Marketing
January 28, 2022

Which SaaS solutions can help speed up your sales cycle?

By
Amandine Fernandez
Head of Acquisition
Sales Engagement Platforms seek to make aligning your marketing and sales easier, and also to improve the entire sales experience. The main goal is to accelerate and consolidate the sales funnel. SaaS solutions are growing alongside CRM and SFA.

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.

The Sales Engagement Platform: a bridge between marketing and sales

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.

Inbound and outbound marketing on the menu of the Sales Engagement Platform

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.

Inbound outbound

In all cases, the required functions can be grouped under 3+1 pillars:

  • Pillar #1: identification, completion and retargeting of contacts along the journey
  • The playground of GetQuanty, for example, a well-known player in France.
  • Pillar #2: the design of multi-channel engagement scenarios (web, email, chat, social networks, and phone calls)
  • A function on which marketing automation players (Hubspot with its sales module) as well as CRM editors (Pipedrive). It should be noted that, in the context of an SEP, these scenarios must also be integrated with the sales force agenda (in order to integrate video or telephone calls in particular).
  • Pillar #3: the synthetic restitution of a client’s commitment
  • Scoring that is increasingly mixed with artificial intelligence and that all solutions (SEP, CRM, and SFA) are now after.

An almost indispensable solution when you want to grow

In concrete terms, in the daily life of users, the practical benefits can be quickly perceived:

  • Sales intelligence is increased tenfold (recording of calls, demonstrations, restitution, and KAIA analysis)
  • Marketing intelligence is essential, involving collaborative work on sequences, content, and more
  • Managers have new types of reporting (tasks, activities, time)
  • Emails are sent by your sales inboxes (decrease in spam, improvement of deliverability, opening rate, and more)
  • The sales team’s work is simplified and structured

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:

  • Upscale your marketing, sales, and support initiatives
  • Improve the employee and user experience
  • Analyze actions thoroughly
  • Personalize communications at a finer level

Key pillar of the Sales Engagement Platform: integration with third-party tools

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).

Lemlist

Lemlist

Salesloft

salesloft

Calendly

Calendly

Letsignit

Platform Letsignit

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.

About the author
Amandine is the Head of Acquisition at Letsignit! Initially a content specialist, she now actively contributes to the profitability of acquisition channels: SEO, SEA, SMA, SMO... Amandine is also one of the pillars of Marketing at Letsignit! For more than 5 years, she has been participating in and initiating marketing projects and campaigns that systematically reflect her vision, writing style, and creativity (which can also be seen in all of her colorful outfits that brighten up the day of everyone she meets).
About Letsignit
With Letsignit email signature manager, connect with your audience in a way that's on-brand and personal, while driving quality lead generation.
Frequently
asked questions
1
Is it possible to track the number of clicks on email signatures?

Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.

You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.

If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.

2
Can we add links to social networks, our website, and appointment-setting applications such as Calendly?

With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.

And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.

3
Can employees update their signature information themselves (number, function, etc.)?

It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.

This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.

4
Why it is important to standardize our email signatures on a large scale to ensure our identity and brand image?

It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!

A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.

With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.

5
What is the user experience like for our employees?

What is the user experience like for our employees?

  • If you opt for the Letsignit Add-in for Outlook, they will have a dedicated space in their Outlook account where they will be able to view the signatures and campaigns assigned to them.
  • If you opt for the Letsignit Desktop APP, they will be able to preview all their signatures and campaigns in this space. If they want to change their default signature to another one when sending an email, this will be done in their signature library in Outlook.

In both cases:

  • They preview their signature before sending an email and choose from signatures assigned to them.
  • Based on the permissions granted, they will also be able to modify their personal information such as their name, position, or address in these spaces.

In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.

6
Can my employees have multiple signatures available to them?

With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.

Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:

Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.

7
Regarding “Green IT,” have you implemented measures to limit the digital footprint of email signatures?

If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.

As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:

  • Optimization of the weight of signatures and campaigns in emails.
  • Green features: lightening of signatures during response/transfer emails, possibility of not embedding images, implementation of lighter signatures for internal exchanges.
  • Integration of a 'Switch to Teams' widget to encourage your employees to continue their exchanges via chat, rather than email.

As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.

8
Regarding “Green IT,” have you implemented measures to limit the digital footprint of email signatures?

If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.

As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:

  • Optimization of the weight of signatures and campaigns in emails.
  • Green features: lightening of signatures during response/transfer emails, possibility of not embedding images, implementation of lighter signatures for internal exchanges.
  • Integration of a 'Switch to Teams' widget to encourage your employees to continue their exchanges via chat, rather than email.

As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.

Frequently
asked questions
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