Switch, Save and Succeed - How Salesforce Sales Engagement Outperforms Outreach.io and Salesloft
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Efficient lead management is a critical factor for the success of any sales team. But knowing which leads to prioritize and what actions to take can be overwhelming, often leading to missed opportunities.
Salesforce Sales Engagement aims to solve this issue by automating your sales workflow. There’s an overwhelming number of sales engagement solutions available, so we have invested time to check what the pros and cons are and we tried them out. So you don’t have to spend your time doing that. We also look at the costs and value-added integrations to get the most out of your sales engagement solution. And we look at ways of introducing a Sales Engagement solution.
Ok, so where do we start?
Let’s start by looking at 3 goals that sales engagement solutions help achieve.
Main goals of using Sales Engagement
The 3 main goals of using a sales engagement technology:
- Lead Prioritization: Ensuring that your sales reps focus on high-value prospects increases conversion rates and ROI.
- Streamlined Outreach: Automating and standardizing communication allows your team to engage with a larger audience, which is key for scaling your operations.
- Tracking & Analytics: Data-driven decision-making is vital. Analytics give you actionable insights into what's working and what isn't, allowing for continuous improvement and strategy refinement.
Ok, so you wonder what does that look like in practice?
The two challenges Sales Engagement helps your business development team overcome
To make it tangible, Sales Engagement helps your sales development reps address two challenges:
- What action to take next on a specific lead
- What lead to work on next
The ability to know what action to take next with a specific lead (call, email, follow-up, etc.) is critical for moving leads through the sales funnel and for optimizing conversion rates. Prioritizing leads allows sales reps to focus their efforts, ensuring that high-value or 'hot' leads are not neglected. Salesforce Sales Engagement uses Sales Cadences to address both of these challenges.
Ok, understood, now give me a practical example.
What do you need Sales Engagement for?
Let’s say you have a booth at a convention (yes we know, who goes to conventions these days) and you collect leads. Now you got 186 leads that you want your sales team to followup with and qualify.
The cadence goal is to set up a qualification call with the prospect. The cadence itself consists of actions that your sales reps take to achieve that goal, ie. setup the qualification call.
An example cadence might look like this:
- Day 1: Send LinkedIn contact request and state that you reach out in a separate email to setup a followup call
- Day 1: Send Email to followup on the event and propose a time to meet
- Day 2: Call the prospect to setup the qualification call
- ...
- Day 14: Send a breakup Email (I know ironic term isn’t it?)
You take the actions that your most successful sales reps take to drive business and you turn them into a Sales Cadence. By sharing your most successful sales cadences, call scripts and identifying coaching needs (more on that below), you can move your average sales performers closer to the productivity of your high performing sales reps.
So, after 10 days of following up, you set up qualification calls with 38 of the leads. You disqualified 120 leads. And 28 leads are still pursued in open cadences.
Ok, so now we know what practical problems we can address with Salesforce Sales Engagement.
So what about the Salesforce Platform, what can it do for you?
Leverage the entire Salesforce Platform
Sales Engagement is natively built on the Salesforce platform. That means you can take advantage of all the automation capabilities that Salesforce offers.
For example, after completing a call and recording the result, it can trigger the next actions – like auto-updating the lead status to "not interested" – all in real-time. This streamlines data quality and frees your reps to engage with more leads.
Using Salesforce platform makes your sales team more efficient and effective. (Let us know in the comments how you leverage these capabilities.)
So now, let’s look at how you can empower your sales reps more powers with integrations.
Integrations that add value
Using a CTI like Aircall and LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Sales Engagement enhances your outbound sales. Remember these tools cost extra money. In our experience this cost is often amortised through the gained productivity of your sales reps. One of the companies we helped made 36% more outbound calls just by using a CTI.
Sales Engagement includes Einstein Conversational Intelligence which provides analysis of your call transcripts. This gives insight into what’s discussed during a call (eg. competitors, pricing etc.). It also shows how much your sales person is talking compared to the other person.
Use these insights to identify areas of improvement for your team. Also you can build up a library of best practice call recordings to bring new starters up to speed faster. A faster sales rep ramp-up pays back (see Sequoia The sales learning curve). Mark Leslie provides an example where reducing ramp time by 2/3 can increase first year revenues from $6.75m to $20.75m. A similar effect applies to your BDR ramp-up time.
Remember to set it up in compliance with the data regulation and privacy laws in your country.
Ok we get it, we can make our outbound sales team more efficient. But what about costs?
Reduce your license costs by consolidating your tech stack
Sales Engagement is an add-on license to Sales Cloud. Purchasing the add-on is often more economic than buying a 3rd party solution like outreach.io or Salesloft. In fact our last three clients that moved away from 3rd party tools to Salesforce Sales Engagement saved an average of 43% in license cost.
Reducing the number of vendors reduces complexity.
So how can I set it up?
Who can set it up?
You can have someone who knows Salesforce really well in your office set things up. Or, you can work with a trusted Salesforce consulting partner.
Why working with a Salesforce consulting partner is awesome:
- No bumps in the road: We'll move your old sales cadences smoothly.
- Best practices and enablement: We show you how to make great sales plans.
- Get started fast: We help your sales team learn quickly and easily.
Fine, but what alternatives exist?
Alternatives
Outreach.io and Salesloft are the most prominent alternatives. Both of these companies have great content on how to drive results.
Sales reps create new plans and use them for different people they want to sell to. Something that Sales Engagement has recently gotten better at through the addition of Quick Cadences.
Both tools look good. But they don’t work perfectly with Salesforce. They both have integration challenges. Since they are not Salesforce native (technical lingo for they are not build on the Salesforce platform).
Gong is a tool that helps you record record calls and write notes about good calls. But, Sales Engagement has a feature called Einstein Conversational Intelligence, so you don’t need Gong anymore.
Ok so by now you know we are a bit biased towards Salesforce. If you don’t believe us, ask your friends who use a bunch of tools about how much fun it is to integrate them.
So, how do we do it at Valuent?
How we do it at our company
Early in 2023 we hired our first Business Development Representative. Then we were looking for the best sales engagement tool to support her. When talking to other companies in the Berlin ecosystem, three tools came up again and again. So we decided to focus on Salesloft, Outreach.io, and Salesforce Sales Engagement (formerly High-Velocity-Sales).
At first, we wanted to go with Outreach.io, which has great content and youtube enablement videos. But we know how daunting it can be to integrate different SAAS solution from our clients. So, we tried Salesforce Sales Engagement to see if it works for us before trying something else. It was hard to know whether Salesforce Sales Engagement was good, because there aren't many articles or videos on it.
After we tried it, we found out it’s a great tool that saves us money. We haven’t looked back since.
Good, you sticked with me for so long. It’s now dark here in Berlin.
Conclusion
Ok, let’s wrap it up.
If you are on Pipedrive or Hubspot and happy, then Salesloft or Outreach.io may suffice for now. But if you’re already using Salesforce, then their own Sales Engagement solution can get you going fast.
For existing Salesforce customers that already rely on a third-party sales engagement solution, we recommend to assess the total cost of ownership of their current setup. Including maintenance and integration costs. We have often found clients to be able to reduce their licenses costs by switching to Salesforce Sales Engagement platform.
Ok so here you go. If you have questions just shoot me a message.
Ps.: We currently offer a free consultation to assess whether Salesforce Sales Engagement is the right fit for you. This offer is limited to the first 28 people reaching out to me. We have 5 more spots available, so reach out while it lasts.
