The sales landscape today is very different. The volume of prospects, pipeline, and revenue are huge. So, when you hire AEs, the most important thing you want them to do is to engage new prospects and close more deals. But when you look at how an average AE spends his time, it is evident that many processes are keeping him from selling, thus affecting his sales outreach strategy. 

And surprisingly, this doesn’t include dealing with noisy coworkers, workplace gossip, or even lack of skills to make a sale happen. But, it is doing tons of time-consuming manual tasks!  

Salesforce research reveals that sales reps spend 66 percent of their time on non-revenue generating activities. While that’s a bitter pill to swallow, it is nevertheless true! Because along with opportunities, the sales evolution has given rise to more processes, tasks, and problems too. Hence non-selling tasks such as logging in, managing emails, updating customer information, and inputting sales data keep your AEs busy throughout the week. 

But that’s worrisome, isn't it?

Outsource The Tasks To Technology Already 

SaaS sales reps typically have a lot of opportunities to manage daily. Their outreach process includes nurturing leads by establishing trust, boosting product awareness, and building relationships. And these efforts to convert leads to customers take time. This means they must operate efficiently to perform at their peak.

But, the inefficient tasks cause them to lose valuable prospecting and closing time. So what do you do about this? Get your sales reps to outsource their repetitive tasks to technology. And what better than using a Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) to fine-tune outreach inefficiencies.

No more repetitive tasks with a SEP 

Yes, you’ve read that right. As Gartner rightly said, a SEP is a level 1 technology and a mandatory purchase for sales teams everywhere. With a single interface, it helps efficiently plan, track, execute, manage, and analyze interactions between your AEs and customers. This way they can spend less time on low-value manual tasks and close more deals instead.

Using a SEP can improve your AEs' sales outreach efforts manifold giving them more closed deals. Three major task categories they benefit the most are:

1. Engaging prospects on multiple channels

Reaching out to prospects is the most important task of your AE’s day. But with prospects present on multiple channels, manually reaching out and following up on every channel becomes an arduous process for them. 

The right sales engagement platform supports connecting with prospects on multiple platforms. Outplay’s multi-channel outreach, for example, makes reaching out at scale via email, call, SMS, chat, LinkedIn, and Twitter possible. This takes away the burden of switching between platforms for your AEs.

Moreover, a SEP also makes automated cadences possible by creating a schedule for sales teams to follow up with new prospects and follow through with customers. Because manually managing touchpoints to track each prospect’s cadence becomes really difficult. Automated cadences sent in a timely and effective manner help your AEs diversify and scale their sales outreach.

2. Toggling between tools in the sales stack

Did you know your AEs generally go back and forth with many tools in the sales stack? They do so to identify a prospect’s stage in the sales funnel, build a lasting relationship with them and measure the impact of outreach. But they end up losing so much of their precious time in this process.
 

A SEP, however, has a solution for this. Integrating with numerous tools, it provides your sales reps a holistic view of all the prospect-related activities on a single platform. This makes taking action on the right data at the right time effortless. Marrying Outplay for instance, with tools like Salesforce and Hubspot, the SEP has made the lives of AEs easier. They are now free from the burden of manually updating data on the CRM as it is automatically synced and updated immediately.

Similarly, the integrated calling engine in the SEP makes handling calls and voicemails efficient. Your sales reps can easily call, record, transfer, and send voicemails with the feature. The call notes and recordings help analyze the approach and improve communication with prospects. And the best part, all the data is stored on the platform for easy reference later.

3. Tracking Key Metrics 

Your AEs are constantly trying new ways of engaging with prospects. From cold emails to calls to LinkedIn messages. Both them and you as Sales Managers want to understand the effectiveness of their efforts along with their performance. For this, you need to create a report on a sales tool, download the report in a sheet and then manually manipulate it. That’s just too much effort, right?
 

Not when using a sales engagement platform. Integrating with different sales tools, a SEP shows you all the data in one place. It makes tracking the sequences easy with detailed analytics on email open rates, click rates, and booked meetings. Outplay’s sales analytics enables AEs to course correct and close more deals.

Additionally, with a SEP you can also track your sales team’s performance. By changing filters such as calls, email, messages you can track activity-based analytics of your entire team’s performance or one AE in particular. Your low-performing AEs too can use the analytics to improve.

Wrapping up 

Technology has made our lives easier at many levels, so why not use it to automate the manual tasks that eat away your AEs time? Sales engagement platforms such as Outplay unleash their potential by automating time-consuming and trivial daily tasks. This not only leaves them time to engage with more prospects but also do what they are hired for - close more deals!