The TOPO Sales Engagement Leadership Report released in December 2020 focused on the innovative practice of sales engagement across high-growth sales teams in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report takes a deep dive into the issues of sales enablement and the factors that prevent best-practice results.

It provided my team with the instruction and information we needed to address in 2021 as we develop strategies for our continued journey toward excellent service to our clients, converting all consumer interactions to a continuous flow of relationship building and predictable revenue growth.

Although the report was published in 2020, after rereading it, here are some lessons we will continue to implement for growth and engagement in 2022. They are lessons that your practice can implement as well.

The Challenge

Sales engagement platforms are a mission-critical technology investment necessary to implement a sales engagement strategy. The overwhelming top sales engagement challenge is content strategy — the need for an effective sales engagement playbook and sales process.

Although sellers are responsible for creating the messaging, they lack the infrastructure and experience to scale in an optimizable fashion. This leads to disorganized content libraries and ineffective and unchecked content. The result is a poor buyer experience.

The goal is the successful alignment of touch patterns. This includes but is not limited to text messaging, LinkedIn and other social media, video, direct mail and chat — organized by segment and the minimum content needed to deploy the messaging.

Great seller experiences are paramount to facilitating better buying experiences. Sellers can use the technology within the context of their work, such as email inboxes, or use the technology directly on accounts, contacts and opportunities in their customer relationship management system.

What is an effective sales engagement strategy?

An effective sales engagement strategy includes prescriptive guidance on how to prioritize leads and accounts; how to store relevant research; how to create a touch patterning decision tree and guided workflows; and how to develop an easy-to-search content library tagged by scenario, product and use case.

What is an effective playbook?

An effective sales engagement playbook visualizes the common scenarios and triggers for sellers to enroll prospects into touch patterns. It then simplifies the number of decisions sellers must run through to pull relevant content into those scenarios.

Getting a team of sellers to adopt a new way of working requires an effective playbook process.

That playbook process needs to be designed to prioritize, to recognize common buying behaviors, and to select the appropriate touch pattern, message or content to engage the buyer with minimal friction.

Automation Capabilities A Top Factor For Success

Workflows design and automate processes based on predefined business rules. Previous capabilities of automated or augmented known workflows must be revamped. Today, more advanced workflows completely shift the way sellers prioritize their time.

Personalized messaging automation improves reply and meeting rates. This creates high-impact selling activity. To accomplish this, you must leverage available data, messaging and content to craft targeted messages using a combination of custom copy and prewritten templates.

Spearheading this is artificial intelligence that provides a Google-like translation of every customer interaction. This creates a “story so far” so sellers know exactly what occurred on every call. It also creates coaching opportunities at the point of deviation to develop best-in-class sales teams.

Automation also can create triggers to automatically enroll buyers into targeted touch patterns. This reprioritizes buyers in real time based on frequent engagement with emails. AI and machine learning also can be used to suggest specific messaging-based scenarios.

Work-From-Home Has Upended Industries

The work-from-home sales environment has upended traditional sales enablement — from onboarding sales representatives to training sales reps to getting reps in production sooner and in a cost-effective way.

Most training today is something like Zoom sessions. This reduces or eliminates the opportunity for managers to “ride with reps” to see whether they are adopting your suggestions — because they are no longer “riding to see their prospects.”

Using sales automation as an onboarding and training delivery tool can improve the perceived value to both reps and managers, making it easy to scale growth.

AI can create talk tracks automatically to create a comprehensive story-so-far. This enables managers to set follow-up calls with the reps they trained to make sure they are making the desired changes in their selling relationships, in real time. Sales managers also have the visibility into forecasted deals that an AI-generated story-so-far can provide.

Features that highlight sections of recorded calls allow managers to commend reps for doing a good job. This also gives managers the opportunity to suggest specific changes or to edit playbooks in real time to implement those needed changes across distributions or sales channels.

Building Work-From-Home Rep Confidence

People buy from people they trust. So how do you build a rep’s confidence in this new selling environment? By having a sales enablement process that reps trust so they can follow up with details on the points in the conversation just by clicking a button during the sales call.

By setting up touch patterns that match scenarios, the rep can tell a prospect or a client, “I just sent you an email with a detailed comparison of xxx and xxx that we’re discussing.”

When the rep finds the proper supporting content, they can follow up with a compelling message in real time. The client’s response is tracked throughout the relationship, making it better, more efficient, and more effective for the rep simply to click a button during the call.

By having a sales enablement process that provides the buying behavior touch points, the rep can set the expectation for the next call with that prospect, and they can see in the AI-generated story-so-far exactly what was discussed and sent during that call.

This sets the rep up as a more trusted advisor and sets the expectation for a call next Tuesday, simply by clicking a button during the call and putting this “follow up” on their to-do list for next Tuesday (or Wednesday or Thursday, etc.). As a result, the rep does not have to remember to send the email after the call and can put the reminder to call next week on their calendar just by clicking.

2022 Success Strategies

Buyers need sellers to exceed expectations at every interaction. Sellers must have the ability to facilitate buying decisions virtually.

Selling teams can create extreme value when they are able to convert selling activities into revenue with state-of-the-art, role-specific, behavior-activated sales enablement tools.

Our new selling environment and our 2022 success require a sales engagement automation strategy, personalized messaging and an effective sales engagement playbook strategy.

We’re getting our sales enablement sales process fine-tuned. Is it time for you to do the same?

10 COMPONENTS OF A SALES ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY

1. Messaging: A framework for the key messages that will be delivered in all customer interactions, including personas, value propositions and case histories.

2. Content: The overall plan for content in go-to-market activities from marketing content such as white papers, blog posts and webinars to sales content such as email templates and collateral.

3. Channels: The mediums through which buyers and sellers engage.

4. Technology: A single interface to plan, execute, track, measure and optimize the interactions of sellers with buyers across multiple touches and channels.

5. Data: The account, contact, intent, activity, engagement and product data required to manage sellers and tailor experiences to buyers.

6. Workflow: Manual and automated processes required to create an interconnected engagement experience.

7. Touch patterns: A planned progression of communications across multiple channels directed toward specific prospects or accounts.

8. Enablement: The strategy and playbook for enabling sellers to take the right steps with buyers.

9. Metrics: Accurate assessments of engagement performance to monitor conversion, attainment of pipeline and revenue goals, and customer health.

10. Management: The organizational cadence of observing metrics, testing variations and prescribing improvements across all components of the strategy.

SOURCE: TOPO Sales Engagement Leadership Report

Lloyd Lofton is the founder of Power Behind the Sales. He is the author of The Saleshero’s Guide To Handling Objections, voted 1 of the 11 Best New Presentation Books To Read in 2020 by BookAuthority. Lloyd may be contacted at [email protected].