Sales engagement is a trendy term. It is a term that’s being thrown around now by experts and those who want to make it in business. Bringing the two words into one by one makes it simple. Just say ‘sales’ for selling and ‘engagement’ for interacting with customers and all through that, you have one aim in mind- sell to them.
But the term sales engagement goes beyond that. Read on to find information regarding what exactly is sales engagement, why every business needs to be aware of it, how to measure it, and if a business must resort to sales engagement tools to survive.
Sales Engagement Definition
As touched on above, sales is the exchange of a commodity for money. He or she who does this is involved in selling something to people. He or she has some value to transfer to others in exchange for cash. Engagement means emotional involvement or commitment.
Sales representatives understand this better. They interact with customers regularly and appreciate the act of keeping in touch with customers and clients to increase sales. In the process, they try to engage customers by understanding their needs and wants. Further, they try to satisfy these needs or wants. In this way, salespersons involve themselves in the journey of satisfaction for end-users of products. But they have to do that in the right way or the opportunities and benefits that are supposed to accrue will be lost. The best a salesperson can ever do is try to shape that process and use it to his or her advantage. It is good for one to always consider how to engage when to engage, and the right way to do it. The best salespersons who have been successful claim that it is best to present oneself to support engagement, make oneself valuable and helpful at the right time.
There are four elements that we must concern ourselves with if we are to succeed in sales engagement. These are (1) How salespeople and customers communicate, (2) Frequency of seller/buyer exchange, (3) Understand and support buyer’s journey, and (4) Substance of seller/buyer interactions.
Notice that sales engagement is not really the same thing software automation, or something related, as some have tried to imply in recent times. Be aware that when sales agents rely solely on automation, they lose individuality and reduce personal interactions with customers, thereby clouding them out of the mind of the buyer altogether. Although sales engagement software can really help grow a business, these must be used in the most beneficial ways.
Why Businesses Need Sales Engagement
For a business to survive, the sales team must be very active and effective. In many small business offices today, sales and marketing specialists may not be doing their bits and sales may slack off in response to an ineffective approach. For them to succeed, they must send out the right message and ensure that these get to the right recipients. Secondly, they must ensure that the message is really connected to the brand because disconnect in the language of sales information or proposals will get prospects lost in the middle of something.
So, whether the sales team is using an automation technology or not, they have a responsibility to ensure that at all times the message is clear and can easily be understood by prospects and it is fully aligned to represent the brand at all times. Although these automation tools in themselves are not the embodiment of sales engagement, they can be tools used to grow any business.
When the sales department has all the relevant content they need for pitching to prospects, this will mean higher conversion rates and no matter how small the business is. As many business experts have seen and experienced, sales engagement provides avenues to measure critical metrics that helps the team become more effective.
How to Measure Sales Engagement Metrics
There are ways to measure sales engagement in all organizations. For example, the use of emails for marketing is a prominent practice in some organizations and for the sales specialist to measure their success, they have to look at the responses they are getting. How many emails are sent out? How many have been replied? How many of the response led to sales?
These are some of the questions that the team will ask themselves in other to get a better understanding of the engagement they have with customers.
If the company uses a blog to engage clients or customers, the sales team will seek to understand how many visitors come to the site per day, how often do they interact on the site by commenting on articles, or signing up at the subscriber page, where are the visitors coming from, what are their interests? These are the things they must be able to know and tell if their sales engagement is to be effective.
If you make use of your smartphone you can also take note of how many text or WhatsApp messages you send in order to engage prospects, and how many replies you are getting.
The Future of Sales Engagement
The business of selling and buying is moving swiftly and things are rapidly changing. How corporate bodies sell is also rapidly changing, as seen in a report by Oppsource. The world is getting new solutions, vendors, and sales tools. The tools show promising idea that they can actually make selling and buying better. More and more companies are dying to have new sales prospecting team that can help the business to thrive. Some of them have already invested a lot in sales engagement tools.
Don’t be surprised, because these sales engagement tools and technology will grow bigger as time goes on. The same Oppsource report says in part- “With this huge shift to sales development and engagement software, the tech industry has taken notice. The market for sales engagement platforms will explode from $700 million to $5 billion in the next five years.”
Where Your Business Stands
We have seen what sales engagement really mean, the benefits, and how a corporate body can start utilizing it for calling more sales and more visibility for the brand. If you really want to have a successful business; one that is not rigid and unable to change in the way it carries out business strategies, this information is key.
Take the decision right now to start looking at the future instead of staying fixated in the present world or still doing business as usual. A total revamp has to be done for some SMEs to survive. Team managers must start thinking in new ways and apart from developing new products that add value to other people’s lives, a major improvement must be made in sales engagement practices.
