Whether selling to businesses or customers, a crucial part of modern sales is communication and engagement with potential customers to generate interest and tap into opportunities.
An estimated 60 Billion emails are sent for sales-related outreach every day, and according to Gartner, only 23.9% are ever opened. This is where sales engagement software comes into play — A sales engagement software optimizes the sales communication process by streamlining communication with potential customers, prospecting databases full of potent leads, and automating the workflows required to create a seamless sales experience for sellers.
Any tool that provides intelligence about, or makes sales communication and customer engagement easier, is a sales engagement tool, hence, these come in different shapes and sizes.
As one can already assume, there are many giants and small businesses alike in the sales engagement software category, all with their unique features and drawbacks. This list mentions 10 such sales engagement software tools worth checking out, along with an overview of each containing their respective features and benefits.
Features to Look Out For in Sales Engagement Software
All sales engagement software is built differently, however, certain features and capabilities should not be overlooked while selecting a sales engagement platform. These essential features are the ones that can make or break your choice of sales engagement software:
Integration Capabilities: A sales engagement tool should seamlessly integrate with other tools your business uses, especially with sales tools such as CRMs. Integrations allow sellers to use any software in their existing processes, allowing them to capture the power of sales engagement automation without revamping their entire pipeline.
Performance and Engagement Analytics: If a sales engagement software cannot reveal the results that automation or a lack thereof is producing, then it cannot hope to satisfy modern sales engagement needs where decisions need to be data-driven. Performance and revenue reporting capabilities are essential for taking measures to improve performance. Engagement metrics about customer interactions are critical to figuring out which strategies are working.
Workflow Automation: Automation should, by definition, reduce the amount of manual and time-consuming tasks that need to be performed by the sales professionals, while still increasing their productivity. As such, any sales engagement software should result in reduced operational time and more time available for selling. Selling insights are a cherry on top of any sales engagement software.
Customization: Customization is the backbone of adoption. All businesses have varied needs and a good sales engagement platform needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of different types of workflows, pipelines, and companies.
Top 10 Best Sales Engagement Software
Here are the top 10 sales engagement software to look out for in 2024:
1. Lemlist
Lemlist is a sales automation tool that is all about reaching the right contacts at scales and converting them into leads. Lemlist is designed to streamline sales and marketing outreach in a way that ensures that your emails are read and do not end up in spam.
Key Features and Benefits
Multichannel outreach (Linkedin, email, and voice call) in the same campaign.
Advanced conditions to trigger your campaign’s next steps based on the recipient’s responses.
A Chrome extension that allows for scraping contacts and adding them to campaigns all without leaving LinkedIn.
A database of 450M+ B2B contacts, with advanced filters to make your search for leads easier.
Integrations with all major CRMs, lead warming, and other sales tech stacks.
AI features for hyper-personalization and boosting efficiency.
Potential Drawbacks
Some users have reported bugs that prevent the timely completion of campaigns.
Their pricing ladder is too steep with certain great features requiring a high upfront investment to use, leading small businesses to consider this a drawback.
Their customer support team lags in giving proper solutions to consumer issues, according to some users.
2. Salesken
Salesken is an AI-powered sales engagement platform that focuses on optimizing sales strategies and processes such as cold calling and lead tracking through intelligence offered by AI. It has 3 main products on its platform - AI Sales Assistant, Quality Assurance AI, and Revenue Intelligence AI.
Salesken enhances sales team productivity by optimizing sales rep training and offering real-time conversational analytics to improve sales behavior, to build a robust sales calling framework.
Key Features and Benefits
Detailed deal and customer journey insights and AI intelligence to empower the best course of action to convert deals.
Revenue intelligence insights and forecasting accounting for sensitive deals and trends.
Real-time conversational intelligence and prompts empower reps to handle even the most complex customer queries most effectively.
AI sales analytics, summaries, and transcriptions of each call to empower sales leaders to make decisions and boost sales performance.
Pricing insights for competitors, and great pricing for the Salesken platform itself.
Potential Drawbacks
Some users have reported inadequate reporting capabilities.
Some users have mentioned that learning how to integrate the software into their day-to-day work is tough.
3. Mailshake
Mailshake is a powerful outreach automation and lead management tool used by over 50,000 companies worldwide. Its features include an AI email writer to ensure high conversion rates and increase email deliverability so that emails don't end up in spam.
Mailshake streamlines outreach making outreach at scale simple and effective, incorporating LinkedIn and social media platforms.
Key Features and Benefits
Multichannel outreach automation to ensure that prospects are reached where they are.
Dynamic content management and insights to improve conversion rates.
Seamless integrations with popular CRMs, Calling tools, and social media platforms, among others.
Lead catcher and data finder features to find potential customers, import them to your CRM, and start outreach automatically upon discovery.
Lead management and lead insights to better understand and proceed with each lead.
Potential Drawbacks
Some users report missing features and poor customer support regarding them.
Some users are unhappy with the pricing stating that it's higher than competitors for similar features.
Customizability is limited and tough and filters under the data finder are limited.
4. MixMax
MixMax is a sales engagement platform that prioritizes ease of use and maximum efficiency. It automates workflows and notifications to ensure that no follow-up is missed and claims that sales reps can save over 40 hours spent in lead management and scoring by using MixMax, as MixMax automates all these processes.
Their multichannel outreach also includes AI support and email enhancement features to make the emails more engaging for the prospects.
Key Features and Benefits
Multichannel outreach features over Slack, email, call, SMS, and other platforms.
AI Compose for quick email writing, along with a library of prebuilt email templates for quicker activation of campaigns.
Personalized insights for every lead such as optimal time to connect and engagement score for scoring the leads, which automatically feeds into outreach email campaigns for their optimization for best results.
Workflow automation features for salesforce updates, lead creation, and data entry.
One-click meeting creation and call features right from your inbox. MixMax streamlines communication channels to be managed from one place.
Users are happy with the pricing options, reporting it to be ‘aggressive’ and ‘sensible’.
Potential Drawbacks
Users have reported missing or broken features and inaccurate repetitive notifications being triggered.
A MixMax sender footer is included in each email in the free version of the software.
5. Spotio
Spotio is a unique sales engagement software because it is made specifically for field sales. It automates entire processes required in field sales such as route planning, territory management, and data capturing for CRM updates.
Spotio also includes live location tracking of reps, and lead scoring and qualification for prospects, ensuring that sales reps only visit the prospects most likely to convert.
Key Features and Benefits
Task automation features for data entry, sales planning, and messaging templates.
Route planning to save time and focus on leads that have the most chance of converting.
Territory management and control features that let sales managers limit the visibility of leads per rep and see territorial performance details.
Hybrid multi-channel communication features and customer mapping to ensure leads are nurtured in the best possible way.
Sales tracking and performance analytics for each rep.
Integrations with major CRMs directly, and other apps through Zapier.
Potential Drawbacks
Although users are happy with the features, they report a steep learning curve in being able to utilize all the features effectively.
Users have reported steep and stagnant pricing as a drawback.
Some users have also reported slow loading and update times, although infrequently.
6. Revenue.io
Revenue.io is an AI-powered sales engagement platform that focuses and sales and revenue intelligence to power engagement. Revenue.io provides real-time insights into performance and guides salespeople through customer calls via real-time conversational analytics. They can also use it to record calls and analyze them for insights.
By converting every engagement into actionable insights, Revenue.io greatly reduces rep ramp-up time and enhances sales training. Their sales calling intelligence platform is the highlight of their software, along with intelligent insights for revenue teams and forecasting.
Key Features and Benefits
AI-powered real-time conversational guidance and actionable tips to sales reps to ensure the highest chances of closure.
Multichannel outreach automation and lead-specific insights like the best time to engage, best channel to engage, etc.
Real-time performance tracking and optimization insights with accurate revenue forecasting.
Their communication hub, RingDNA, is the highest-rated AI-powered Salesforce dialer in the industry.
Lead management and prioritization insights, along with generative responses to capture interest at the right time.
Users have reported it to be a great value-for-money offering.
Potential Drawbacks
Some users have reported call dropping and management issues.
Their dialer is reported to be slow in queueing calls and crashes occasionally.
7. Klenty
Klenty is a sales engagement platform that prioritizes making sales engagement an agile process. With their behavior-triggered playbooks to record best practices for each scenario, AI writer, and other features meant to streamline sales communication, they aim to reduce the rep’s workload and have them focus on the leads.
Their conversational intelligence features are top-notch for keeping a record of and deriving insights from sales calls. Their LinkedIn automation feature to conduct outreach at scale directly on LinkedIn is also noteworthy.
Key Features and Benefits
Multichannel (Call, text, LinkedIn, and email) automated outreach with personalization and intent-based playbooks.
Power dialer, call reporting, and live transcription of calls along with actionable insights for sales reps.
Lead enrichment and LinkedIn prospecting tools to capture new opportunities, create warm databases, and drop voicemails in just one click through their smart calling features.
Scheduling automation that matches the relevant data of the right reps to the right lead and integrates with the calendar to book meetings instantly.
Playbook creation for each sales scenario to introduce consistency in sales behavior across large sales teams.
Integrations with major CRM platforms and communication platforms, along with Zapier support for infinite integrations.
Users are happy with the pricing and the price-to-performance ratio of Klenty.
Potential Drawbacks
Users have reported complexities in using the features, and a steep learning curve for someone using such software for the first time.
Users also suggest that integration capabilities are overstated and cause issues sometimes.
8. Reply.io
Reply.io is a powerful sales outreach and AI automation platform. Their Artificial Intelligence-powered features, such as an AI-powered SDR agent that books calls and keeps refreshing prospecting data to keep outreach running 24/7, are some of the industry’s finest.
They also feature AI-powered website chatbots that convert inbound traffic into leads, covering both inbound and outbound aspects of sales effectively.
Key Features and Benefits
Multichannel outreach campaigns with advanced conditional formatting and conditional replies, along with AI-powered automated creation of sequences and campaigns.
Unlimited mailboxes to ensure the highest deliverability rates, along with email warmup features for each of the inboxes for free.
Reply Data, Reply.io’s B2B contact database with over 89 million contacts, and their Name2Email extension to find new prospects anywhere you want.
A large list of no-code integrations with major CRMs, lead generation software, and other sales tools, such as RB2B, Gmail, LeadFuze, etc.
AI response generation to ensure all leads are nurtured.
Users are very happy with the base pricing but report that for add-on features, the pricing quickly starts to climb to steep levels.
Potential Drawbacks
Some users have reported issues such as broken integrations, lack of organization and customization, and features not working intermittently.
A lot of the features are very hard to use, and users report that months into using the software, they are still not at ease sometimes.
9. Instantly
Instatnly has been rated the easiest-to-use sales engagement tool by G2, the world’s leading software marketplace. Users adore its intuitive interface with a plethora of customization options.
Their inbound and outbound sales features are some of the best in the industry, and their lead database is rich in B2B contacts, leading to a high satisfaction rate amongst users. Instantly makes it easy for businesses to do personalized multichannel email outreach at scale, and convert website visitors into leads in an efficient way by automatically recognizing their contacts and adding them to campaigns.
Key Features and Benefits
160 Million+ B2B contacts in their database with advanced filtering options to make sure you get your leads quickly and instantly.
Deliverability customization and monitoring, along with unlimited sender accounts created and warmed by Instantly. 1-click activation of sender accounts is also a great feature.
Instantly identifies website visitors and adds them to a campaign automatically to ensure no interest is left unattended. Advanced filtering options are available for inbound traffic as well.
Inbox rotation and sending customization to build scalable campaigns that don’t end up in spam.
Powerful integrations across sales and communication tech stacks.
Potential Drawbacks
Some users are unhappy with the pricing, which is too steep for advanced features specifically.
Users also report that the lead management capabilities of Instantly are somewhat limited.
10. Clari
Clari is a complete sales engagement and revenue platform that gives you intelligent AI-powered insights to stay on top of revenue and streamline sales processes to have the best outcomes.
Clari has acquired Groove, a sales engagement platform, to boost their sales engagement features and make them more robust. Groove helps users optimize and unify the sales journey.
Key Features and Benefits
Personalized engagement tools and AI-powered guidance for every member of the sales team, especially sales development representatives (SDRs) and business development representatives (BDRs)
Real-time coaching with Clari copilot, a conversational intelligence model that empowers sales representatives to make the most out of sales calls.
High-level AI-powered analytics and pipeline management features and sales cycle optimization with adequate reporting capabilities.
Automation of workflows so sellers don’t have to spend time on manual and administrative tasks, along with unification of multiple apps to empower actions without app-switching.
Automatic capture of deal activity across email, CRM data, calls, meetings, etc. to give reps more time to close deals rather than doing data entry.
Potential Drawbacks
Users have reported dashboarding limitations and weak signal capture, along with several missing features.
Some users are also unhappy with the limited availability of customization options.
Some users report high monthly subscription charges.
Wrapping Up
In 2024, merely contacting prospects is not enough. Unless you can achieve scale in your outreach and implement lead-scoring processes, you cannot hope to scale sales and thereby your business.
The sales engagement software tools listed above optimize how you communicate with prospects, and ensure that your sales team is optimized for utmost efficiency. This comprehensive list of sales engagement platforms will boost sales productivity by guiding your sales reps toward success and preventing them from falling into the trap of poor leads, poor planning, or manual tasks.
Note: All information here has been sourced from respective vendor websites and software marketplaces such as G2 and Gartner.
FAQs
What is sales engagement software?
Sales engagement software offerings streamline the methods and ways in which sales teams approach and communicate with leads, including which leads are contacted at what time. Such software platforms are excellent for optimizing sales outreach and improving efficiency.
What is the best software for sales?
The best sales software include a CRM, lead generation software, sales compensation software, and a sales engagement software.
What is the difference between a CRM and a sales engagement platform?
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool is a centralized dashboard of your sales pipeline that shows the status of each lead as they move through your pipeline. Sales engagement software, on the other hand, is designed to optimize and streamline communication with potential customers.
What is CRM software in sales?
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software in sales is software that centralizes your sales pipeline into an online dashboard to streamline how businesses manage their interactions with their consumers.
What is the difference between a sales engagement software and a sales enablement software?
A sales engagement software is designed to enhance sales communication and make it scalable, on the other hand, a sales enablement software optimizes sales and marketing collaterals to empower sales reps’ knowledge about the product and increase their selling power.
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