Best Sales Engagement Platform

What is Sales Engagement Platform

Sales Engagement Platform is a type of software that helps you automate the sales process through cold email outreach. In most cases, such services are used in the B2B enterprise sales process. Also, this kind of service can be called cold email software, cold outreach software, email outreach software, sales enablement software, sales automation software, automate cold email, etc.

It's important to understand that the main goal of such software is to establish contacts with potential prospects. Basically, the sales process is built through email and Linkedin.

Email outreach vc Email marketing apps

Very often people confuse email marketing with cold email outreach. These are two different tools that work via email. But they have completely different goals. Email marketing is all about retention leads in a funnel. Email marketing is about inbound marketing when the user himself left you contact information and allowed you to send letters. You can read more about email marketing here.

Cold outreach is when you find an email on the Internet and try to establish contact by yourself. These are cold, outbound sales. Email marketing is often used by marketers. Cold outreach is used by salespeople. In email marketing, you can send one email to 10,000 subscribers at once. In outreach, you can send no more than 100 emails per day (you need to find out how many emails per day your email provider allows you to send). Email marketing is about mass mailings, outreach is about drip marketing.

From a technical point of view, this software is also different. In email marketing, you send emails and these emails are sent from the vendor's email server. Outreach emails are sent from your personal Gmail or SMTP server. For example, in email marketing, on the technical side, the sender will be the email vendor (list of vendors). In outreach, the final sender will be Gmail (Gsuite) or another email provider.

Email design is also different. Email marketing is usually used with images, buttons, links, etc. The user understands that this email isn't personal.

Example:

In outreach, the email looks like a personal one. As a result, the user thinks that the email was written manually, especially for him.

Example:

Thus, email marketing and cold outreach are very similar at first glance, but they are very different both from the business goals and from the technical side.

Sales Management Software vs CRM

These terms are very similar, and the problem is that vendors want to be different from each other and come up with categories themselves. Someone says that they are "Sale engagement platform", someone says that they are "Sale management platform". It confuses the end consumer. That's why we write this manual. CRM (customer relationship management) is about managing the sales process. Sales management software or cold outreach software is about networking.

The main tool in cold outreach is sending emails. A key function in CRM is a kanban board with deal stages and customer cards. In CRM, you put notes, schedule a call, set reminders, and tasks. You don't automatically send a series of emails from CRM. In cold email outreach software, you set up a chain of emails that will be automatically sent at a specific frequency. Ideally, you should send emails, and when someone answers you, the system sends data to CRM and creates a new lead and deal in your pipeline.

CRM and Sale Management Software work together, not replace each other. Some CRMs have outreach functionality. Some outreach software has CRM functionality. Your task is to understand the difference between business processes. Then you can easily select the tool you want. CRM is about managing existing leads, Cold outreach is about communication, sales, and finding new leads.

Which companies should use Sales Enablement Software

In most cases, this type of sales is used by companies in B2B sales, in all directions: SMB, Midmarket, and Enterprise, but it works best in Midmarket and Enterprise. In this type of sales, email is the main form of communication. If your Customer avatar is a small eCommerce business, the contact details of such a customer are easier to get through Google ads, Facebook ads, etc. In SMB, people use little corporate mail. They use free mailboxes like [email protected]. CAC (Customer acquisition cost) in SMB is small and customers can be found in large numbers.

If your client is a Midmarket company or Enterprise, attracting such clients becomes more difficult and expensive. Due to the narrow specifics, the cost of advertising will be 10-100 times more expensive than in SMB, and therefore some companies use cold outreach.

Also in Midmarket and Enterprise, the corporate email [email protected] is the standard of communication and every employee checks it every day. Thus, reaching a decision-maker through email is easier than through paid advertising. Of course, there are different cases, and we'll talk about them further.

Cold email outreach exists because it's almost impossible to catch certain people from the B2B segment on the Internet. Example. You provide web development software. Your customer avatar is a young startup that has received funding. How will you catch them in Google ads? This is unreal. But you can go to a website that lists startups that have received funding. Then find the founders' emails and start the Cold email outreach process. This is in line with the GDPR if the data was found in open sources.

Basically, this sales process is used by companies that want to sell something in the B2B segment.

Who uses Sales Management Platforms

• B2B salespersons
• Journalist
• Link builders for SEO
• Content creators
• Recruiters

The cold email outreach process

Let's understand the whole path of the cold outreach process. To automate this process, you need other categories of software that work in tandem with the Sales Engagement Platform. In order to start sending emails, you need to have the email of the person we need. How can you do it? There's an entire category of software for this purpose.

• Email finder software

  Email finder software is a certain type of tool that allows you to find corporate email if the user has left it publicly available. For example, you want to find contact information for Microsoft employees, use a tool from this category, type in a domain name and the app looks for emails of Microsoft employees. On average, the system finds 75-80% of contacts that were in the public domain. There are special tools. This category is responsible for the business process of finding emails for your prospectuses.

  There are many guides on how to find your prospects' contact information. Now, it's important to understand in general how the outreach process works. The most important thing is to create the perfect Customer avatar or The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Understand which companies can buy a product from you. Understand who the decision-maker is. And only after that try to find his contacts.

• Sales intelligence software (Data enrichment software)

  After a lead has been received, the task of the seller is to find out as much information as possible about this lead. The more complex your sales process is, the more information you need. In some cases, you only have one chance to write an email to the right person and you need to have unique information for maximum results.

  These kinds of services enrich data from different sources. For example, they can tell you how many people work in this company, how much investment they raised, what their revenue is, what software they use, etc. Before that, you know that the client's name is John and he works for "BestCompany". After using such software, you will know much more information about John than he knows about himself.

• CRM systems

  After you send a series of automated emails, someone will reply to you. At this stage, the prospect becomes a lead. This is a specific user who is interested in your product and is ready for further dialogue. At this stage, the sales manager begins to write emails manually from the customer card in CRM. In most cases, at this stage, mailing through the cold outreach software is finished.

• Email verification tools

  After you've found the contact details of your prospects, you need to verify them. You drive the found emails into such services, and they show how likely the email is to be valid or not. This will help you reduce your bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate, you are more likely to get into SPAM. This category is responsible for the business process of verification and the validity of emails.

• Cold outreach tools

  Cold outreach tools help you automate the whole process of automatic email sending. It's about this category of apps that you've read on this page. This category is responsible for the business process of sending emails.

Outreach vs SPAM

Good outreach is different from spam. Spam is when you send useless information. For example "play online casino" or something like that. Sometimes people don't know what they need and your task is to explain it to them. And if you do a good job with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), you'll send the right emails to the right people.

If you send cold emails, it doesn't mean that people don't need your product. They haven't known about it yet. Let's say your customer avatar is a CMO of a large company. It would be logical to offer him services that help automate marketing and speed up the work of the department. Even if he knows nothing about them, this doesn't mean that he doesn't need them. But it will be strange for the marketing director to receive emails with an offer to change the windows in the office.

Related software categories

• Email address finder
• CRM
• Email tracking software
• Email verification
• LinkedIn outreach tool

Sale Management Software benefits

• Automation of sending cold emails
• Sending 100+ emails per day
• Personalization in emails
• Takes away routine processes
• Follow-ups
• Integration with CRM and other categories of software