In a world with abundant distractions, properly engaging your sales prospects is more important than ever.
When you have a disjointed sales process, your prospect gets conflicting messages, gets confused, and ultimately gets cold feet.
This is where sales engagement platforms shine.
Now, with technology, you can coordinate your communications through multiple channels and within your organization seamlessly.
In organizations that I’ve worked with, the ones that make sales engagement a priority close more deals and are often less stressed when doing it.
In this article, we compiled a list of the best sales engagement platforms on the market. We will also discuss what makes a good sales engagement platform and how to choose one that will help you close deals and skyrocket your revenue.
What Are the Best Sales Engagement Platforms?
Sales engagement platforms are a key tool for sales teams, providing a way to manage customer relationships and interact with prospects. The best sales engagement platforms will have features like CRM integrations, multiple engagement channels (call, email, chat, etc.), workflow automations, and productivity tools. These features help sales teams to be more efficient and effective in their outreach efforts.
Without a good CRM integration, you’ll be fumbling around with customer data, and wasting time while creating customer profiles from scratch.
Integrating with a CRM system allows sales engagement platforms to automatically keep track of interactions and update customer profiles on the fly. This dramatically speeds up sales reps’ workflow, and provides a complete view of the customer journey, making it easy to pick up on trends and focus on making more sales.
Multi-channel engagement ensures that sales reps can reach customers through the right channel at the right time – whether that’s a phone call, email, or chat. Sales engagement platforms help unify these communications into one seamless customer experience.
And finally, productivity tools like contact lists, calendar integrations, and workflow automations help sales teams eliminate repetitive tasks, stay organized, and free up more time for personal interactions.
Sales engagement platforms all have their unique strengths. This list of best sales engagement platforms includes solutions that meet these criteria so you have a good selection to choose from.
1. Groove
Overview
Groove is Salesforce native sales engagement and productivity platform. The Groove suite of sales productivity tools are built to integrate into your sales processes and modernize your workflows.
Highlights
- Search account history, access LinkedIn profiles, automate meeting scheduling, log activities directly in Salesforce
- associate events with custom fields including meeting types, notes, outcomes and next steps
- Track customer interactions and calls and automatically log transcripts into Salesforce
- Personalized multichannel campaign automation
- Custom workflows and templates
- Advanced activity capture and administrative reporting
- Salesforce integration
Pricing
- contact sales to request a demo
Bottom Line
Groove is a powerful and intuitive platform for sales engagement. Their productivity tools integrate seamlessly with Salesforce and give your sales team the tools they need to get the job done. Additionally, they offer professional services packages dedicated to customer success so you will always have help getting the most out of the platform. The Groove sales engagement platform is worth checking out if your company uses Salesforce.
2. Freshsales
Overview
Freshsales is a sales engagement customer relationship management system. The Freshsales system automates integral sales processes such as outreach, tracking, and forecasting. Freshsales is part of the wider Freshworks suite of business solutions.
Highlights
- Capture visitor information with customizable Web Forms
- AI-powered chatbots to chat with website visitors real-time
- Communicate seamlessly on a cross-channel “activity timeline” and gain complete context on the complete customer engagement
- dynamic forecasting and AI-powered sales insights
- Sales campaign automation
- External app integrations including Gmail, Quickbooks, Slack, Outlook and more
- 21-day free trial
Pricing
- Free
- Growth $15/month
- Pro $39/month
- Enterprise $69/month
Bottom Line
Freshbooks is a great platform for sales teams that want to integrate a few processes into their wider sales system as well as get a fully functioning platform. The free plan can help you get organized with built-in chat, email, and phone communications. As you scale and want to integrate your sales process more, you can easily move up the Growth, Pro, and enterprise options.
3. Mixmax
Overview
Mixmax is a Google Gsuite and Salesforce-centric sales engagement platform. Use click integrations to streamline and automate workflows that are central to your sales team’s productivity. Track engagements, communicate across channels, schedule meetings, and integrate with your CRM system.
Highlights
- Track emails and get insights on deliverability, open rates, and more
- Integrate with CRM systems such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, Copper, or Greenhouse
- Create personalized email templates using CRM data
- Streamline sales calls with in-app dialing, automatic call logging, and Chrome dialer extension
- Intuitive calendar integrated meeting scheduler
- workflow automation
- Add team members to email and chat to collaborate on customer engagements
- 14-day full access free trial
Pricing
- Free
- SMB $24/month
- Growth $49/month
- Growth + Salesforce $69/month
- Enterprise Custom Pricing
Bottom Line
Mixmax is great for small startups all the way up to Enterprise level companies that use Gmail or Salesforce for sales. The platform fits in with Gmail functionality nicely so your sales team can hit the ground running without reinventing their workflows. With a 14-day free trial and a free option, Mixmax gives you lots of latitudes to try it out and scale into the higher plans as you develop a need for more features.
4.SalesLoft
Overview
Salesloft is a comprehensive CRM-integrated sales engagement system. Use the complex APIs available to hookup the Salesloft suite of engagement tools to your CRM of choice. Track calls, automate workflows, synch calendars, and easily engage with prospects at every touch point imaginable.
Highlights
- Orchestrate complex workflows with sales activity automation and templates
- use the phone dialer and messenger to track and log calls into the CRM
- track sales rep activity across platforms
- synch calendar for quick and easy meeting scheduling
- 160+ partner integrations with CRMs, email tools, Scheduling software, and other API platforms
- Improve productivity and revenues using advanced analytics and forecasting
Pricing
- Prospect – Contact sales for custom pricing
- Enterprise – Contact sales for custom pricing
Bottom Line
The Salesloft suite has pretty much everything you could need in a sales engagement platform. They have built out a system with all the bells and whistles that help your sales team in their daily activities. Because the system is comprehensive (rather than an add-on to other applications), there will be some learning in order to fit Salesloft functionality into your organization. But once you have it up and running, the sky is the limit for what you can do.
5. Hubspot Sales Hub
Overview
Hubspot Sales Hub is a CRM-integrated sales engagement platform. As part of the wider Hubspot suite of products, Sales Hub offers a host of engagement tools to help your sales team speed up their workflow and close more deals. Unique features include in-app meeting capabilities and a secure payment platform.
Highlights
- preset workflows to make calls, send emails and enroll contacts
- Live chat, in-app meetings, and video functionality
- personalized email templates and email tracking
- Configure, Price, Quote tool
- Sales process automation
- Secure payment with an in-CRM payment system
- reporting and AI analytics insights
- 1600+ app integrations
- Hubspot community and customer success team for software support
Pricing
- Free
- Starter $45/month
- Professional $450/month
- Enterprise $1200/month
Bottom Line
Hubspot is a popular CRM in the modern digital sales space. Their tools are touted as intuitive solutions to the most challenging aspects of implementing a sales process. The Hubspot Sales Hub is a great addition to the Hubspot software stable. You get all fancy sales engagement functionally offered in other platforms plus a few extras – such as accepting payments directly in-app.
The main limitation of Sales Hub is that it is built on the back of the Hubspot CRM system. However, adding on Sales Hub is a no-brainer for companies that have already committed to using Hubspot for their customer relationship management.
What Is a Sales Engagement Platform?
A sales engagement platform is software that helps sales representatives manage their customer interactions. It provides a way to dynamically engage with customers, track and store customer data, as well as schedule and automate sales activities.
Sales engagement platforms have many beneficial features such as tools for managing leads, opportunities, and tasks. These tools help sales reps to stay organized and efficient as they interact with increasingly larger prospect bases.
Some sales engagement platforms use multi-channel communications such as email and live chat to create a more personal connection with customers. Automation can help balance both personalization and scalability through repeatable workflows.
Sales engagement platforms can help sales organizations better understand their customers, by providing insights into customer behavior. Gathering in-depth data on the daily interactions between sales and customers can help improve efficiency and optimize future interactions.
Summary
Sales engagement platforms are a key tool for any business looking to increase its sales and reach its target audience. By providing customers with relevant, personalized content and communication at each stage of the sales process, businesses can keep their customers engaged throughout the entire journey and ultimately close more deals.
With some of these platforms offering free trials, there is no reason to keep putting off this aspect of your sales process. Get the best sales engagement platform that has the right base features for you, and start building with additional features as your sales team grows.
