Sales engagement + best tools for it, explained
What is sales engagement?
Sales engagement is a strategy that focuses on how sales teams interact and connect with customers. This goes beyond fostering meaningful communication and enduring relationships. The idea revolves around understanding and addressing customer needs at every point of their journey with your company.
If this sounds complex to you, that’s because it is. The approach requires personalized communication, strategic planning, and being on time. Every interaction should be relevant and impactful. From the first point of contact to deal closure and beyond.
However, achieving this goal requires tools. It’s almost impossible for your team to manage sales engagement with just a spreadsheet.
Let’s look at the five best sales engagement tools your business should try this year.
Five best sales engagement tools you should try
These tools are to your sales engagement what butter is to bread. Without them, personalizing interactions and engaging customers isn’t very appealing.
However, finding the correct information, organizing it, and personalizing touchpoints at scale becomes a breeze with them. But which tools can we use?
NetHunt CRM
NetHunt CRM is a CRM system and sales engagement tool in one, living inside your Gmail inbox.
This fully-fledged CRM system has comprehensive sales engagement tools under one roof. You can organize customer data, automate client engagement, and grow your business from the same tab you use to check your emails.
NetHunt CRM has been around since 2015. It has since received dozens of G2 badges, including the Our Users Love Us Badge, meaning NetHunt CRM has an average review score of above four stars. In fact, way higher than four: a 4.7 rating on G2 and a 4.8 rating on Capterra!
NetHunt CRM’s new update provides even more sales engagement-focused features that allow you to maximize sales. With them, NetHunt CRM’s functionality includes:
- A LinkedIn integration to add customer data from their LinkedIn profiles into your CRM and message them right from the customer card.
- Sales automation for building detailed workflows for customer engagement, enabling your salespeople to focus on high-value activities until they need attention.
- Email campaigns let you launch sales engagement and re-engagement campaigns in one click. You can also use macros to make the emails more personal and relevant.
- Integrations with messenger apps, email, social media, and VoIP dialers are perfect for an omnichannel communication strategy. They help you centralize your sales engagement.
Reporting functionality is supplemented by NetHunt CRM's Looker Studio integration.
Reply.io
Reply.io is an AI-powered sales engagement platform. It enhances sales processes by integrating advanced automation and personalization capabilities. Reply.io does thist through features like multi-channel campaigns, personalized communication, and detailed analytics.
A key feature of Reply.io is its email sequence accuracy. The tool’s system automatically stops sequences if the bounce rate is too high.
Reply.io also has AI capabilities. You can use its Jason AI to craft personalized emails. This can help increase engagement and response rates from prospects.
However, some users report challenges in using Reply.io. According to reviews, it can be challenging to manage multiple accounts. The tool also has a steep learning curve, occasional technical glitches, and inconsistent customer support. Some clients also find both the setup process and the navigation cumbersome. Analytics can also have some inefficiencies.
Reply.io offers a free plan with limited features and paid plans starting from $60 monthly. These plans include various features like email sequencing, follow-up tracking, CRM integrations, and more.
Clearbit
Clearbit is another marketing automation and sales acceleration platform. Its goal is to help businesses identify and engage customers that fit their Ideal Client Profile (ICP). This, in turn, significantly improves lead generation results and conversion rates while decreasing customer churn.
One of Clearbit's strong suits is providing high visibility into customer profiles. The tool makes it possible thanks to more than 100 firmographic and technographic data points. This allows businesses to tailor campaigns to target audiences with improved precision.
Clearbit can also help decipher intent from prospective customers by identifying companies behind anonymous website visits.
With Clearbit, you can create personalized buying experiences in real time. The tool lets you capture leads more effectively through forms and intent-based outreach. Clearbit also integrates with several tools like:
- Salesforce
- Google Workspace
- Outlook
- HubSpot
… and others.
The platform has high ratings, thanks to excellent data enrichment capabilities and ease of integration. Some users do find the pricing policy relatively high. This might be something a smaller business should take into account.
Clearbit starts at $50 per user per month and goes all the way up to $1,000.
SalesLoft
SalesLoft is another sales engagement suite known for its ability to automate email tasks, provide sales coaching, and offer tools for efficient communication.
SalesLoft features include the following:
- Sophisticated email outreach: you can send emails according to the prospects' time zones to be on time.
- Templates for various outreach activities, helping standardize your team’s outreach processes and increase efficiency.
- Integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to empower engagement activities with a powerful prospecting tool.
- Reports for tracking the performance of each sales campaign.
Despite all the advantages, some clients report issues with SalesLoft. Some note problems with the buggy dialer feature and the lack of aesthetic appeal of the user interface. Additionally, there are concerns regarding the platform's reporting capabilities. Some users find the analytics and reporting tools need more depth.
SalesLoft has both an annual and a monthly license. The yearly option costs around $2,000 per user per year, with the monthly price being around $125-165 per user.
Apollo.io
Apollo.io is a sales and marketing platform. Established in 2015, it offers a wide range of features to help salespeople engage with prospects and build healthy business relationships. It features an extensive B2B database, personalized engagement features, and robust analytics.
Some of the features Apollo.io offers are:
- Detailed account-level information, including firmographics, business objectives, and contact information for key decision-makers.
- Alerts and reminders about key opportunities and recommended actions with leads.
- Automated initial emails, sales email templates, and engagement tracking — among other functionalities.
- An extensive database capable of holding over 250 million contacts and 60 million companies.
- Personalized email campaigns, phone calls, and LinkedIn messaging.
- Its workflow engine provides analytics to help businesses make data-driven decisions.
- A Chrome extension that integrates functionality into daily tools like LinkedIn and Gmail, making it easier to find contact details and send personalized emails.
- Apollo.io is integrated with NetHunt CRM, combining the strengths of two brilliant tools.
Why should you use sales engagement in your sales strategy?
The first reason to implement sales engagement into your strategy is that it warms up the sales process as an interactive process. A sales team focused on building relationships and offering value at every touchpoint leads to higher conversion rates.
Positive interaction with your business also leads to an improved customer experience and lower churn rates. At the same time, engaging prospects with the right personalized message at the right time makes you more likely to convert leads into sales.
In other words — regular and meaningful engagement helps build lasting relationships, turning one-time buyers into long-term clients.
FAQs
What is an example of sales engagement?
A great example of sales engagement is a salesperson contacting a customer with a personalized, value-driven solution. The salesperson tailors the solution to the customer's specific needs and industry.
For example, instead of saying, “Hey! You should get NetHunt CRM because [pre-made pitch]”, your salesperson would say, “Hey! I saw online that you’re struggling to keep up with incoming leads — and NetHunt CRM can help you with that.”
Throughout the sales engagement process, the salesperson aims to provide value, build a relationship, and guide the customer through the sales funnel toward purchasing.
What is the difference between sales engagement and CRM?
Sales engagement focuses on the direct interactions between sales teams and clients. This includes communications and strategies to guide potential clients through the sales pipeline. CRM is more about managing overall customer relationships and data. However, sometimes, a tool can be both a CRM and a robust sales engagement tool like NetHunt CRM.
What is a sales engagement tool?
A sales engagement tool facilitates and optimizes interaction between sales teams and prospects. These tools help automate and track communication processes such as emails, calls, and social media interactions. They provide features such as email templates, scheduling capabilities, engagement analytics, and integration with CRM systems. This enables sales teams to engage more effectively with clients and streamline the sales process as a result.
To cap it all off, these tools are quite often the missing piece in the sales engagement process. Many entries on this list offer free trials, so give them a shot!
NetHunt CRM provides a whole 14-day free trial with no commitments. Give it a try!
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