In a tough economy and with potential customers clutching onto their budgets, sales teams are expected to do more with less every day. And since it’s impossible to make new amazing leads appear out of thin air, sales leaders are better off focusing on what they can control – their tool stack. One of the most useful sales tools out there is a sales engagement platform.
If your team is struggling to get more sales out of their current lead lists, sales engagement platforms can help maximize their communication efforts and close more deals. We’re going to show you what sales engagement platforms are, why they’re beneficial, as well as our top picks you can use to get started.
What is a sales engagement platform?
A sales engagement platform is a sales tool that helps sales reps automate and optimize interactions with customers. These platforms give sales teams a centralized dashboards where they can keep track of whom they reached out to, when and with what kind of message.
Sales engagement platforms provide an easy way to achieve better sales results while keeping your sales team small and efficient.
The benefits of using sales engagement platforms
If you already use a CRM, you may think you have all the sales engagement software you need. However, there are some unique benefits of using the best sales engagement platforms.
Multichannel communication
A sales engagement platform combines multiple communication channels in one. For example, your sales reps can communicate via email, social media platforms, phone calls, live chat and other places, all from a single dashboard.
There are two benefits to multichannel communication. First, you have all the communication in one place, allowing sales development teams to catch up on who said what and when. The second is that your sales reps can choose which communication channels work the best for which customer type.
Automation
A sales engagement platform can do the heavy lifting and automate the most tedious parts of sales communication. Following up with sales leads, scheduling appointments and logging interactions – these are some of the many things that typically take hours if you do them manually.
Within your sales engagement platform, you can pick what interactions to automate and what triggers a new message that goes out from your sales team.
Personalized communication
The best customer interactions are those where the communication is personalized according to customers’ characteristics and preferences. You may have all of this sales intelligence, but using it through manual outreach can be daunting.
Sales engagement platforms help sales team use the existing information about their customers to personalize every interaction.
For example, the sales engagement platform could grab the info from your CRM that a lead is a small business owner and send them a personalized email, offering budget-friendly solutions with a clearer ROI. Meanwhile, an enterprise business would get a different type of message.
Analytics and reporting
You no longer have to rack your brains to figure out which cold email or SMS campaign performs the best. A sales engagement platform analyzes the performance of different channels, campaigns, subject lines and even individual sales reps.
This helps you choose better communication channels, split test elements such as subject lines and find better ways to reach your target audience.
Integrations with CRMs
Sales engagement platforms are good for precisely that – engagement. You still need a capable CRM to keep track of all of your customer information, including their preferred communication channels. Modern sales engagement platforms integrate with the most popular CRM tools, saving your sales reps even more precious time.
Lead scoring
As sales leaders know, not all leads are created equal. Your entire sales organization can benefit from lead scoring features that typically come with a sales engagement platform. These tools score the leads based on their likelihood to convert, which shortens your sales cycle and improves the overall sales productivity.
Top features sales teams should look for in sales engagement platforms
Besides having an acceptable price tag, there are some key features that every good sales engagement platform should have. Here is what you should watch out for.
Multichannel communication – the sales engagement platform should support a large variety of channels, such as email, SMS, live chat, social media, etc.
Workflow management – the ability to create and manage communication workflows for sales teams
A/B testing features – the ability to split test sales campaigns based on various criteria, allowing sales reps to improve their sales performance
Call recording and analytics – if the sales engagement platform supports phone calls, it should have features for recording calls and analyzing call performance
CRM integration – your sales engagement platform should connect to the CRM you use
Content management – a central data repository for storing and managing sales intelligence information
Automation – the ability to automate mundane tasks such as followups, scheduling and data entry
Best sales engagement platforms to try in 2024
With all of that out of the way, let’s show you some tools that will make every sales rep more effective at their job and help you engage prospects and earn more revenue.
1. Woodpecker
While Woodpecker is first and foremost a tool for cold emails, it’s also an amazing sales engagement platform. If you want to try out new sales tactics in 2024, cold email is the route to go and Woodpecker can help you both automate and personalize the process at the same time.
Woodpecker can warm up your inbox, monitor your deliverability, validate the emails to make sure they are legitimate and then personalize each email based on your customer relationship management tool data.
Speaking of which, Woodpecker plays well with Hubspot, Zoho, and Pipedrive, among others, making sure your CRM data is accurate so you can personalize communications with ease.
If sales email is not your preferred channel, you can also use Woodpecker for your LinkedIn outreach activities. Eliminate the manual tasks of sending messages and followups and let us take care of the multiple touches on this platform.
Pricing: $37 per month for the Sales Assistant module with 500 contacted prospects per month. Send more pipeline to your sales team with our tool – entirely free to get started!
2. Hubspot Sales Hub
If you’re already using Hubspot’s CRM, there is no reason to look for sales engagement platforms other than their sales hub.
Their sales engagement software is one of the top choices for businesses that want to have it all in one place. There is a central prospecting hub where you can choose which contacts to reach out to and how.
When it comes to emails, there are email templates you can use to get started. There is an AI tool for drafting emails and sales cadences if your reps get stuck, too – and it works for writing calls to action as well.
There are phone capabilities too, and Hubspot allows you to track and record calls, as well as automatically log them in the CRM.
All of this advanced automation comes at a price. While there is a free plan and a Starter one at $18 per month, you’re more than likely to have to opt for the Profesional at $450 monthly.
3. Salesloft
Calling themselves the “leading sales engagement platform”, Salesloft sets the bar high from the very start.
It covers various communication channels, from email to socials, and helps your sales teams identify gaps and automate their sales activities so they can focus on closing more deals.
It’s one of the few platforms that stress their use of artificial intelligence. In Salesloft, that means that the tool interprets how someone is moving in the buyer’s journey and tells your team when to move in and close the deal.
In true enterprise software fashion, the pricing is nowhere to be found, so you’re going to have to get in touch to get a quote.
4. Mailshake
This sales engagement platform is all about email and some phone communication. Mailshake helps you automate and refine your cold email outreach using personalized email messaging.
There are plenty of tools to help you get there – the data finder that helps you find the contact details of potential buyers, the AI email writer, the deliverability tool for improving your email metrics and others. You can automate both the email creation and the followups and tell your sales team to jump in once manual action becomes necessary.
At $58 per month per one seat, it’s pretty expensive compared to tools like Woodpecker, but it may be worth giving it a spin.
5. Klenty
Like Mailshake with extra features, Klenty helps you with various interactions across email, social media and phone.
This is more than a sales engagement platform – it’s a sales execution platform that helps you find prospect data and then capitalize on it with cold emails and outreach messages.
Once your foot is through the door, Klenty can help you schedule meetings and log customer interactions directly in the tool. You can record and transcribe calls with one click of a button.
Prices start as low as $50 per user per month, but you may need to opt for pricier plans to get all the features required by your team.
6. Zendesk Sell
Just like Hubspot, this popular sales CRM has a sales engagement platform you can benefit from. And if you’re already using the CRM, this is the next logical choice. And given the rich feature set, you won’t be making a mistake with Zendesk Sell.
You can use the platform to see where customers are in their customer journey and then create personalized outreach tactics for a more efficient sales process. Zendesk knows where the contact is in the customer lifecycle and it nudges your sales team to go out and get in touch.
Pricing is a bit tricky because it starts at $19 per month but Zendesk forces you to purchase a license for 5 agents and pay for a year up front, racking up the lowest cost to $1,140 per year.
7. Clearbit
If you have some CRM data, but not all of it, Clearbit is the tool to make your sales process more efficient.
Clearbit takes a look at your existing contact data and enriches it. For example, if you have someone’s email and company name, Clearbit can add the company industry and employee headcount, making it easier for sales teams to prioritize whom to reach out to first.
And you don’t have to do that yourself either. Thanks to advanced sales technology, Clearbit can score leads based on the data it provides and combines with what you already have. This is the one platform that can both give you contact info and determine the buying intent for each customer.
Unfortunately, pricing is not available publicly.
8. Apollo.io
Looking to get more prospects and sales but no idea where to start? Apollo has a database of over 275 million leads from different countries and industries. All you have to do is choose your ideal customers and you can find all of their contact data in a single interface in Apollo.
Based on the data you provide, Apollo’s AI algorithm can score leads and tell you which ones to reach out first. And it can even build out pipelines for you, explaining which core channel to use for communication and where to get started.
At $49 per user per month, it’s a good deal too.
9. Freshsales
Part of the Freshworks family of products, Freshsales is an AI-powered CRM that helps your team get more sales with the data you already have, improving customer experience in the process.
Their AI assistant Freddy takes a look at your contact database, gives you suggestions on how to segment it and where to reach out to those customers, using an email cadence or another channel.
Ease of use is the name of the game and Freshsales allows you to get a Kanban overview of your pipeline and sales activities. This makes it easier for sales leaders to get an overview of all their activities as well as monitor the performance of individual sales reps.
At $15 per user per month, you get a lot of features in a powerful package.
10. Zoho SalesIQ
Competing with the likes of Hubspot and Salesforce, Zoho is one of the top competitors in the CRM arena for decades now. If you’re looking for a sales engagement platform that works well with your website, this is our top pick.
SalesIQ adjusts the messaging on your website based on who is viewing it – and then engages prospects with a live chat feature. You can then get deep analytics insights about what performs best on your website and which visitors are ready to get contacted and sold to.
It costs just $7 per user per month to get started.
11. Vanillasoft
Get higher visibility over your sales process and find out where to put more focus with Vanillasoft.
This app gives you real-time access to your sales data, allowing you to track leads and sales processes and ensuring no good lead falls through the cracks.
With autodialing and lead routing, your sales team can determine which leads to call first and then call them quickly, without wasting time on manual research and prospecting.
Unfortunately, there is no publicly available pricing.
12. Capsule CRM
Capsule CRM offers a straightforward and efficient approach to managing customer relationships.
It’s user-friendly, making it easy for teams to track customer interactions and sales processes. The platform’s clear layout helps you see the customer journey from start to finish. Customization is a key feature, allowing you to adapt the tool to your specific business needs. With its affordable pricing, Capsule CRM provides a practical solution for businesses looking for an effective, no-nonsense CRM system.
Wrapping up
Helping your sellers engage effectively with their leads starts with investing in the right tools and processes. Using sales engagement platforms helps you unlock more deals from your existing lead lists and maximizes the efficiency of your sales team.
Choosing the right sales engagement platform can feel like a maze, but it all boils down to choosing something that supports sales enablement rather than creating more work for your revenue teams.
At Woodpecker, we can help you create connections with your customers so you can break through the noise and skyrocket your closed deals. Sign up today and try Woodpecker for free!