Everything You Need To Know About Sales Sequencing Software

A platform that allows salespeople to interact with leads, customers, or their prospects can be defined as ‘sales engagement software’. 

Simply put, it's a software that helps with sales sequencing, activation, or engagement.

Sales engagement software offers playbooks or sequences that help a company's sales team organize their activities, including social media, email, text, and phone. However, before jumping on the wagon, there are some things RevOps professionals should know.

Implementation Will Not Be A Walk In The Park

If you've ever heard from your sales team that implementing and maintaining sales engagement software is easy, heed our warning and never believe them. According to several field experts, the complexity of setting up and maintaining such software is several times more challenging than people make it out to be.

Several company executives have lamented that they wish they knew the panning and the sophistication it needed before implementing a complex sales execution tool like ‘Outreach’. According to them, most of these platforms are essentially CRMs. That's why integrating them into a company's other existing complex tech stack can never be a walk in the park. The most common example was when they iterated that the record ownership between Outreach and Salesforce was not in sync or routine, which caused the wrong sales rep to send the messages.

Measuring the amount of thought that goes into integrating these systems with your CRM, setting it up can be one of the biggest tasks you take on in a while. You will be left with making a lot of decisions, like which CRM value are you okay with being overridden by which sales engagement system update? Or who will be responsible for syncing your CRM configurations with field settings and rules?

Veteran RevOps specialists have repeatedly recited their company's mistakes while implementing sales sequencing software. Most of them used two values in the rulesets and incorrectly put the integration mapping in Outreach. As a result, Outreach couldn't synchronize data with Salesforce, citing the reason that the ‘picklist value was invalid’. In such instances, sales teams have turned to Apollo, deeming Outreach unfit to work with. However, such a switch has always brought on a new wave of issues. The common issue? The person in charge of setting up the software mistakenly enabled a setting, resulting in a new person record forming whenever any activity was logged. From these and many more such mistakes, we have realized that your company can be either big or small, and you may be the most occupied, but not handing your sales team captain by setting up, monitoring, and maintaining will be the biggest mistake.

You might be wondering, who should be in charge of it? The answer is that when you have a system with bidirectional sync with your CRM, the ones who oversee the CRM should always be in charge. That way, you can ensure that both systems are in sync and that every step has been implemented currently. It will help you save yourself before a faulty implementation process causes you much damage.

Large-Scale Bad Messaging Is Your Enemy

With sales engagement software, you get an incredible feature of sending a one-off or single email to many people who chose not to communicate with your brand. The software uses a loophole in the email management system, which allows salespeople to theoretically and sometimes practically set a big part of your database in a sequence in just a day.

However, when you're sequencing, you must correctly examine the message you're sending. You cannot expect a new person with no prior experience selling to your company's customer base to get everything perfectly right when trying to sell a high-tech product. It's understandably impossible, so it's unexplainable why many B2B businesses still give this mass communication job to people with either the least or absolutely no experience.

Usually, marketing teams take charge of writing the emails to send and salespeople are never happy about it. Marketing people can be wordy, which salespeople who regularly focus on keeping their communications on point and personal obviously do not like. However, to send the perfect message, both teams must come together and be in sync. Sales data and feedback can only improve the message the marketing team is crafting. Now, if the marketing team collaborates with the sales team before they roll it out for sequencing, then salespeople can start their work with solid content.

On the other hand, the messages or emails that the sales teams roll out can be improved by working with an analyst who can also help them collect content. Once one of the experts from the sales team drafts the first set of emails, the data will then have to be analyzed every week to improve and update it to write a new sequence.

Now, this regular analysis needs to be done for a company that uses sales engagement software to push many messages to target accounts. As per RevOps professionals, if you don't figure out and utilize the best engagement data, even if you have the best engagement system, it will keep churning out wrong results. It doesn't need to be mentioned that if your team's primary purpose is generating revenue for the company, you have to review the effectiveness of your work daily. This should include the performance of the mass messages or emails sent out by the sales engagement software.

Most executives agree they should've reviewed their work. The focus and control should be on whom the messages are being sent and what those messages are. Organizations must prioritize communication control and consistency to effectively reach the right audiences and avoid overwhelming them with unnecessary messages. This means centralizing messaging, streamlining sales sequences, and ensuring proper CRM synchronization to reduce excessive noise and improve the overall customer experience.

Mass Scale Spells Doom For Your Domain

All marketing executives are now bound to follow the anti-spam and data protection regulations. Additionally, most marketing automation systems are designed to strictly follow rules that dictate what to do and what not to do. This means that any marketing executive following their lists and spamming will have to work hard to devise creative ways to break the law. However, when it comes to salespeople, they don't have to adhere to these rules. Hence, if they're spamming a person's mail, it can call doom to the entire company rather than only that person's email account.

Companies should control the flow of emails that every person sends daily through their sales engagement software as soon as possible. For example, when a large chunk of emails are sent using Gmail, your account could be suspended if more than only three of them out of 1000 sent emails are reported spam. However, this won't just concern one person's email; it can lock down the deliverability of everyone else and the automated system used by your company. The risk is a bit lower when using Microsoft, but it doesn't go away entirely, so those days are gone when one suspended account didn't mean much for the company.

You can't really measure how many of your emails end up in the spam section on the receiver’s end. Hence, the only way to get ahead of this problem is to control the flow of sent emails by your sales engagement software and, most importantly, pay heed when anyone says your emails are ending up in spam. For whatever reason, that's happening, and it can be the beginning of your domain's doom.

To Sum It Up

To optimize sales performance and achieve meaningful, lasting revenue growth, sales teams must harness the power of sales sequencing software. By understanding and applying the principles of effective sales sequencing, organizations can effectively manage their leads, communicate with customers consistently and personally, and ultimately increase revenue and customer satisfaction. Embrace the potential of sales sequencing software and transform your sales process today.