The average sales rep spends only one-third of their day directly engaging with prospects, with the rest spent on research, meetings and admin tasks. Lost sales productivity costs businesses more than $1 trillion each year.
A sales engagement platform helps your team plan, execute, track, measure, and optimize interactions with buyers and customers. It assists your team through every stage of the sales funnel – from generating pipeline to engaging customers to managing deals up to cross-selling and renewals.
Sales engagement technology doesn’t replace your sales team. Rather, it empowers your team to deliver revenue-generating processes at scale – helping to close faster. Simply put – sales engagement platforms help you sell more, work less, and provide an exceptional buyer experience while doing so.
We took a deep dive into one of the most comprehensive sales engagement platforms, and a PMG partner, SalesLoft, to see it’s capabilities.
What is SalesLoft?
SalesLoft empowers every member of your sales team to connect with buyers in just a few clicks from anywhere via mobile, desktop or phone. With SalesLoft, your reps know who to contact, when to make contact, and how to make contact. This maximizes your sales team’s productivity, prevents potential buyers from slipping through the cracks and increases revenue.
Salesloft is a comprehensive sales engagement solution that answers the needs of SDRs, BDRs, Account Executives and CSMs that need to generate pipeline, close deals, and increase their customer share of wallet. It includes multiple integrated capabilities to achieve that, and leverages automation to reduce manual work, scale sales processes and support the most complex ones out there.
How SalesLoft Brings Value to Your Sales Org
1. Sales Email
It isn’t difficult to craft a winning email; the problem is doing it at scale. With SalesLoft, you can create your own email templates, quickly add personalized messaging or a custom video or attachment – and send it off to your buyers. All emails are auto-tracked for clicks, opens, and responses. That way, you can make data-driven decisions about which templates work and which don’t.
Top Takeaway: This feature helps sellers send human emails at scale.
2. Cadences
A sales cadence is a sequence of communication actions. A good sales cadence involves contacting prospects on the right channels, with the right messages, at the right time. Users can build cadences within minutes using variants such as email, phone calls, text and social, all from within the platform as well as personalizing these cadences in a few clicks. By monitoring the top-performing cadences, teams are able to repeat what works and increase performance.
Top Takeaway: Establish, scale and optimize a personalized sales process.
3. Calendaring
Scheduling a meeting manually is wasted time that can be spent selling. SalesLoft’s ‘Calendaring’ (as in ‘scheduling’) tool lets your sales reps share their availability with customers by providing a link to their calendar into an email.
Top Takeaway: Increases the number of meeting bookings.
4. Automation Rules
Cadences are all well and good, except every customer is different – right? With this automation tool, you set rules that trigger based on customer persona, field updates, activity, or account tier. To give one example: let’s say a prospect suddenly engages with an email you sent them two days ago. With the right automation rule, the prospect is added to a high-priority cadence – enabling you to call them when the iron is hot.
Top Takeaway: Setting up and implementing effective cadences can massively improve the performance of a sales team.
5. Conversation Intelligence
More and more sales teams are going remote, and Covid-19 is only speeding up this trend. In theory, this should make it more difficult for managers to coach their reps. However, SalesLoft’s Conversation Intelligence tool bridges the gap. Among other things, this tool lets managers share highlights from real conversations to onboard reps more quickly; add comments and notes with time-stamped notations, auto-tagging, and keyword tracking; and review hours of calls in minutes with speed-listening and topic shortcuts.
Top Takeaway: Drastically improves the on-boarding process for new sales reps, allowing for quicker and more effective training.
6. Dialer and Messenger
These days, each prospect engages differently and this is why using multi-channel cadences works better than others. SalesLoft’s Dialer and Messenger tool gives you one-click dialing and texting from inside Salesforce, Outlook, Chrome, or your mobile device. Other features include LocalDial from an area code close to the customer, pre-recorded voicemail options, and a coaching option that lets managers jump in on calls.
Top Takeaway: Connect more often with LocalDial and CalledID – your prospects answer more often.
7. Analytics and Reporting
Being a data-driven sales org is about using your internal data to improve your sales process. SalesLoft lets you ask questions like: “Which cadence delivers the most booked meetings?”, “How many touchpoints does it take us to get a response?” and “Which email templates get the most success?” It allows you to see what works and what doesn’t.
Top Takeaway: Empowers you to constantly improve and refine your sales process.
Conclusion
The success of your sales team relies on being able to provide authentic, personalized customer experience. A good sales engagement platform enables you to provide a great customer experience in a scalable, predictable way – shortening deal cycles and bringing in more revenue.
This was just a brief introduction to the platform. We have been using SalesLoft for some time now and what we have seen so far is very impressive. We will shortly be releasing a further blog post where we will review the HubSpot Sales Hub and compare the two solutions.
If you have any questions or want to learn more, feel free to get in touch with us here.
SalesLoft 101: An Introduction to Sales Engagement
May 14, 2020
Kfir Pravda
The average sales rep spends only one-third of their day directly engaging with prospects, with the rest spent on research, meetings and admin tasks. Lost sales productivity costs businesses more than $1 trillion each year.
A sales engagement platform helps your team plan, execute, track, measure, and optimize interactions with buyers and customers. It assists your team through every stage of the sales funnel – from generating pipeline to engaging customers to managing deals up to cross-selling and renewals.
Sales engagement technology doesn’t replace your sales team. Rather, it empowers your team to deliver revenue-generating processes at scale – helping to close faster. Simply put – sales engagement platforms help you sell more, work less, and provide an exceptional buyer experience while doing so.
We took a deep dive into one of the most comprehensive sales engagement platforms, and a PMG partner, SalesLoft, to see it’s capabilities.
What is SalesLoft?
SalesLoft empowers every member of your sales team to connect with buyers in just a few clicks from anywhere via mobile, desktop or phone. With SalesLoft, your reps know who to contact, when to make contact, and how to make contact. This maximizes your sales team’s productivity, prevents potential buyers from slipping through the cracks and increases revenue.
Salesloft is a comprehensive sales engagement solution that answers the needs of SDRs, BDRs, Account Executives and CSMs that need to generate pipeline, close deals, and increase their customer share of wallet. It includes multiple integrated capabilities to achieve that, and leverages automation to reduce manual work, scale sales processes and support the most complex ones out there.
How SalesLoft Brings Value to Your Sales Org
1. Sales Email
It isn’t difficult to craft a winning email; the problem is doing it at scale. With SalesLoft, you can create your own email templates, quickly add personalized messaging or a custom video or attachment – and send it off to your buyers. All emails are auto-tracked for clicks, opens, and responses. That way, you can make data-driven decisions about which templates work and which don’t.
Top Takeaway: This feature helps sellers send human emails at scale.
2. Cadences
A sales cadence is a sequence of communication actions. A good sales cadence involves contacting prospects on the right channels, with the right messages, at the right time. Users can build cadences within minutes using variants such as email, phone calls, text and social, all from within the platform as well as personalizing these cadences in a few clicks. By monitoring the top-performing cadences, teams are able to repeat what works and increase performance.
Top Takeaway: Establish, scale and optimize a personalized sales process.
3. Calendaring
Scheduling a meeting manually is wasted time that can be spent selling. SalesLoft’s ‘Calendaring’ (as in ‘scheduling’) tool lets your sales reps share their availability with customers by providing a link to their calendar into an email.
Top Takeaway: Increases the number of meeting bookings.
4. Automation Rules
Cadences are all well and good, except every customer is different – right? With this automation tool, you set rules that trigger based on customer persona, field updates, activity, or account tier. To give one example: let’s say a prospect suddenly engages with an email you sent them two days ago. With the right automation rule, the prospect is added to a high-priority cadence – enabling you to call them when the iron is hot.
Top Takeaway: Setting up and implementing effective cadences can massively improve the performance of a sales team.
5. Conversation Intelligence
More and more sales teams are going remote, and Covid-19 is only speeding up this trend. In theory, this should make it more difficult for managers to coach their reps. However, SalesLoft’s Conversation Intelligence tool bridges the gap. Among other things, this tool lets managers share highlights from real conversations to onboard reps more quickly; add comments and notes with time-stamped notations, auto-tagging, and keyword tracking; and review hours of calls in minutes with speed-listening and topic shortcuts.
Top Takeaway: Drastically improves the on-boarding process for new sales reps, allowing for quicker and more effective training.
6. Dialer and Messenger
These days, each prospect engages differently and this is why using multi-channel cadences works better than others. SalesLoft’s Dialer and Messenger tool gives you one-click dialing and texting from inside Salesforce, Outlook, Chrome, or your mobile device. Other features include LocalDial from an area code close to the customer, pre-recorded voicemail options, and a coaching option that lets managers jump in on calls.
Top Takeaway: Connect more often with LocalDial and CalledID – your prospects answer more often.
7. Analytics and Reporting
Being a data-driven sales org is about using your internal data to improve your sales process. SalesLoft lets you ask questions like: “Which cadence delivers the most booked meetings?”, “How many touchpoints does it take us to get a response?” and “Which email templates get the most success?” It allows you to see what works and what doesn’t.
Top Takeaway: Empowers you to constantly improve and refine your sales process.
Conclusion
The success of your sales team relies on being able to provide authentic, personalized customer experience. A good sales engagement platform enables you to provide a great customer experience in a scalable, predictable way – shortening deal cycles and bringing in more revenue.
This was just a brief introduction to the platform. We have been using SalesLoft for some time now and what we have seen so far is very impressive. We will shortly be releasing a further blog post where we will review the HubSpot Sales Hub and compare the two solutions.
If you have any questions or want to learn more, feel free to get in touch with us here.