What Is Sales Engagement & How Does It Work?
Almost every business developer working on an outreach campaign must have come across the word sales engagement. This can be in the case of LinkedIn outreach, sales, or lead generation.
The concept of sales engagement is interesting because it depicts your customer's behaviour. It also helps you analyze if your product is improving or if your customers are showing interest. When trying to stand out from the rest, most businesses eventually end up having a disastrous effect on business.
In the current era, where the market is becoming more and more competitive, businesses are using extreme measures and aggressive tactics to gain more sales. They are now using LinkedIn automation tools to run their campaign on autopilot.
As a result, these tactics are driving the customers away. Most customers complain that they receive more than 100 emails, multiple messages, connection requests, and many more on their emails and social media. These automated spam messages are only testing the nerves of these customers, driving them away.
To cut through all this unnecessary noise, you need to work on your message, outreach strategy, and online presence to increase your sales engagement.
A good sales engagement campaign can not only boost your sales but will also help you to minimize the overall effort. So, your sales team can target the right people and send them a direct first message for sales.
within this article, we will highlight
- what is a sales engagement
- Sales engagement platforms
- Best sales engagement strategies
What Is Sales Engagement?
If you are in sales and marketing or just part of the team, you are already aware of the term sales engagement. Most people understand this term, but they define it differently.
The basic idea of sales engagement involves a sequence of interactions between a sales representative and the person of interest. These interactions usually happen throughout the sales cycle and help the prospect become a customer.
These interactions start from outreach and involve engagement over social media or email, along with cold calling and emailing. For every phase that a prospect passes, certain touchpoints ensure success. This success means the prospect can complete the process and become a client.
As per the truest, there are more than 8 touchpoints, each with significance. These touchpoints ensure that your relationship with the prospect is not just momentary but also can be transactional and emotional.
To elaborate, you can take help from a simple example. Let’s say you need to sell something, make that possible, and work on sales engagement phases. You will start by sending a connection request on LinkedIn. This can be done manually or by using a LinkedIn automation tool.
After that, you will have a follow-up email, so ensure you reach your prospect through multiple channels. Then you have to send the first interaction message after the connection, followed by a LinkedIn InMail if they have yet to accept.
Finally, you will see the objective of your campaign and see what the next phase is. In some cases, this leads to a questionnaire that helps in assessing what should be the next step.
Although most people perform these steps manually, they can also be automated using a good LinkedIn tool. Now there are so many different LinkedIn automation tools available in the market that are safe for use and ensure that you can run a multichannel campaign for better output.
After all these details, you should consider the sales engagement platforms. To answer this question, let’s dive into the details.
Sales Engagement Platforms
Now that you know about sales engagement and want to make the most out of your outreach and sales campaign, you must also know about the sales engagement platforms. This will give you information about your target audience and how to reach out to them for better sales engagement.
If you are a B2B business, your target audience is another business. Hence when you look at the platform, you will never think about social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. You will use LinkedIn or email to reach another business as your target audience.
Most business uses both LinkedIn and mail to teach their audience. This target is known as the multichannel strategy. This may look hectic initially, but the process will get easy if you use LinkedIn automation tools.
With the help of a good cloud-based LinkedIn automation tool, you can easily run a multichannel campaign targeting B2B business owners, CEO, and other decision-makers in the business with just one dashboard.
These platforms are ideal for outreach marketing. However, there are other prospecting methods as well that will bring the leads to you.
If you already have a specific target audience, you can use the LinkedIn sales navigator for the prospect finding. This will help you in the lead generation process, and you will also be able to use the filters to narrow your list.
If you are just a sales representative, you can rely on free LinkedIn filters; however, if you are head of business development, you need a paid LinkedIn sales navigator.
Most people end up getting help from a cloud based Linkedin automation tool. This will help you reduce the effort and maximize the ease; you need to work with a good LinkedIn automation system. You can get a list of 150+ prospects with just one linked search.
Apart from this, a good LinkedIn automation tool will help you launch a multichannel campaign without extra effort.
Best Sales Engagement Strategies
After knowing in detail about the platform and how it works, it is very important to know some of the sales engagements that will bring your favorable results. Most people know about these strategies in theory, but when they have to implement them in real life, they fail badly.
To help beginners, we have covered some main steps along with the results so you can choose the strategy that will suit your brand.
Hyper Personalize Your Campaign
If you are a sales rep, you must be familiar with personalization but are you familiar with hyper-personalization?
Well, most people add names and details like a designation for personalization. However, when you hyper-personalize, you add a visual aid to help you bond emotionally with your prospect.
With the help of hyper-personalization, you will see a 55% increase in the response ratio. Apart from this, you will also see that prospects will remember you for a long time, even if they don’t make a purchase. However, if they make a purchase, they will surely come back.
What Do You Need?
For hyper-personalization, you can start by optimizing your profile on LinkedIn so that when a customer lands on the account, they can get all the information they need.
When you send a message, don’t just add text; add a visual aid. You can add pictures, a small video, or even a gif related to your business. Most LinkedIn automation tools come with third-party integration allowing you to design a gif immediately.
To keep the focus clear, your target audience must be very narrow. This will be possible if you use the LinkedIn sales navigator. Run a multichannel campaign to help you reach your prospect through LinkedIn and email.
Use Linkedin InMail for the outreach campaign
For this kind of outreach campaign, you can use the LinkedIn automation tool to reduce your efforts and make the process speedy.
With the help of this campaign style, you will be able to increase the overall connection acceptance rate to up to 70%. You will also get at least 14 calls from every 170 connections you lock successfully.
What Do You Need?
To make this possible, you can start by looking at the engagement at a LinkedIn webinar. Ensure you have a good webinar related to your file with at least 500 attendees.
Now you can filter the people from this webinar and target their profiles. After extracting their profiles, you can reach them through InMail.
Once you have the list, you can make sure to personalize everything with the help of an AI-based line. If you are using a good LinkedIn automation tool, you will be able to do this with the help of your tool.
Finally, when you send the message, add humour and visual aid to grab your prospect’s attention for a longer time. Third-party hyper-personalization software, including hyper, is usually used with LinkedIn automation tools to generate dynamically customized gifs.
Outreach Campaign by scraping data from event
This is one of the best outreach campaign strategies out there. The best thing is that you will be scrapping the prospect list based on interests to improve the results.
You can use a good LinkedIn automation tool and a LinkedIn sales navigator to run this campaign successfully for this campaign.
With the help of this outreach campaign, you will see an increase in the connection acceptance rate by 55%. You will see an enhancement in the response rate by at least 66%.
What Do You Need?
To run this campaign, you will start by scrapping the prospect list from the event. On LinkedIn, you will see people with similar interests. You have to extract then a prospect list based on mutual interests.
Start by searching for an event on LinkedIn related to your file. After you have these details, you can use a good LinkedIn automation tool to easily target the people who have been a part of the event.
Finally, run your campaign with a good personalization message.
Bottom Line
To sum up, your sales engagement will only work if you know how to target the prospects. For each style, you need a good data scraping tool and a LinkedIn automation tool to help you run the campaign.
There are three main ways you can gather prospects. This includes using events, webinars, and posts. For each step, you need to ensure that message is fully personalized, so the prospects feel validated and cared for.
You will need more than just adding a name or replacing a designation; you will need much more than the name. Some people even use videos and pictures, which are very good options. To make it even easier, good LinkedIn automation tools can be used for this kind of personalization.
