Top Sales Engagement Tips For Agencies

While some salespeople may still think of sales as purely a numbers game, that’s rarely the case today. If you’re trying to sell products or services, especially ones that are even the slightest bit complex or expensive, you’re going to close more deals if you engage with your prospect. Rather than just spraying out the same cold pitch to everyone on the planet, sales engagement allows you to nurture your leads and bring genuine value to your prospects. 

This is often easier said than done though, particularly if you’re an agency. Engaging with your prospects takes time and effort for anyone, but even more when you’re working on behalf of a client. This post will look at the best ways agencies can improve their sales engagement and get even better results for their clients. 

Know who you’re selling to

As an agency, you’ll end up taking on the bulk of your clients’ sales-related tasks. After all, if someone’s hiring you, it’s because you have the expertise and/or resources that they lack. That said, you’ll still need a significant amount of input from your client. Effective sales engagement requires you to go beyond understanding the product and develop an in-depth knowledge of the leads and prospects you’ll be reaching out to—and no-one knows those people better than your client. Rather than relying on your own industry knowledge or research, use that knowledge to your advantage. 

Review your client’s existing marketing data. Talk to them about their ideal customers. Move beyond the basic demographic data and get to know them on a deeper level. What are their concerns, their pain points, their objectives? If your client doesn’t know all the answers to these questions, work with them and find the answers together. Not only will this provide a solid foundation for your sales engagement, but you’ll also prove to your clients that you’re serious about getting them the best results possible.

Know who you’re selling for

Meaningful interactions are at the heart of sales engagement, but those interactions must be consistent. Without knowing exactly who it is you’re selling for, you risk confusing your prospects with confusing messages and conflicting goals.

The first step is having a thorough profile that covers the client, their product, and their campaign objectives. Just as you got to know the potential leads in depth, dig below the surface. Rather than settling for the product features, get to know the company values behind the product. What problem were they trying to solve?

Once you have a better understanding of the company and what they’re trying to say, listen to how they say it. Are they traditional or modern? Technical or inspirational? Innovative or tried and tested? When you can engage with your prospects with the same message in the right tone, then you’ll provide them with a seamless experience.

Choose the right channel

By definition, sales engagement is a two-way street, an interaction between a salesperson and a prospective customer. There are plenty of channels you can choose from for that interaction, from more traditional phone calls and plain emails to video messages and social media. 

However, if you don’t pick the right channel, then your engagement could end up being all one-way conversation, making all your hard work pointless. That’s why it’s important that you know your social media target audience very well.

Hopefully, from your research and conversations with your client, you have a solid understanding of the buyer journey and where your prospects are more likely to be found. 

Are they hanging out in Facebook groups or posting on LinkedIn? Can you reach them by phone or is a handwritten note more likely to get their attention? 

The good news is you don’t have to restrict yourself to just one channel. In fact, a multichannel outreach strategy, where you use different touchpoints over a given period of time, is far more likely to be successful. For example, warming up a prospect by leveraging a social media engagement tool before reaching out directly with a personalized video message is more likely to get their attention. 

Have the right content ready to go

The thinking behind sales engagement places a greater emphasis on the quality of interaction. Agencies that can go beyond the pitch and offer valuable content will be able to stand out from the competition for all the right reasons. This starts with working out what kind of content would be most valuable to your prospects and then ensuring that it’s readily available. 

From the salesperson’s point of view, content would include the messaging they use in their outreach and follow-ups. 

A cold email template, a phone script, or a go-to connection request message can help salespeople make a good first impression. However, with any kind of template or script, it’s important that it’s relevant and personalized to the prospect. Even the most engaging messaging will fall flat if it feels like it was just copied and pasted. The quality of your calls and content is vital as well, so only choose the best call center software and plan your emails thoroughly.

After that initial contact, your team should then have a library of content that addresses your prospect’s most pressing needs. Again, collaborate with your client to offer a variety of content that is all focused on specific challenges your customer might face. White papers, e-books, videos, and other forms of content can offer significant value to your prospect, as well as demonstrating that you genuinely understand their challenges. 

Use the right tools for the job

While it’s technically possible to engage with prospects using nothing more than a phone and/or a working internet connection, it’s going to be much harder (and impossible to scale). On the other hand, having the right technology will have a massive, positive impact on your sales engagement success. 

One of the most important tools for any salesperson is their CRM. Keeping track of who you’re engaging with, their current position in the sales cycle, what content you’ve shared, the next steps, etc., makes it easier to keep on top of your sales engagement. For an agency, it also helps share any necessary information with your client. 

Research tools can help you find ideal prospects, learn more about them, and find their contact details. Along with saving time, this will also give your team new ideas and ways to personalize their engagement.

By making the mechanics of contacting and talking with prospects as simple as possible, outreach software allows your team to focus on making that engagement high quality and genuine. 

This might mean having a dialer and email automation for the initial contact and follow-ups, tools for creating and sharing personalized videos, or scheduling software for arranging stress-free meetings. 

Finally, having a dedicated sales engagement platform allows you to see and control every aspect of the process, from start to finish. 

By having one place where you can directly manage your chosen sales channels (or that easily integrates with other apps that manage those channels), you can check how your latest campaign is performing, identify any potential issues early on, and share best practices with the rest of the team. 

Train your agency staff to engage effectively

All the knowledge and tools in the world aren’t going to help you if your team doesn’t know how to use them properly. Every person involved in the sales engagement process should be properly trained and have a firm grasp of the best practices.

Obviously, everyone will need to understand the basics of sales and be comfortable with how to make a cold call, send an outreach email, etc.

For sales engagement, you’ll have to ensure they can take those skills to the next level. Rather than being content with blasting out salesy pitches, help your team develop their research and communication skills so that they can send those engaging messages that stand out from the competition.

For example, using carefully chosen questions and active listening to better understand the prospect will allow your salespeople to tailor their approach so that it’s relevant to the person they’re talking to, rather than chatting about features that the person couldn’t care less about.

You should also make sure that everyone is familiar with the software tools you’re using and how to get the best out of them.

There are plenty of agencies out there who’ve invested in the very latest tech, get a top-of-the-range platform, while their teams use only the most basic features—or even worse, ignore the platform entirely and use something else. If just one person on the team isn’t using the same tool as everyone else, it’ll become much harder to track your campaign results and make any necessary changes.

But, as an agency, you’ll also face a unique challenge in that you’ll be selling someone else’s product.

This means that every time you take on a new client, you must make sure everyone on the team knows all the relevant details about the company and the product, so they can confidently answer any questions that come up. Make sure that everything you’ve learned when onboarding the client is shared with the team.

 

Conclusion

Engagement is an essential part of today’s sales process and, when used correctly, is a great way for agencies to deliver top results for their clients. By taking the time to know the client and the prospect, using relevant content in multiple channels, and having the right tools and training in place, you’ll be able to effectively implement sales engagement in your agency. As a result, you’ll be able to help your clients convert more leads and drive more revenue.