How to improve Sales Engagement

Whether you are working from your office surrounded by your sales team or working from home, sales metrics don’t change. As a sales manager or a sales rep, you are still tasked with delivering revenue and meeting or exceeding your sales quota by connecting with potential customers in order to set up meetings and drive revenue.

Most successful sales leaders think through every step of the sales engagement process and make each touchpoint they have with either a prospect or a customer as personalized as possible.

It is important to have a structured plan of action to ensure that you know how to keep the conversation going with those in your sales pipeline. Thinking through the common questions, objections, or pain points of your ideal customer can be helpful in determining how to engage with them, what content to send to them, and what the best approach may be for moving them through the sales cycle.

So, how can you improve sales engagement….

#1 Know your ICP

Work with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer personas to improve the chances of your marketing and sales efforts’ success, as you can tailor your efforts towards prospects who are more likely to engage. When reaching out to potential prospects, it is important to research as much as they can about them. Looking at social media platforms like LinkedIn can be a highly effective way to get insights into what commonalities may exist that can be leveraged in a personalized sales outreach message.

#2 Look at your customers

Don’t have an ICP or buyer persona? Analyze the customers that have purchased from you and look at what they have in common. Do they all have the same title? Are they all in the same vertical? Are they located geographically close to each other? These similarities are the starting point for figuring out what kind of person is your Ideal Customer Profile.

#3 Understand pain points

As you’re assessing your current customers and ideal customers, consider the challenges they face. What is keeping them from being their most productive? Technology? Budget? Processes?

#4 Create the right cadence

As you create your sales cadence to contact prospective customers, remember in B2B sales, it takes, on average, 6–8 touch points before a prospect will book a sales call. These should be in the form of email, phone, texts, video, and social outreach. The success rate of turning a prospect into a customer hinges on the follow-up. Many individuals take the “spray and pray” approach to sales engagement and send out as many initial emails as they can causing a logistical and time-consuming nightmare to manage. Being selective with who and how you reach out to prospects will give you a greater return on your engagement rate.

#5 Personalisation is key

Sales and marketing research shows that 80% of people are more likely to do business with a company that sends personalised messages. So take the time to truly find ways to engage with personalised messages. No one wants to get a sales pitch that could be delivered to anyone passing by. Include personal aspects to it, such as any pain points that person could be experiencing, the name of someone you know in common who referred you or a reference to a social post that the person posted on LinkedIn recently.

#6 Share success stories

Your happy customers are the best people to promote your products because they’ve already chosen them and are seeing the return on investment. Sending a potential customer who is in the consideration stage of the customer lifecycle, a case study, a link to customer reviews or a customer endorsement that demonstrates how it’s helped them increase revenue or productivity — or even better, both can motivate them to buy.

#7 Use the right tools

Take a look at the crowded sales engagement market and narrow it down to exactly what your specific company needs to drive sales engagement.

Once you have the right sales engagement tools and have done your research to create personalized sales outreach messages (be that a cold call, cold email, text, or social message) you’ll have everything you need to boost your sales engagement.

PipeLaunch enables you to have a successful sales engagement campaign within Salesforce by automatically enriching Salesforce with the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and suggesting additional matching profiles from LinkedIn including verified email addresses, giving your sales team a competitive advantage by removing 9 hours per week spent on research, resulting in faster prospecting and pipeline generation.