Scaling with Sales Engagement Platforms & Your Sales Stack

A sales stack, also known as a sales technology stack, is the totality of sales software that empowers a sales team to excel. Typically cloud-based, these technology solutions are designed to facilitate the sales process, ensuring data accuracy, eliminating process errors, and freeing sales reps to devote their time to … actually selling!

When a company first starts out, the sales stack is usually just a spreadsheet. Anyone who has ever sat in a sales seat in that particular situation knows that solution simply does not scale. 

At all.

Scaling your business requires a smart investment in your sales stack. Studies repeatedly show sales reps spend well less than half their time on revenue-generating sales activities. The rest of their time is spent internally, administratively juggling information as data processors. 

Your sales stack should be built to solve that sales activity problem. In that regard, sales engagement platforms (SEPs), like Salesforce Sales Engagement, Salesloft and Outreach have become essentials to automate a company’s outbound responses. 

What is a Sales Engagement Platform (SEP)?

An SEP is an engagement layer that integrates with your CRM and leverages its data, syncing and surfacing lead and account data, automating manual tasks, and measuring and tracking critical sales activities along the customer journey.

An SEP is absolutely mission-critical in accelerating your speed to lead, also known as lead response time. 

Lead Response Time = Lead Processing Time + Rep Response Time

Revenue teams have two big levers to push and pull upon to affect lead speed to lead. One of the biggest causes for delay lies in rep response time. Reps need data, and any lead with missing data requires time-consuming research. Plus, reps are human, and they can’t work Lead B if they’re engrossed with Lead A. Lastly, sometimes reps get so busy they forget, and a lead gets lost.

SEPs never forget.

If speed to lead is important to your business (spoiler alert: It is!), you absolutely must have a sales engagement platform. 

However, you must never rely solely on your sales engagement platform.

Maximizing the sales stack for revenue orchestration

SEPs are fantastic at performing their intended purpose – engaging with leads. You can think of them as a sort of “last mile” delivery service.

What’s important – absolutely critical for the customer experience – is that they deliver the right goods to the right person at the right time.

That’s where the principles of revenue orchestration come to play. 

First, you need to direct your SEP to engage a lead from the right representative at your company. The most potentially damaging circumstance here lies with existing customers. 

Regardless of the size of their account, every customer rightfully thinks they are your most important customer. Their expectation is that they are treated as priority number one by your company.

Now, imagine how they feel if, upon an inquiry, they’re treated like a brand new prospect, being pitched about products, solutions and/or services with which they already engage. Not a great experience, to say the very least.

Lead-to-account matching ensures leads are matched to accounts. With that information, leads can then be routed to the right representative at your company. For example, existing customers are routed to the correct Customer Success managers, leads at accounts with open opportunities are distributed to the appropriate Account Executives, and net new leads are assigned to the responsible Sales Development Representative. 

Proper orchestration not only sends leads to the right representative, it also delivers all the necessary contextual information also. Without this contextual data, well, another potential disaster lies just over the horizon.

Imagine a lead inquires about a campaign for beach vacations, only to have a company follow up with a locked-and-loaded automated response touting winter snow skiing getaways. There’s probably no need to count three strikes here. The lead is going to move on to a company that does a better job of listening.

Here’s where automated lead routing solutions play such a critical role. With a solution like LeanData Routing, with its campaign-member based routing features, a lead is forwarded to the right rep complete with critical context. In the above example, that campaign data drives it to the proper automated outbound sequence from the SEP – in this case, the beach vacation sequence. 

Please remember one thing from this post: SEPs are absolutely critical, almost a table stakes ante to the go-to-market (GTM) game, but never, ever rely solely on your SEP for success.

Introducing LeanData’s seamless integration with Salesforce Sales Engagement

LeanData has long been seamlessly integrated with both Outreach and Salesloft, two titans in the segment, allowing LeanData customers to orchestrate their GTM processes with speed, efficiency and effectiveness. Additionally, truth be told, LeanData had in the past developed ad hoc solutions for several customers using Salesforce Sales Engagement, previously known as High Velocity Sales, or HVS, an emerging player in the space.

Now, with Salesforce Sales Engagement growing in market share, LeanData has added it to its key integration partners. Using LeanData’s FlowBuilder interface, customers can now just drag and drop their desired SEP node into their GTM plays.

No fuss, no muss, no time delays that absolute crush speed to lead. Your reps will notice, but most importantly, your prospective customers will notice too. And, nothing gets you closer to closed/won than a sterling customer buying experience.