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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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

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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

Salesloft

Calendly

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.