All leading sales engagement platforms employ at least some sales automation tools, but they differ in where and how automation can be deployed, as well as their depth and effectiveness.
A sales engagement platform that integrates with a company's customer relationship management (CRM) solution like Salesforce and offers sales automation to assist revenue teams and sales leaders is critical in a business world coping with the effects of the pandemic, rising inflation, and the Great Resignation. More than 50% of B2B sales professionals have experienced increased workloads during the pandemic, according to a survey conducted by the sales engagement platform Groove.
As their workloads have grown, sales professionals' workflows have also been disrupted. With many sales teams working remotely and in-person meetings a rarity, more companies have turned to CRMs, sales engagement platforms, and their corresponding automation functionalities to help manage the sales funnel.
Nearly half of the sales professionals surveyed by Groove said they have adopted sales automation technology to cope with this new normal. To ensure that sales teams maximize the ROI of their CRMs and sales engagement platforms, it's essential to consider a few key automation capabilities.
Multi-channel campaign automation
Multi-channel campaign automation allows for the creation of automated multi-step messaging flows from multiple channels. The following are some essential campaign automation features:
Automated flows
Sales professionals need to spend more time engaged with leads and less time stuck in repetitive processes. A state-of-the-art sales engagement platform allows flows to be personalized using existing fields or attributes within its CRM—even custom objects.
A quality sales engagement platform should support automated flows—aka sequences or cadences—across email, short message service (SMS), calls, meetings, and LinkedIn InMails and Connection requests. It should be scalable and collaborative and allow relevant customization to suit a sales team's unique needs.
In Groove, for example, these flows can be implemented right from Gmail, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, or the Groove app. Activating these sequences enables sales professionals to add new leads to different flows automatically, which helps ensure they engage with every prospect and respond to each inquiry.
A/B testing
Automated split testing, or A/B testing, allows sales professionals to identify what flows work effectively and what sequences need to be adjusted.
A sales engagement platform should administer testing across multiple templates and subject lines and assess multiple template variations in a single test. Sales teams should be able to view engagement analytics at the individual and account levels and access detailed metrics regarding flow performance.
Workflow management automation
An advanced sales engagement platform will also sync with its corresponding CRM to automatically update various sales activities to streamline workflow. The following are some essential campaign workflow management automation features:
Email and calendar logging
Your sales engagement platform should automate the capture and logging of vital email, LinkedIn, calendar, and meeting activities to a CRM such as Salesforce. It should also provide easy personalization controls over which activities are synced and which aren't so users can exclude internal or personal messages.
An enterprise sales engagement platform should be able to automatically link activities to the appropriate leads or accounts and auto add new business contacts to Salesforce who are copied on emails or appear on meeting invitations. Your sales engagement platform should empower sales professionals to utilize templates to generate automatic follow-up messages and it should provide data on messaging volume and success rates.
Some sales engagement platforms further permit sales teams to automate when to move prospects through the sales pipeline via preset triggers.
Auto-dial and call logging
Workflow management automation also extends to calls and call logging.
Groove’s OmniDialer, for instance, offers reliable, single-click dialing from any web page or through Salesforce. It has the ability to record each call and notify the caller if the number requires consent from the recipient to record. It can also automatically log call activity, transcripts, and notes to Salesforce.
Additionally, Groove provides the ability to click a phone number to send SMS or MMS messages from a personal inbox, or through Salesforce or the Groove app. Sales representatives can also receive email notifications when prospects respond to these messages.
Sales engagement platform automation benefits
Automation is not a one-and-done task and practical automation must incorporate all the work processes that revenue-generating teams rely on. With workloads increasing and working paradigms shifting, the sales teams that are poised for success are the ones that embrace essential and functional automation.
And the advantages of automation within a sales engagement platform aren't limited to the obvious. Yes, platforms like Groove can save your sales team time and allow them to focus on high-value tasks that drive revenue. But they also provide data-backed insights that sales leaders and sales representatives can leverage to improve productivity and profitability.
An enterprise-grade sales engagement platform can process massive volumes of data quickly within Salesforce or other CRM to produce usable analytics. Sales teams can monitor their overall reach, lead qualification rate, call effectiveness, conversion rate, and other crucial metrics in real time.
Optimize your sales efforts with Groove
Groove is an innovative sales engagement platform that features abundant automation opportunities and is created to work with a company's current Salesforce CRM.
A leader in sales engagement platform technology, Groove was named to the most recent Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies in the United States and won the 2022 TrustRadius Awards for Best Feature Set and Best Relationship.
Groove has also garnered acclaim for its customer service. It has been voted the top-ranked sales engagement platform on G2 for 13 consecutive quarters and counting.
To learn how Groove can fuel your sales team to reach its potential, visit our Solutions page or connect with us today.