How To Book More Meetings Using a Sales Engagement Platform?

Every business wants more sales.
Chances are if you are currently reading this, you are also looking for ways to increase your sales. If you are selling a B2B(Business-to-Business) service or product, your sales achievement majorly depends on the meetings you book with a prospect. 

Booking meetings with the right kind of people and delivering them the right message at the right time plays a key role in your revenue generation process. Seems overwhelming, don’t worry. This article will help improve your sales performance by helping you book more meetings using a Sales Engagement Platform. Some of these tools like SmartReach.io charge as per usage so its not an expensive solution

Take a look at the statistics.

As per HubSpot research, 47% of sales leaders say one of the key signs of productivity is the frequency of sales tool use. 

This statistic shows that sales teams are increasingly using technology to improve their productivity and book more meetings. It also gives a sense that a sales tool would be nice to level up your sales game.

Sales Engagement Platforms can help you plan, execute, track and optimize engagement with your customers. 

But exactly how do they do that?

And what is this “Sales Engagement Platform?” 

Most importantly, will a sales engagement platform help you book more client meetings? 

Well, you’ll know all of those in a minute. Keep reading.

What is a Sales Engagement Platform?

For those of you who don’t know (and for those of you who know), a Sales Engagement Platform, according to Gartner is “..a  single interface.. to efficiently plan, execute, track, measure and optimize interactions between customers and sales across multiple touches and channels.”

Sounds complicated?

We also hate business Lingo. So, Let’s cut the fluff. 

Simply put: it’s a tool that helps salespeople talk to more people and book more meetings. Essentially, this tool enables sales departments to efficiently deliver high-quality interactions with prospects and customers at scale. 

And to be able to book more meetings, engagement is essential especially in case of B2B service/product businesses where sales cycles are comparatively long and include multiple stakeholders. 

To book more meetings, sales reps need to interact with more people, specifically leads (as they love to call it) within an organization. In a sales engagement platform these interactions can take many shapes- email, whatsapp, calling, linkedin outreach or even sms. 

Let’s call these interactions ‘touchpoints’. Through a sales engagement platform sales reps can maximize outreach via multiple touchpoints. Not only that, they can automate the whole process of outreach with just a few clicks. Additionally, they can also monitor the performance of those touchpoints. 

And results? Increased Engagement & streamlined sales outreach process. Thus more meetings booked.  

Whether you have got a sales army or you’re a one man army, a sales engagement platform will help you automate your cold outreach process, saving you time & helping you book more appointments.

All this will make you think that it would cost you thousands of dollars in monthly cost.

Nah… with only $29 per months you could send from unlimited email accounts using tools like SmartReach.io. No per seat pricing. You only pay for what you use.

Crazy right. Want to talk to an expert?

Why is a Sales Engagement Platform important ?

A sales engagement platform is important for your business.
Before I tell you why this is important. 
Meet Bryan, an SDR at SoftMicro Inc, a product based tech company. Bryan’s typical day looks like this:

# Bryan spends about 2-3 hours everyday prospecting from Linkedin, and other sites for new leads.
# Bryan spends about an hour on verification of authenticity of the prospect emails.
# Then Bryan spends about 3-4 hours writing 70-75 personalized emails.
# Finally, he spends rest of the time on calling clients

What’s the outcome of all these activities? 

• His emails hardly fetch a significant open or reply rate on a consistent basis. 
• He’s surviving on the phone calls.(Since his emails don’t work most often)
• He fails to catch up with his weekly quotas. (and some days during the lunch break he hates his job for doing the same things everyday) 

Feel him? 

Now let me introduce you to Trevor. Trevor is a VP of Sales at SoftMicro Inc. Here’s what Trevor’s typical day looks like:

# Trevor checks the status of the deals his SDRs are cracking.
# Trevor meets some of his SDRs to discuss their performance of the week.
# Trevor reviews the latest sales reports
# Trevor works on his quarterly sales forecast 

What does he find? 

• Trevor finds that his SDRs are spending on avg 3-4 hrs everyday just crafting personalized emails. These emails are not even getting the desired response. 
• Some of his SDRs such as Bryan are not able to hit their weekly meeting booking quotas consistently. 
• While looking at the trends in the sales pipeline, he identifies so many missed opportunities in high value deals. Because some of his SDRs failed to respond on time to the prospect query.

 As per the latest sales report his team is 20% down from last month in booking meetings and overall revenue generation.

Trevor is under constant pressure to hit his team’s revenue targets.

What would you do if you were Trevor?

Chances are you have already met a person like Bryan or Trevor or both of them. All they need is the right sales engagement platform.

In fact, According to Gartner , “Sales engagement is such a high priority that 90% of sales leaders plan to invest in technologies and methodologies to help their sellers engage effectively with prospects and customers.” 

Statistics sound great. But what is the importance of this tool?

Let’s find out how sales engagement platforms can help overcome the issues faced by SDRs such as Bryan.

First of all, a Sales Engagement Platform provides multichannel outreach. This feature lets you send your message via multiple channels such as Email, Linkedin Inbox, Whatsapp, Calling and SMS. Thus, you or our friend Bryan virtually can reach out to a prospect on all the channels possible. This can increase the number of leads he can generate. 

Sales Engagement platforms provide automated solutions from outreach till reporting. That means whatever time you are spending daily in our outreach activities via linkedin, email or calling can be automated with a few clicks. Results? A SDR like Bryan can focus on his other sales activities. Automation will save your valuable time. 

Only outreach isn’t enough for your business. 

Because sales leaders like Trevor continuously need to see the results of his team’s interaction with prospects and customers on a day to day basis. That means you need to carefully examine a bunch of reports to make the best possible decisions for your business.

 A Sales engagement platform provides you with an automated analytics & reporting system. This system tracks all the activities from prospecting till the deal stage that helps to make informed decisions. 

Collaboration and accountability are essential for your business.

Sales engagement platforms help your team collaborate with each other seamlessly. You can keep track of the conversation between prospects and the SDRs. You can assign core activities such as prospecting, email outreach, replies etc. between your teams which helps you scale up your outreach process. It keeps all the client-oriented roles on the same page. 

According to analysis by Gartner, the top sales engagement platforms have a daily active user rate of over 60%, while traditional enterprise software has a daily active user rate of only 10-20%.

Investing in a sales engagement platform can help you improve your sales strategy in two ways: 

1. It will allow you to monitor all your prospect  interactions in a single place.
2. It will help you optimize your communication with the prospects.

According to case studies by G2, sales engagement platforms can help businesses book up to 15% more meetings, increase their reply rate on queries by 27%, and improve their open rate by 46%.

Sales Engagement Platforms pay for themselves

According to a study conducted by Forrester, companies using sales engagement platforms can show a 329% return on investment over a span of three years.

From the Return On Investment (ROI) perspective, sales engagement platforms pay for themselves.

 Their ability to drive revenue has quickly made them the most utilized sales technology after the traditional CRM. In fact, according to the market trends, the demand for sales engagement platforms have increased over the past. 

In the age of AI, businesses are looking for robust, automated systems that can optimize their sales plan and can also integrate well with their existing CRMs. 

And that’s precisely what a Sales Engagement Platform does for your business!

How do Sales Engagement Platforms help you book more meetings? 

If you’re a sales leader or a sales development representative, you know how challenging it can be to book more meetings with your prospects.

You have to juggle multiple communication channels, craft personalized messages, follow up at the right time, and track your performance. It can be overwhelming, time-consuming, and frustrating.

But what if there was a better way? 

A way that could help you automate, optimize, and scale your sales engagement process, while still keeping it human and personalized? 

A way that could help you book more meetings, close more deals, and grow your revenue?

To understand how it can really help you book more meetings, let’s take the example of SmartReach.io, one of the most reliable sales engagement platform. 

Multichannel outreach

In today’s cut throat business world, using multiple channels to communicate is essential. 

To book more meetings, you need to reach out to prospects through different touchpoints, such as LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp, and calling. The more channels you use, the better.

Multichannel outreach strategies increase customer engagement and conversion rates significantly.

You could add unlimited LinkedIn accounts or WhatsApp numbers and run daily sales outreach tasks via SmartReach Task Manager for only $39

• Linkedin View Profile

• Linkedin Connection Request

• Send Linkedin Message or Inmail

• Send WhatsApp Message

• Send Manual Email, Call or SMS

And if you love full Linkedin automation or calling software with power dialer then those features are also available but at an extra cost.

Eliminate the need to switch between multiple tools and platforms for your campaigns.
Create unified campaigns that target prospects across multiple channels simultaneously, ensuring consistent and coordinated messaging.

On top of that, you can add automated follow-ups across platforms and centralized responses across channels to ensure timely interactions without constant manual intervention. You could also move prospects from one campaign to another based on events. 

For example, if a prospect opened your email, you can set a workflow to move such prospects to a Linkedin outreach campaign or better still call prospects as soon as they engaged.

Smart email automation & follow-ups

A HubSpot study found that 80% of sales require at least five follow-ups. This highlights the importance of follow-ups in your outreach process, which can be done with the help of intelligent software that never forgets a task.

SmartReach’s email automation & follow-up features ensure your outreach is consistent and timely. Unlike other platforms, SmartReach provides a human-like sending automation which saves your emails from spam filters. 

• Auto Follow-Ups: SmartReach can automatically send follow-up emails to leads who have not opened your previous emails, or send targeted emails to leads who have shown interest in certain products or services.

• Email Verification: SmartReach’s automated prospect email verification ensures accurate email outreach, protecting your domain and saving your sales reps time.

• Email Warmup: SmartReach provides email warmup feature to build sender reputation making sure your emails reach prospect’s primary inbox and not the spam. Warmup is good for new email domains or addresses or if you’ve facing issues with emails going to spam. By running warmup, you set your campaigns up for success and ensure your cold emails reach the prospects you want to speak to.

• Campaign Soft-Start: Improve your sending reputation by incrementally increasing your daily sending of emails from campaigns. This ensures that more emails are delivered to your prospect’s inbox.

• Spintax: Spintax helps you create dynamic variations of a specific section within an email. You’ll love the fact that each recipient would receive a slightly different version.  This is what Spintax looks like in action. 

• Time Zone Scheduling: SmartReach adapts at different time zones. That means if you are outreaching from the US to prospects based in India, SmartReach will automatically start sending emails at the local time zone so that it receives the maximum number of open rate, reply rate etc.

• A/B Testing: The A/B testing feature allows you to add and analyze up to 5 variants of email: subject line and email body to test various content combinations. 

It saves all your time in guesswork and you are able to make more informed decisions backed by real-time data.To avoid wasting time on campaigns with uncertain effectiveness, leverage A/B testing to create more targeted communication.

There are multiple smaller email automations features to make sure you can book more meetings. 

AI generated content

According to a 2022 report published by McKinsey, 83% of companies using AI for sales and marketing saw a cost decrease, and 27% of them stated the decrease by more than 20%. 

Not only the latest AI language models help you craft compact email content but they also help you save so much time.

With SmartReach’s new AI-generated content creation feature, you can create high quality compelling email communication in seconds. You have an option to add your email context, feed your email audience info and email writing style.

This is what your AI generated email will look like in action.

SmartReach’s AI Content Generator recommends email subject lines based on your email body. 

Not only this, if you have received a sales enquiry or reply from a prospect, then you have an option to generate a response; SmartReach analyzes the context of the email thread and provides an appropriate response

Power of personalization

In order to book a meeting with a prospect, first you need to address the prospect’s whereabouts (in this case, Company Name, Prospect Name, Industry etc.) . That draws us to the concept of ‘Personalization’. 

Personalization is the first thing your prospect notices about your communication. 

According to Hubspot, 92% of customers expect a personalized experience.

Personalization impacts open rate significantly which ultimately decides if the prospect receives your message or not.

 According to a study published by Yes Lifecycle Marketing confirms this and reveals that emails with personalized subject lines get 50% higher open rates.

According to the same study, however, only 2% of emails use personalization. 

SmartReach gives you the power to personalize your cold outreach at scale with features such as:

#Merge Tags: Merge tags allow you to personalize your cold email outreach by inserting unique data from your mailing list into your emails. This makes your emails more relevant and engaging to your recipients, and can lead to higher open rates and click-through rates. 

 #Conditional Merge Tags: Write conditional statements that  hyper-personalize your communication with a prospect on the basis of the specific conditions you provide. This personalization feature will help you maximize the open rate & deliverability. 

#Custom Column: SmartReach allows you to add unlimited custom columns when uploading a prospect to SmartReach CRM or Prospect Management section. You can then use them as merge tags to take personalisation to a different level.

Example: You add custom columns like “Social Post”, “Social Platform” and “Prospect Industry” and upload the relevant personalisation data. Now, when you create you communication, you add a sentence like:
“I recently read your {{Social_Platform}} post on {{Social_Post}} and can relate how it makes a difference to the {{prospect_industry}} industry.”

Collaboration – shared inbox & integrations

• Shared Inbox: SmartReach’s Shared Inbox is a place where the entire team is present in one common inbox. Every member can read and reply to emails. This gives you complete visibility into your sales team’s interactions with prospects, empowering you to monitor deal progression and detect reply sentiment for accurate sales forecasting. 

With shared inbox you could add all you sending emails inboxes in one common or unified inbox. So if you are actively using inbox rotation then you can access all replies at one place

Shared Inbox: SmartReach’s Shared Inbox is a place where the entire team is present in one common inbox. Every member can read and reply to emails. This gives you complete visibility into your sales team’s interactions with prospects, empowering you to monitor deal progression and detect reply sentiment for accurate sales forecasting. 

The share inbox helps you to prioritize deals or prospects based on deal size or deals at risk of falling off. It also helps with reduction in sales cycle.

Thus, you engage better with your prospects and increase the chances of converting them into paying customers.

• Integration with sales tools: SmartReach provides a two way sync with leading CRMs such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho and others, so that your data is always current. This makes it easy for sales reps to stay organized and manage their workflows. 

Data driven decision making 

“Sales managers still can’t control 83% of the metrics they’re measuring.“

– Harvard Business Review

To be able to book more revenues, you need to constantly assess what’s working and what’s not in your business. 

As a result, It becomes crucial to make informed decisions based on data, numbers, statistics rather than whims and fancies. 

With SmartReach’s advanced analytics and reporting features, you’ll be able to make more informed business decisions backed by real time data that too with a few clicks!

• Team Leaderboard Report: This report provides the statistics on the performance of sales reps under a single account. It’s an essential tool for sales leaders to track the progress of their sales reps and identify areas for improvement. Also you will gain insights into the prospects assigned to each team member.

• Deal Grid Report: Deal Grid Report gives you real-time insights into account progress and deal health, helping you identify delayed follow-ups, unblock team members, prioritize high-value deals, and spot at-risk deals.

• Prospect Contacted Report: Prospect contacted reports can be used to track individual and team performance, identify trends and patterns in sales outreach, improve sales processes, and identify qualified leads.

• Progress Bar: With SmartReach’s advanced progress bar you’ll be able to view the progress of your existing campaigns and the overall status of the prospects assigned to those campaigns.     

• Hot Prospect Report: Some of your prospects have replied to your emails or opened your emails. What’s next? With SmartReach’s Hot Prospect Report feature you’ll generate a report of such prospects and start sending them personalized campaigns. Result? Better engagement and more conversion in the funnel.

• Best time to Send: With this feature you’ll be able to see what’s the best time you can send your outreach campaigns to your prospects that engage them more than usual. 

Find more detailed reports and analytics that will help you achieve your sales goals. Check out our page SmartReach.io .

Conclusion – Boosts meeting bookings

To sum it up, SmartReach boosts meeting bookings in 6 key ways:

• Multichannel Outreach: Reach prospects across multiple channels, including email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, calling, and text, to increase engagement and scale your outreach.
• Automate repetitive tasks: Automate repetitive tasks like follow-up emails, progress tracking, and meeting scheduling to free up sales reps to focus on building relationships.

• Personalize outreach: Tailor outreach messages to each prospect, ensuring the right person gets the right message at the right time via multiple channels.
• Track and measure results: Track and measure campaign results to identify what’s working and what’s not, so you can continuously improve your results.
• Integrate with other tools: Integrate with other sales tools, such as CRM systems to streamline workflows and keep sales reps organized.
• Provide insights and recommendations: Get insights and recommendations to identify the best prospects to target, the right time to reach out, and the most effective messaging and more.

Time is money, especially in sales. The more time you spend engaging with prospects and customers, the more likely you are to convert them into paying customers. That’s why engagement is key in your outreach process.

Don’t let repetitive tasks and manual outreach stand in the way of your sales success. 

Automate your work and focus on what matters most: building relationships and closing deals. Try SmartReach today!

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