3 Rules of the Road for Choosing a Sales Engagement Platform

Imagine leaving for work in the morning driving your Oldsmobile and coming home that night in a Ferrari. Now imagine weighing the inevitable midlife crisis convo you're about to have with your family against the gratification you'll get when your daily commute feels like flying. In the same way, buying into a sales engagement platform can feel both daunting and exciting. Choosing any software requires an investment of time, money, and guts (it's not easy pitching your notoriously budget-conscious executive), but you also know that it has the potential to be powerful, to maximize efficiency, and to have you soaring through your daily tasks with unprecedented velocity. Can you feel the wind in your hair, yet? 

But how do you move from your tried-and-true vehicle to an ultramodern machine? Is it worth it to wager security against opportunity? Without the proper due diligence, investing in new software IS risky. But just as you would never invest in a new ride without consulting Autotrader or the Kelley Blue Book, here is some reliable research you can use to vet a sales engagement platform. With these guidelines, you’ll be able to distinguish the basic sales engagement platform from the best-in-class in no time at all.

1. Safety Features: Email persistence without SPAM risks

Think of email safeguards as the seat belts for your sales engagement platform. One main fear people have around sales email automation is whether it’s going to create a free-for-all of spam. And that will be a problem...if you don’t choose a sales engagement platform with appropriate email safeguards. The most select platforms will be sure to have the following features:

• Single accounts don’t get flooded, so you don’t get blacklisted (domain-level throttling)
• Prospects don’t get leeched by multiple active sequences (sequence exclusivity)
• Clients get breathing room between sequences (cool down times)

2. Speed: Never miss an opportunity to respond

Nobody wants to buy a Ferrari only to wind up in the passenger’s seat. But that can happen when purchasing sales software that only lets reps respond at a specific time each week. Although sales engagement technology has powerful potential to tell you when your prospects are most likely to respond, and to help you to automate your own responses, you need one without system restrictions that keep you from pursuing leads at your own speed.

3. Cutting-Edge: Keep information up-to-date

What if you’ve finally taken the plunge and bought a superb high-end vehicle, only to discover that it doesn’t really have all the latest bells and whistles? It'd be frustrating, to say the least! If you don’t want to make the same mistake in choosing a sales engagement platform, the fancy feature you’ll need to look for is ‘conflict resolution.’ This means, if  one of your sales admins updates a phone number in a contact record in Salesforce while an account exec simultaneously updates the same contact record in his sales engagement platform, you know which update will stick. Conflict resolution considers several more sophisticated factors so that the sync is dictated by the most accurate information, and not the overriding system. It’s the Apple Car Play of sales engagement platforms. Vroom.