Sales engagement tools are designed to streamline the sales cycle the way marketing automation helps companies nurture prospects. According to Gartner, “Sales Engagement Platforms” or SEPs “accelerate the way sales teams execute large-scale, multi-channel and multi-touch engagement”. They facilitate the adoption of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SFA (Sales Force Automation). In short, an SEP doesn’t substitute CRM and SFA, but rather complements them.
What value added does MS bring alongside CRM, SFA, or marketing automation? The objectives and the teams involved are different. Because it’s supposed to record all customer interactions, the CRM is the guarantor of customer data and makes it available to the marketing and sales teams. SFA, on the other hand, focuses strictly on sales force productivity—notably by automating various tasks throughout the cycle. Finally, marketing automation, intended for marketing teams, handles email operations and content-sharing scenarios.
Alongside these solutions, an SEP builds a bridge between marketing and sales by offering a single place where global engagement scenarios are designed: scenarios that cover all interactions, from email to phone calls to social networks. The goal is to give salespeople an accurate view of the level of engagement of their accounts and the optimal next steps to take.
What SEP seeks above all is to improve the sales experience. It does so by reducing low-value tasks (typically data entry at each stage of the sale), and more importantly, by suggesting relevant actions based on signals of interest (recorded interactions across a wide range of devices). This is why it’s called “engagement:” an SEP encourages salespeople to use all the channels and tactics at their disposal. As a result, the SEP activates both inbound marketing (e.g., access to a white paper from a personalized email) and outbound marketing (e.g., advertising via banners or social networks).
This ambition explains the broad functional scope of the “Sales Engagement Platform” concept. This is often a field that is covered with a variety of SaaS solutions, in which case we speak of a “best of breed,” or by a global SaaS solution.
In all cases, the required functions can be grouped under 3+1 pillars:
In concrete terms, in the daily life of users, the practical benefits can be quickly perceived:
Thus, SEPs can become real allies when your business is growing rapidly. They allow you to structure your processes and meet the following four challenges:
Another element to consider when choosing a Sales Engagement Platform is the ability of the solution to integrate with existing solutions (CRM, SFA, and martech applications) as well as with all contact points (social networks, landing page, chat, and emails).
This integration with the existing information system is essential to the efficiency and profitability of an SEP. Indeed, often native, these integrations allow to create a uniform data field between all the tools and to guarantee a transparency of this same data at the level of all the services of your company (marketing, sales, and support). A great asset for analysts of all kinds, these SEPs represent the missing piece of the lead life cycle and today make it easier to see the entire lead journey. From the first marketing touchpoint to the first sales touchpoint, to the support requests, thanks to the SEP, the entire story can now be written in your CRM.
Great news for Letsignit users: email signatures can also be part of the scenarios orchestrated via sales engagement solutions. This is possible with major players in the SEP market such as Outreach or Salesloft but also with those who cover part of the functional field: Lemlist (automation of prospecting and engagement emails), Calendly (appointment scheduling and calendar synchronization), Pardot (marketing automation), or HubSpot (with its sales module).
Letsignit integrates simply and automatically with these solutions and allows all your emails, regardless of the platform, to be signed. In a 100% branded and secured way, but also in order to personalize the messages you share in your banners, according to the position of your contact in your funnel.
Add email signatures to channels that you can activate in a sales engagement dynamic to manage specifically and thus take full advantage of the power of email.
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