The Best Sales Engagement Platforms For 2023 to Increase Your Company’s Profits
According to Globe News Wire, the sales engagement platforms market size is anticipated to reach a staggering $22 billion by 2032.
With the market holding value of $7.4 billion, such a massive increase indicates a demand for high-quality sales engagement services. No wonder companies are interested in sales enablement platforms because of their game-changing business benefits.
Let’s explore more about sales engagement platforms to help you get a deeper perspective.
We will discuss the importance of these tools and some features they must have. Then, we will look at the seven best sales engagement software to give you a great starting point in sales development.
So, buckle up and prepare to plunge into sales strategy, automation, and technology.
What are sales engagement platforms?
Sales engagement platforms are tools sales teams use to unify sales workflow across various channels by automating the sales pipeline to make the entire process more effective.
These tools help you find and engage with new prospects and customers at the different stages of their customer journey and also track their activities.
Sales engagement platforms are popular because they help bring potential customers on board, and you can easily integrate them into your sales outreach platform to make your sales process flawless.
Note that CRM tools often accompany most sales engagement platforms. Yet, these are different because sales engagement is about delivering high-quality customer interactions, while CRMs are more about data organization.
Importance of sales engagement platforms
Why should you consider a sales engagement platform?
To answer that question, we need to break down a sales engagement platform into its essential elements:
- Interface: A sales engagement platform gives you a single interface for all your sales-related activities, helping sales reps and teams be on the same page and boosting collaboration.
- Plan: A sales engagement tool provides workflow automation so that you can plan your sales strategy.
- Execution: A sales engagement tool can automatically execute your sales strategy by interacting with customers via different communication channels.
- Tracking: A sales engagement platform tracks all sales-related activity, such as the number of phone calls logged into the CRM platform or emails sent to prospects.
- Measuring: A sales engagement tool measures the overall effectiveness of automated workflows and sales strategy to pinpoint segments that can be improved.
- Optimization: A sales engagement platform optimizes the sales pipeline and makes it more efficient.
Keeping the aspects above in mind, it becomes easy to answer the question we posed before. Sales engagement platforms are essential because
- They make your sales teams more organized
- Help the marketing managers and executives know the next steps
- Assist in closing deals much faster
- Provide opportunities for reaching new customers.
The best sales engagement platform will also help you integrate inbound lead generation into your pipeline.
Now let’s look at the features a reliable sales engagement tool must have.
Must-have features of sales engagement platforms
There are several outreach competitors to consider for your business. Regardless of your choice, your sales management platform must have these five features.
1. Communication hub
This feature offers sales teams a single interface for accessing all sales-related information in one place. A communication hub must have different communication modes like email, phone, live chat, social media, and SMS.
This communication hub also helps you to see previous communications between reps and prospects and access new customers.
2. Creating and managing content
This segment is all about tools allowing companies to manage, personalize and brand their selling content. It can be templates, scripts, and letters.
Sales prospecting tools help deliver your sales strategy to prospects and ensure the standardized selling content is up-to-date.
3. Workflow management and automation tools
This segment covers the area of workflow automation. The sales engagement platform you choose must have instruments for automating repetitive tasks.
You can automate processes like
- Sending emails
- Scheduling meetings
- Personalizing response generation
These features help sales reps to save time on manual tasks and engage with hot leads in a more invested and personalized manner.
4. Lead scoring, generation, and nurturing
This segment brings forward features that help generate, score, and track new leads. A sales engagement platform should have features for finding, grouping, and categorizing leads.
Next, when you know where to genera leads, it is time for features that will track the lead-generation process. A lead tracking feature helps sales teams see how the sales process is going and determine whether any tweaks are needed.
5. Sales-related analytics
The final segment is all about analytics. A good sales engagement platform must-have features providing reports on how the lead generation process is moving.
These features are crucial for customizing sales plans for different customers and having a clear vision of the next steps needed to close deals.
7 best examples of sales engagement platforms
Now that we know more about what a sales engagement platform is and why it is important let’s look at the best sales engagement platforms out there.
Remember that any given tool on the list is not an all-in-one solution. Each tool has its distinct features, pricing plans and ratings.
Based on these variables, we compiled the list below.
1. Expandi
Expandi, the tool we create, is an excellent sales engagement platform focusing on LinkedIn automation and sales outreach. With this tool, your sales reps can use automated sequencing to contact new prospects via LinkedIn and email.
With Expandi, you can start your marketing campaign in 15 minutes. You also get tools to create personalized touchpoints for your audience quickly when generating leads. Expandi is also on the list of top B2B lead generation companies.
📌 Key features
When it comes to standalone features coming with Expandi, these are the ones to mention:
- LinkedIn outreach: Allows sales reps to directly connect and communicate with leads through automated and personalized InMails, messages, and invites.
- Email outreach Automates your email and guarantees up to triple response rate, especially when combined with LinkedIn automation.
- Image and GIF personalization: Adds a creative touch to boost engagement.
- Smart sequences: Offers an omnichannel outreach to combine various sales-related actions in one particular sequence;
- Third-party integrations: Seamlessly integrates with Zapier, HubSpot, Slack, MailChimp and Google Sheets.
- Round-the-clock support: There to meet every user’s need and address any inquiry customers and prospects might have.
💰 Pricing
- Expandi is one of the tools with a good price-to-quality ratio. It comes with a 7-day free trial and one particular pricing plan to choose from.
- Expandi seat with pay-as-you-go model at $99/seat/month
❤️️ Rating
2. Hubspot Sales Hub
Hubspot Sales Hub is a sales engagement platform with sales analytics and engagement features. Regardless of your number of sales reps, this tool can help you scale sales processes through automation.
It also has a customizable visual pipeline to help you track your lead-generation process in real time.
📌 Key features
Hubspot Sales Hub offers the following features.
- Contact management: It allows sales reps to see all the prospects and leads in one place with all their contact information visible.
- Referral tracking: Tracks your outreach efforts and ensures your sales team knows what leads were left out.
- Forecasting: Enables sales teams to get an overview of a user persona and build the outreach strategy.
- Customer database: Provides information on all the existing and potential leads
- Third-party integrations: Integrates with Salesforce, Slack, Zoom, PandaDoc, Shopify, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
💰 Pricing
Hubspot Sales Hub provides a 14-day free trial and two pricing packages:
- Professional–$414/month
- Enterprise–$1,104/month
❤️️Rating
3. Groove
Groove is a sales engagement platform that enables revenue teams to boost lead generation. The tool focuses on integrating easily into your workflows to help optimize, automate and modernize sales processes.
Groove also offers automation to help reduce the workload of your sales teams by assisting them to avoid repetitive tasks and allowing them to focus on high-priority tasks.
📌 Key features
Groove provides the following features:
- Email, calendar and activity tracking: Automates logging, updates, and all the activities to keep sales teams up-to-date
- Multi-channel campaign automation: Comes with personalized emails, LinkedIn messages and calls
- Task prioritization and streamline workflows: Help you to organize and assign tasks
- Third-party integrations: Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Jira, Zapier, and Shopify
💰 Pricing
Groove offers a 14-day free trial, and pricing is available on request.
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4. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a sales engagement platform part of Salesforce CRM. It is a multifunctional engagement platform that allows you to track and improve sales processes.
Its key objective is to source and use data directly from your CRM and translate it into a more effective sales pipeline. It allows you to boost sales and marketing processes quickly.
Salesforce Sales Cloud also helps you track your products and forecast the overall sales strategy progress via various benchmarks.
📌 Key features
Salesforce Sales Cloud offers the following features.
- Lead nurturing: Comes with automated messages and responses.
- Email marketing
- Pipeline management: Gives you an overview of the entire sales pipeline and also generates automated reports
- Activity dashboards: Shows all sales-related activity in one place
- Third-party integrations: HubSpot, MailChimp, DocuSign, Zoom and Slack
💰 Pricing
Salesforce Sales Cloud offers a 30-day free trial and four pricing plans:
- Essentials–$25/user/month
- Professional–$75/user/month
- Enterprise–$150/user/month
- Unlimited–$300/user/month
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5. Salesloft
Salesloft is a sales engagement platform focusing on B2B interactions. It focuses on sales acceleration and meaningful customer interactions.
You can pair it with various CRMs to synch and automate how you handle your prospects and leads.
Like other Salesloft competitors, this tool supports team collaboration and offers an omnichannel communication model to help sales reps stay organized.
📌 Key features
Salesloft offers the following features
- Prospecting: tools to contact, track, and nurture all the leads from different dashboards and communication channels
- Lead distribution: Allows teams to group and segment prospects for easier task assigning
- Customer database: Provides all the information you need to contact and nurture a particular lead
- Interaction tracking: Provides insights into how well sales reps do their jobs and what can be improved
- Third-party integrations: Salesforce, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoom, Slack, Vidyard, and HubSpot
💰 Pricing
Salesloft offers a 14-day free trial and two custom pricing models.
- Prospect (pricing available on request)
- Enterprise (pricing available on request)
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6. Outreach
Outreach is a sales engagement platform designed to aid sales reps and teams in streamlining sales processes to boost efficiency.
It means you can use Outreach and its suite of tools to handle the overall outreach to prospects.
The platform works with major marketing channels like
- Phone calls
- SMS
- Social media
Outreach promises to save your company’s time and resources through outreach automation.
📌 Key features
Outreach offers the following features
- Automated pipeline generation: Helps you to optimize the overall sales engagement process across the entire revenue cycle
- Revenue Intelligence: Helps you make and manage stronger sales cycles to help you close deals effectively
- Real-time pipeline analysis: Tracks all prospects’ interactions and signals. Also offers new insights to boost decision-making and make forecasting more accurate
- Third-party integrations: Salesforce, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoom, Slack, Vidyard, and DocuSign
💰 Pricing
In addition to its 14-day free trial, this sales engagement platform offers three pricing plans:
- Minimal–$8.95/month
- Standard–$12.95/month
- Premium–$19.95/month
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7. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Last but not least, there is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This sales engagement platform focuses on maintaining seller-buyer relationships.
The idea behind LinkedIn Sales Navigator is to integrate with other sales technologies to feed sales teams data that you can turn into prospective leads.
This sales engagement technology comes with extensive functionality and utilizes the power of LinkedIn.
📌 Key features
LinkedIn Sales Navigator has the following features
- Extended network access: Allows you to leverage LinkedIn to grow your lead network with unlimited searches
- Advanced searching: Helps sales reps find prospects in a matter of seconds
- Quality opportunities prioritization: Groups and prioritize leads based on the sales pipeline characteristics
- People and company tracking: Offers real-time updates and alerts on leads you collected through advanced searching
- Third-party integrations: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoom, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Outreach and Marketo.
💰 Pricing
Along with a 30-day free trial, LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides three pricing packages:
- Professional–$79.99/month
- Team–$129.99/user/month
- Enterprise (custom pricing)
❤️️ Rating
Comparison Table
The table below shows a brief comparison of all the sales engagement tools.
| Platform | Price | Features | Integrations | Support | Free Trial | G2 Rating |
| 1. Expandi | $99 per seat/month | –LinkedIn outreach
–Email outreach –Image and GIF personalization –Smart sequences |
–Zapier
–HubSpot –Slack –MailChimp –Google Sheets |
–Help Center
–Live Chat –Academy –FaceBook community –FAQs |
7 days | 4 out of 5 |
| 2. Hubspot Sales Hub | Professional– $414/month
Enterprise– $1,104/month |
–Contact management
–Referral tracking –Forecasting –Customer database |
–Salesforce
–Slack –Zoom –PandaDoc –Shopify –LinkedIn Sales Navigator |
–Community
–Live Chat –Phone |
14 days | 4.4 out of 5 |
| 3. Groove | Available on request | –Email, calendar, and activity tracking
–Multi-channel campaign automation –Task prioritization and streamline workflows –Link to Salesforce |
–Slack
–HubSpot –Salesforce –Jira –Zapier –Shopify |
–Web Form
–Live Chat |
14 days | 4.7 out of 5 |
| 4. Salesforce Sales Cloud | Essentials–$25 per user/month
Professional–$75 per user/month Enterprise– $150 per user/month Unlimited–$300 per user/month |
–Lead nurturing
–Email marketing –Pipeline management –Activity dashboards |
–HubSpot
–Mailchimp –DocuSign –Zoom –Slack –LinkedIn Sales Navigator |
–Live Chat
–Phone |
30 days | 4.3 out of 5 |
| 5. Salesloft | Custom pricing | –Prospecting
–Lead distribution –Customer database –Interaction tracking |
–Salesforce
–LinkedIn Sales Navigator –Zoom –Slack –Vidyard –HubSpot |
–Support Guide
–Live Chat –Call Back |
14 days | 4.5 out of 5 |
| 6. Outreach | Minimal–$8.95 per month
Standard–$12.95 per month Premium–$19.95 per month |
–Automated pipeline generation
–Revenue intelligence –Real-time pipeline analysis |
–Salesforce
–LinkedIn Sales Navigator –Zoom –Slack –Vidyard –DocuSign |
Support Portal | 14 days | 4.3 out of 5 |
| 7. LinkedIn Sales Navigator | Professional–$79.99 per month
Team–$129.99 per user/month Enterprise (custom pricing) |
–Extended network access
–Advanced searching –Quality opportunities prioritization –People and company tracking |
–Salesforce
–HubSpot –Zoom –Microsoft –Dynamics 365 –Outreach –Marketo |
30 days | 4.3 out of 5 |
The Bottom Line
Proper sales engagement is a game-changer. It can bring new leads and help nurture the existing ones.
Choosing the right sales engagement platform doesn’t have to be complicated, several options are available based on your business needs
If you want to beat LinkedIn’s constant changes and become an outreach pro using email and LinkedIn automation, you can try Expandi free for seven days. No payment is required.
FAQs
Why do you need a sales engagement platform?
In general terms, you need a sales engagement platform to help your sales team approach prospects and customers via multiple tools and channels.
These tools help businesses stay organized by streamlining workflow and sales-related processes.
Your sales team can also use a sales engagement platform to
- Boost your sales process
- Improve personalization
- Improve collaboration
- Tap into advanced analytics
Is a sales engagement platform the same as a CRM platform?
Sales engagement tools and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms are different.
While both tools try to reach the same objective: generate leads and close more deals, they use different approaches.
CRM platforms are the ones focused on information organization and managing relationships. In turn, sales engagement software emphasizes contact with prospects and customer interactions.
How can I choose the right sales engagement platform for my business and sales reps?
For sales leaders and teams, choosing the right sales engagement tool is all about following these steps:
- Looking at the right features
- Making distinct pricing considerations
- Business needs
- Consider your company’s growth phase and size
What are the most widely used sales engagement platforms?
When it comes to the most widely used sales engagement platforms that can help with sales enablement, sales pipeline, and sales cycle, these are the ones to consider:
- Expandi
- Hubspot Sales Hub
- Groove
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Salesloft
- Outreach
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Only the best strategies will bring the best results
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