You’ve probably seen the term “CRM” thrown around a lot when discussing sales and just business in general. Customer relationship management or CRM is seen as a necessary part of any company’s operations for maintaining customer relations and driving sales.
CRM usually comes in the form of software that houses customer information in a database. It compiles this data from interaction with the customer, whether through telephone, email, live chat, social media, or through the company’s website.
The goal of CRM is to help you understand your customers better, so you can provide them with fine-tuned products and services that match their needs. CRM can also help establish thepreferred communication channels and methods to communicate with customers.
CRM vs. Sales Engagement
While CRM is all about the way you manage relationships with your customers, sales engagement is all about the way you start them. That’s why it’s important to learn about the sales engagement process if you want to have customers to manage to begin with.
Many businesses utilize a sales engagement platform (SEP) to convert leads into customers more effectively. Companies need togive reps the tools they need to effectively and productively prospect for leads, contact, and qualify them.
Sales software makes the gap between finding a prospect and making a sale smaller and easier to navigate. You can expect a number of features, like:
- Queue-based routing and dynamic prioritization
- Progressive automatic dialing
- Email and SMS marketing engagement and management
- Workflow and cadence automation
- Lead and sales tracking
- Reporting and insight tools
- Logical-branch scripting
- Call recording and VoIP
- Appointment setting with automatic reminders
You won’t get these kinds of features from your typical customer relationship management system, which is instead meant to store data and analyze customer trends.
Why You Need Sales Engagement
With sales engagement software, reps are ensured that they are targeting the right leads, approaching them correctly, and following up on time. Too many reps say that they miss out on following up with leads, and many end up slipping through the cracks.
By providing appointment settings and reminders, as well as a shared calendar, this technology enables reps to manage their time effectively so that no lead ever gets neglected. Without it, it would be impossible to manage so many prospects – especially when they are all at different stages of engagement.
Teams that use a SEPhave the upper-hand compared to the other guys who may only have a customer relationship management platform and automated marketing tools. Sales engagement bridges the gap between the two – you start with marketing, then sales engagement, and then you end up needing CRM.
Without it, how will you effectively follow up on marketing efforts? How will you find the best leads based on marketing data? In a world where sales and marketing teams need to work together more and more, SEP is the answer to creating coordinated efforts that produce the most effective results.
