Use data to drive engagement

As sales professionals, we understand the challenges and difficulties involved with selling a product or service. We have learned from experience what works and what doesn’t work. In this guide, we have outlined every best practice for properly engaging potential customers. We also want to share our knowledge about the techniques that will help you close more deals than ever before.

Sales engagement strategy is a guide for sales professionals who are looking for proven, tactical strategies to build long-lasting customer relationships. This article outlines the essential strategies every sales team should embrace in order to make an impact now and retain customers over time.

Define what sales engagement means to you

Before we can talk about best practices for improving sales engagement, we first need to define what it means and how you should measure success. This begins with establishing company-level goals and quantifying the value of sales engagement.

Use data to drive engagement

Data is quickly becoming one of the most important factors driving business decisions (and it should be). Take advantage of tools that allow you to track your customers’ behaviors, signals, and conversations in order to measure customer experiences more accurately and more often.

Set achievable goals

Your objectives must be specific and measurable if you want to succeed at any kind of strategy, but this is even more important in sales engagement. The goals must be achievable, but they also must take a long-term focus to ensure you’re working toward the best possible outcome for your business and your customers.

Understand your buyer’s journey and map out your sales process

Your buyer’s journey is the process your customers go through before you reach them with your marketing efforts, and it starts long before they ever talk to one of your reps. Map out every step of the journey so you can figure out where customer engagement fits in, which will help you determine how often you need to align with distinct steps.

Make sure your sales reps are on the same page

Reps should work with product marketing managers to get really clear on messaging and buyer personas. You need two different types of messaging for this—initially, you want your reps to match the messaging in your marketing team’s materials so they can personalize their interactions with customers when it matters. Then you need to agree on your “ask” of customers—the next step, an event or product sign-up you want them to take.

Identify the right channels for reaching buyers at each stage of the journey

Once you’ve identified your target accounts, check what other channels are available to reach these buyers. PR is an effective way to get in front of people at the top tiers of organizations—research shows that CEOs and other senior executives find about 80% of their information through external sources like newspapers, industry analysts, and other publications.

They’re also more likely to pay attention to messages that come through trusted sources, like third-party research, trade press publications, analyst reports, and case studies.

Create helpful content that engages buyers

PR is a great way to get this done since journalists can help craft stories around your insights, which makes it easier for companies to share them broadly.

Although this strategy will vary by company and industry, one of the best ways to start out is to set up an inbound marketing campaign—a system for attracting leads with content marketing, search engine optimization, social media outreach, email campaigns, and other tactics.

The more helpful your content is to buyers’ research process, the more success you’ll have engaging them through earned media.

Close deals with personalized, tailored proposals

Close deals by personalizing proposals that are tailored to each deal’s requirements. By mapping out the buyer’s journey from initial contact to close, you’ll be able to identify key information that will influence your sales engagement strategy. This research will let you form a strong hypothesis about the buyer’s needs and motivations for purchasing, which will help you create a tailored proposal that can move them one step closer to becoming a client.

Improve the buyer’s journey with the use of technology. By using existing technologies, such as websites and social media, you can improve your sales engagement strategy by increasing access to information about buyer behavior. This insight will then allow you to tailor your approach accordingly.

Conclusion

A good sales engagement strategy should include a variety of strategies that influence buyer behavior, such as improving the customer journey and increasing access to information about buyer behavior.

It is an accepted fact among salespeople that when it comes to influencing decisions, it all starts with the buyer, who has the power to accept or reject what you offer. In order to win their business, you need to understand what motivates them and this can provide the keys to an effective sales engagement strategy.