Summary
There's a lot of confusion over this question because Salesforce has such a large product offering. But the simple answer is yes. Salesforce does have a sales engagement platform in addition to its primary and best-known product, its CRM platform. The sales engagement platform, called Salesforce Sales Engagement, allows users to create sales workflows, assign tasks, and complements these functionalities with their AI technology Einstein.
Features in Salesforce's sales engagement platform include:
- An user interface which allows the sales team to manage outreach to prospects throughout their buyer journey.
- Integration with the Salesforce CRM to automatically update a lead's information.
- Workflows which guide a sales team through the touchpoints they'll create for prospects.
- An inbox which functions similarly to an email inbox.
- Lead scoring to understand how qualified a prospect is.
Who should buy Salesforce Sales Engagement?
With a monthly charge beginning at $75 per user and an obligation for a year-long contract, Salesforce's sales engagement platform is not the best option for SMBs. Small and medium businesses who would like to optimize and streamline their prospecting process could benefit from a plan with a less expensive monthly cost which allows them to exit the contract if the tool doesn't serve their business's needs. Additionally, SMBs would be better served by a prospecting tool made specifically businesses of their size, such as Cadence by Ringover.
A sales engagement platform is an important tool for businesses who want to optimize their sales process and accelerate their growth. Let's take a look at why that is the case, starting with the definition of a sales engagement platform.
What is a sales engagement platform?
A sales engagement platform is a single interface which allows sales teams to plan, execute, track, and ultimately optimize multi-channel communications with prospects. No longer will you have to flip between multiple screens and tools to follow interactions with a prospect. A sales engagement platform collects the data of all touchpoints with a lead, and goes even further. From within one interface, you can also schedule outreach or meetings with a prospect, and even automate communications within a cadence. A cadence is a defined series of touchpoints with a prospect which simplifies sales team's day-to-day by giving them a straightforward daily to-do list.
For small and medium businesses who need to maximize their resources to hit ambitious sales development goals, a sales engagement platform is an important prospecting tool to increase efficiency by streamlining and automating sales engagement. Sales engagement refers to any interactions with the prospect throughout the buyer's journey, regardless of the communication channel used. The more engagement a prospect experiences during their buyer's journey, the more likely they are to purchase.
The features of a sales engagement platform ideal for a small or medium business include:
- Multi-channel communications available from within the platform to reach prospects where they are.
- Ability to define a sales prospecting process for the sales development team, including timing between steps.
- Possibility to automate outreach to prospects with personalized communications.
- Creation of templates within the platform so your team can benefit from proven strategies.
- CRM integration, including commonly used tools like Salesforce, so the sales engagement platform is always up-to-date.
- In-platform calendar and meeting creation to streamline the time management.
- Integrated phone system to create a seamless flow for prospect outreach.
In conclusion, the purpose of a sales engagement platform is to increase engagement with prospects in an efficient and scalable manner. Prospection tools like sales engagement platforms have quickly become a key resource for sales teams, with 92% of sales organizations stating that sales engagement platforms are integral to the success of their teams. Now we'll take a deep dive into how sales engagement platforms improve the prospecting process, both from the prospect and sales team's experience.
Prospecting with a sales engagement platform
With a sales engagement platform, you can define and automate a sales prospecting process, ensuring no prospect falls through the cracks.
The most common complaint from both prospects and sales teams is the lack of time. Prospects are often doing their own research into what tools they need, but they have little time for the research and decision-making processes. As a result, they require personalized attention from sales teams so they will be convinced the solution offered fits their specific needs and is truly the best option for them. Recent studies have even found that the top sales teams will deliver an average of 15.5 touches per prospect.
On the sales side, sales teams in rapidly-growing businesses have high goals to hit, and the aforementioned high expectations from prospects. The amount of manual tasks necessary to engage with prospects an average of 15.5 times is very high, demanding an incredible amount of time and organization from sales representatives.
Leveraging a sales engagement platform to increase sales velocity
The end goal of prospecting with a sales engagement platform is to increase the conversion rate, the percentage of prospects who make a purchase. But how exactly do sales engagement platforms do that? Sales engagement platforms allow you to increase your sales velocity.
Here are the functionalities of a sales engagement platform that will help your sales development team to increase their sales velocity.
A single interface for maximum efficiency
First and foremost, a sales engagement platform will be composed of one single interface. This provides users with a central location where they can access workflows, tasks, integrations with CRMs, and communication tools. This single interface allows the sales team to easily track interactions with clients, schedule messages to them using multiple channels, and track performance through an analytics dashboard. The sheer usefulness of having one platform where the sales teams can manage their communications with prospects is one of the main reasons for the popularity of sales engagement platforms.
Customized configuration and planning
For a sales team that already works with a CRM, configuration is a major deciding factor when it comes to choosing a sales engagement platform. After all, the point of a sales engagement platform is to streamline the sales prospecting process–not add another software to the stack which requires time-consuming and tiresome manual updates from the sales team.
In order to avoid this doubling up of softwares, sales engagement platforms must have two-way syncing functionality. Let's take the example of Ringover's sales engagement platform Cadence.
Ringover and Salesforce work together to streamline prospecting
Once Cadence has been integrated with Salesforce, the data on both softwares will update automatically so information is always up-to-date on both sides. Any changes to the information of your Leads, Accounts & Contacts in Salesforce will be automatically updated in real-time, so there is no action required on the part of the sales team member. And yet, the sales team will benefit from having accurate information without having to double up on entering data into both the CRM and sales engagement platform.
And what about data associated with outreach to the prospects? It's the same thing. Any communication carried out in Cadence would automatically be noted in Salesforce, so sales teams can seamlessly follow up with prospects. In keeping with the multi-channel engagement necessary to close deals efficiently, this applies to calls, emails, SMS, even call recordings.
Finally, there's nothing worse than losing track of a qualified lead because the CRM and sales engagement platform aren't aligned. That's why Cadence allows sales teams to align their prospect qualification criteria with that of the Salesforce CRM. If a qualified lead does land in Salesforce, it will be instantly imported into Cadence. Once there, it will be integrated into the custom workflows your sales team has set up, so engagement with that lead will begin.
