If you head a B2B sales team, you know how hard it is to keep your prospects engaged. That is why you must devise a ‘sales engagement’ strategy. Read further to know the ‘5 best sales engagement practices‘ for your growing sales team.
See, you are either doing too much or very little to keep your users/prospects engaged. Finding that middle ground where you don’t alienate your prospective customers is the holy grail that you need to find.
You can’t get on a call with a prospect saying – ”Our product gives the best result in the market.” Buyers are smart these days. Hard selling will only push them off. Your salesperson needs to engage with the prospect.
Let’s see some of the best sales engagement practices:
#1 Get your targeting right
If the location is for real estate, then targeting is for marketing. Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to understand who is most likely to buy from you. Based on this, you will find prospects who are worth targeting. Otherwise, your sales team will be chasing prospects who will never become a customer. Why? Because they were never a part of your target market in the first place.
It might look lucrative to go after everyone because the more the merrier right? Absolutely not. It will only bring down the spirits of your sales team when they see that their efforts are not leading to any of them becoming a paying customer.
#2 Lack of good content can be bad for your brand and sales
Sales is beyond just meetings, cold calling, demos, and negotiations. You need to give reasons for your prospects to see how becoming your customer can be great for their business. Provide them with relevant information about your product and how it can help them.
Ever heard of the Buyer’s Journey? It is the journey that prospective customers go through before they buy a product. Your goal should be to create content for each stage of the customer journey.
Did you know almost all buyers
Awareness stage: In this stage, people seek information and do basic research.
Type of content- Blog posts, Social media posts, Whitepapers, Kits, Tools, Ebooks, Videos, Webinars, etc., work during this stage.
Consideration stage: Prospects want to know if your product is fit for them or not.
Type of content- Case studies, Free samples, Comparison guides, Product walkthroughs, etc.
Decision stage: In this stage, prospects want to understand what it would mean to become a customer.
Type of content- Free trials, Consultation calls, MVP or Prototype creation, Coupons, Demos, etc.
#3 Use Sales outreach tools:
Using the right sales automation tools can make a world of difference to your conversion rates. It will save your time, increase your productivity, and get you better results. The right sales automation tools can help you create a streamlined approach to sales. It will offer the exact solution that your prospects are looking for at the right touchpoints.
A tool like Adapt Engage can even customize sequences based on the product, personas, verticals, etc.
#4 Alignment of Sales and Marketing:
Gone are the days when different departments used to work in silos. There is information sharing and cross-functional support which is the norm these days. Marketing and Sales team have bigger reasons to work in tandem.
When they work together, this is what transpires:
- Salespeople can inform the marketing team when a prospect isn’t qualified
- Marketing can tell the sales team about the kind of enquiries from prospects
- Sales team can be better prepared when they know the marketing content consumed by the prospects
- They can develop buyer personas together
- Both the teams can set common KPIs
#5 Embrace Analytics:
Numbers don’t lie. There is a lot that you can take away from your performance numbers. If you closely monitor your analytics, you can figure out what went wrong and why it went wrong. Analytics will lay bare everything from bounce rate, email CTR, amount of time spent on the website, marketing information consumed, and so on. Using an analytics tool is one of the best methods to understand your prospective customers and how they behave.
Conclusion:
If sales engagement is done correctly, businesses will improve productivity, exceed revenue targets and forge great relationships with the prospect. Have an engagement strategy with the help of a sales outreach tool like Adapt to convert your prospects into paying customers.