How to Choose a Sales Engagement Platform

Are you having meaningful conversations with your prospects that are moving them towards a purchase? That’s what sales engagement is all about.

It comprises all your interactions with potential clients, from how you communicate with them to how they respond to your calls to action. The objective is to create meetings or opportunities and eventually close the deal.

Now, the problem starts when you have many prospects at various stages in the sales process. How do you keep track of every touch point and stay sane? 

That is where sales engagement software or sales engagement platforms come in.

What is a Sales Engagement Platform?

According to Gartner, sales engagement is such a high priority that 90% of sales leaders plan to invest in technologies and methodologies to help their sellers engage effectively with prospects and customers.

A sales engagement platform allows sales reps to automate the process of keeping track of every call they make, every email they send and receive and any other activity they conduct with their prospects and customers.

Using a sales engagement platform will save you time and allow you to analyze your results. The sales engagement software provides analytics about open rates, click-through rates and more.

Top Sales Engagement Platforms

The 2017 TOPO Sales Development Technology Benchmark Report indicates that 87% of sales development organizations have adopted a sales engagement platform. In fact, sales engagement platforms are the top-rated technology in terms of positive ROI.

According to G2 (at the time of writing), the highest rated sales engagement platforms are:

• Apollo.io: an all-in-one GTM platform (sales intelligence, sales prospecting, sales engagement, etc.) that integrates with all CRMs.
• Groove: exclusive for enterprises using Salesforce.
• HubSpot Sales Hub: exclusive for the HubSpot CRM platform.
• SalesLoft: Integrates with different CRMs.
• ActiveCampaign: Integrates with Salesforce.

Choose the Right Sales Engagement Software

The above are just a few of the many platforms available in the market. So, how do you choose between all the available options? Here are some questions you should consider:

• Does the platform sync in real time with our CRM?
• Does it allow personalization of the messages?
• Does it maximize deliverability?
• Does it save our sellers time and make them more efficient?
• Is it easy to implement and learn how to use it?
• What will be the impact on data security and protection?

Apollo.io: Sales Intelligence + Sales Engagement

One of the complaints many sellers have is that they waste a lot of time hopping between different tech tools.

For example, they may use a sales intelligence tool like ZoomInfo or Seamless to gather prospect data. After collecting the data, they would load it into an engagement tool, which then allows them to A/B test emails, see when prospects open them, and track open/reply rates.

The Apollo Advantage resides in that the contact’s database (210 million business records and more than 20 million companies) and the engagement solution are in the same platform. You can add a record to a sequence with one click and sync it with any CRM automatically.

That means that sales intelligence and sales engagement are in one place. 

Because Apollo has a database and can enrich the data of everyone you reach out to before your messages go out, Apollo has the ability to automate a lot of the personalization to improve conversion rates in a way that other sales engagement tools can’t. This gives sales leaders the power of having a 10x larger sales team without having to hire any additional sales reps.

From within Apollo you can create and automate messaging sequences, use an international dialer for your cold calls and more.

Furthermore, Apollo’s analytics provide sales professionals more insight into how to improve their conversion rates and be more successful overall.

While other tools can provide them with A/B testing and stats on Open, Reply, and Interested rates, Apollo will show them where they have the most and least success by Company Size, Persona, Industry, Region, Funding Level, and a combination of those factors which help them understand where exactly in their market is their targeting and messaging working and where do they have room for improvement. 

Apollo is an all-in-one platform that combines data and sales engagement, so you have the ability to seamlessly find leads and reach out to them in one place, which saves time and hassle from integrating multiple platforms.