offers:
Workflow Automation
With a conventional CRM, SDRs spend undue time manually choosing leads to contact, manually contacting them and then manually entering information. And once an SDR is finished contacting a lead, there is no impetus to immediately call another one – unless, of course, the rep is independently highly motivated. By automating the process, however – by having a sales engagement platform to choose the best leads, auto-contact the lead and then automatically log it and set a follow-up time – SDR productivity increases significantly.
Speed to Lead
Studies have shown that contacting a lead between 10 and 60 minutes from first entering your system is the sweet spot – you will see more positive interactions and better success. That 50-minute window is a tight amount of time, though, for an SDR using a CRM. It’s virtually impossible to manually catch every lead coming in at the exact right time. A sales engagement platform tackles this by prioritizing leads in the queue, allowing SDRs to spend more time with fresh leads.
Dynamic Scripting
One part of a sales engagement platform that a lot of SDRs like is the dynamic scripting solution. Conventional scripts, as you probably know, can sound stiff and inhuman, as though the cold-caller is simply going through the motions. The dynamic scripting function of a sales engagement platform provides the cold-caller with branching dialogue options based on responses from the prospect. It allows SDRs to keep the script, while also sounding natural and effectively managing objections.
Some sales managers balk at the idea of deploying a sales engagement platform because they are worried implementing it will be difficult. What if they have to pull teeth to get SDRs onboard? What if they have trouble understanding the interface? But a sales engagement platform is pretty simple to deploy, and any time and effort you put into the process will see a hefty ROI. Click here to visit VanillaSoft to learn more about best practices for sales engagement platform deployment.
Next time you hear someone chatting about sales engagement software, don’t brush it off. You need one, and the sooner you realize that, the better off your team will be.
