Sales Engagement

The sales discovery process is an essential step in learning how you can bring value to your potential customers. But all too often, in a hurry to get to the demo, it’s rushed through as part of qualification or even skipped altogether. 

Biiiig mistake.

As Jacco van der Kooij, says, “Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice,” and this couldn’t be more true in sales. 

Trying to pitch a product without first understanding prospect pain or how they’ll use your solution is a crutch that lower-performing salespeople lean on way too heavily.

A crutch that will come back to bite you when prospects drop out of the sales cycle without buying. Or worse, sign up, find the product doesn’t meet their needs, cancel the contract at the first opportunity, and badmouth you on review sites. 

“Everyone is in a rush today to get to the punch line,” says Vincent Burruano, President of Vince Burruano Consulting Services. “Successful selling requires a time investment.”

How can you avoid these pitfalls?

You’ve decided to automate parts of your sales process, go you!

How you build and scale your sales automation workflow will massively dictate the success (and adherence) of your sales reps. 

But where do you start with automation? And more importantly—where do you stop?

There are many things that robots are better at than humans are, and that includes:

• Pulling data together
• Keeping track of conversations and files
• Enriching data
• Checking in with customers that have gone quiet
• Reminding you that you haven’t followed up on an important email
• Dancing

Okay...maybe humans still have the upper hand over dancing—but for some reason, human sales reps are still handling a lot of these tasks regularly when robots can do them better. Those should be automated.

Just like dancing, humans are better at creativity, empathy, and developing relationships with other humans.

So if you’re trying to build a workflow that combines the unique capabilities of humans and robots, this article is for you.

The pipeline reviews are in, and for some reason—despite what you thought were qualified leads—you can’t seem to eliminate bottlenecks and truly optimize the sales process.

You look at spreadsheets after a bad month, which tell you “if only we hired X more reps or did 10% more activity—we’d hit quota!”

But the solution to missing quota isn’t increasing activity that doesn’t work.

What you should be looking at after a missed target is the why—why isn’t your outbound engaging? Where do the relationships fall off? Which sequences aren’t engaging prospects? How could your reps be spending their time better?

That’s what sales engagement is. 

This work is time-consuming, and a lot of it can be repetitive, whether that’s the hours you spend typing the perfect, bespoke email to every prospect on your list, or keeping on top of simple admin tasks in the various tools you use—many of which seem to create additional work instead of reducing your load.

After reading this article, you’ll know how sales engagement can help your team book more valuable meetings, get more engaged, two-way conversations, and spend less time on things that can be automated.

We’ll cover: