Explore Sales Engagement for Sales Cloud

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe the challenges sales teams face selling in today’s digital environment.
List the features of Sales Engagement.
Summarize how Sales Engagement addresses the challenges of selling in complex digital environments.

Challenges to Selling in a Digital World

What gets in the way of efficient selling? That depends on whom you ask. A new sales rep may be struggling with what to do and when. Experienced salespeople may feel like they need more hours in a day. Buyers will say they need information now—with preferences on where, when, and how they get it.

Sales teams might try incremental fixes in different areas, hoping for overall gains in efficiency. A sales rep might use a prospect-tracking app, log calls in another system, and put social leads in a spreadsheet. But data held in different systems is hard to maintain and creates fragmented views of buyers. For sales teams, a patchwork of imperfect solutions duplicates efforts, consumes more time, and is often eventually abandoned.

Buyers’ expectations are higher than ever, too. A buyer expects you to find them with the perfect content at the perfect time. Your prospects and customers expect personalized messaging with content that’s relevant to their business and their specific needs.

The problems increase if you’re trying to scale up sales efforts. In high-volume sales, teams might assume that entering more prospects at the start of the sales journey would result in more sales at the end, right? Not necessarily. It’s possible sellers just become overwhelmed, making the same emails and calls, trying to track where each prospect is in the process, and struggling to compare results.

The sales team at Cloud Kicks has been dealing with a high-volume challenge. Right now, the team is scrambling after their latest product launch.

Cloud Kicks is a fictional sneaker manufacturer that sells to independent running stores, online sneaker shops, and national sporting goods stores. Cloud Kicks just introduced a new line of sneakers, called Green Kicks, and buyers want to place orders or get information right away. The industry has taken notice of Green Kicks’s natural, vegan materials and eco-responsible approach to manufacturing.

The Cloud Kicks sales team is overwhelmed, managing requests from existing customers and fielding calls and emails from new buyers. Frankly, it’s getting difficult to know where each prospect is in the selling process, when a sales rep needs to follow up, and which sort of engagement is best for each buyer.

Let’s follow along with the Cloud Kicks sales team as they work through these challenges.

The Sales Engagement Solution

Jose Figueroa, sales manager.

The sales manager at Cloud Kicks, Jose Figueroa, has a vision in mind for different processes, or playbooks, that he’d like all the salespeople to follow. For now, he’s got a few diagrams on the whiteboard in his office. Jose wants all his reps to use the new processes, but he’s not sure how to implement the changes. After all, he still wants reps to log activities in the CRM and proactively work new leads.

Cloud Kick is using Salesforce for most of its sales processes, which definitely makes tracking and closing sales deals easier. Still, many salespeople are using different apps to manage new leads, tracking data in manual spreadsheets, and juggling multiple calendars.

Fortunately, Jose’s been in touch with his Salesforce account rep and learned there’s a solution: Sales Engagement. It’s an app that can replace his team’s fragmented approaches and still work seamlessly with the Salesforce platform. The Sales Engagement app includes a set of features that help sales teams work together faster, more consistently, and more efficiently.

Sales Engagement combines exclusive tools and tailored components in Sales Cloud. Jose learns about the features with a brief overview of each.

Standard Cadences and Quick Cadences

Jose wants to deploy specific processes for existing customers, qualified leads, and new business development. (Remember his whiteboard diagrams?) These processes can be standardized in Sales Engagement, where they’re called cadences.

Cadences are combinations of sales actions, which can be repeated to achieve optimum results for a desired outcome.

For example, when a customer emails to request information about a new product, a cadence might include several steps: a call from the assigned sales rep, a follow-up email, and then a face-to-face conversation.

Cadences help everyone at Cloud Kicks understand the “who” part of their selling steps, too.

The cadence target is the prospect (or customer) who receives the call, email, or other communication. One cadence can have many targets.
The target assignee is the person assigned to work the target through the cadence steps. Note: The target assignee can be any Sales Engagement user at Cloud Kicks. The target assignee is designated when a target is added to a cadence, and it can be changed later.

Jose can set up a standard cadence that outlines the specific engagement steps and automates moving and tracking the target through the process. His sales reps follow these playbooks for different scenarios. Each cadence step can use a specific call script or email template for even more consistency. In most companies, sales managers create the standard cadences.

When managers or sales reps assign a target to a cadence, the cadence step that’s currently due automatically appears in the target assignee’s Work Queue and To Do List.

The To Do List takes the guesswork out of what to do next for every sales rep. Steps from cadences are added to the target assignee’s To Do List automatically when they come due. You take a closer look at the To Do List in the next unit.

Any Sales Engagement user can set up a quick cadence. It has just one engagement step but still offers automation and customization. Sales reps can set up their own personalized sales step using a quick cadence. They can also create personal templates for calls, emails, or LinkedIn InMail, or add scheduled reminders to their To Do List and Work Queue. Sales reps set up the outreach step as a quick cadence ahead of time, then they add targets whenever it’s time to execute the step.

Automated Actions

Jose finds there are ways to save more time by automating common tasks related to cadences. Automated actions run in the background and are useful for ongoing, repetitive tasks. With simple if-this-then-that logic, they can automatically add, remove, pause, or resume cadence targets based on changes to field values on prospect records. Instead of requiring admin setup, reps can set up automated actions themselves, or a manager can add them for subordinates.

Engagement: Reports and Tracking

Jose wants to optimize every engagement in the sales journey, so he’ll rely on Sales Engagement features that measure, track, and report engagement and success metrics. Did a prospect open the email? Did they click a link? Which cadences are getting the most engagement and resulting in higher sales? The standard reports included in Sales Engagement can answer questions like these, and there are even more customization options to build reports that answer your company’s specific questions.

Email and Calendar Productivity

Sales reps at Cloud Kicks use email constantly, so Jose wants their email setup to be fast and flexible. He makes sure that Sales Engagement meets their needs with its email integrations which:

Work smoothly with either Gmail or Outlook email.
Use the included Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) to automatically sync email and calendars with Salesforce.
Allow for seamless meeting scheduling with calendar booking links.
Eliminate guesswork around who got which email with email tracking.

Einstein Conversation Insights

Sales Engagement also includes Einstein Conversation Insights (ECI). ECI uses AI and machine learning to provide conversational intelligence from a company’s own call data. ECI surfaces key moments, highlights useful topics, and delivers sales insights. Note-taking is eliminated so sellers can focus on their customers. Sales teams can learn more in Einstein Conversation Insights for Sales.

Sales Engagement and ECI work with third-party dialer integrations, or Salesforce Dialer is available as an add-on.

Sales Cloud Everywhere

The last feature Jose learns about allows his reps to become power users of web intelligence while multitasking. Sales Cloud Everywhere is a Chrome extension that lets reps view real-time updates of customer engagements, work in their To Do Lists, and fluidly update records without leaving the webpage they’re on.

Business Flows Better with Sales Engagement

Jose can’t wait to get started with Sales Engagement. He’s spoken with his Salesforce admin, Linda Rosenberg, about setting up the platform. Linda found there are features the whole team can start using right away, and a few that she wants to discuss with Jose so the settings match his preferences.

Linda Rosenberg, Salesforce admin.

Jose is confident that Sales Engagement will help Cloud Kicks streamline its sales process. Consistent, updateable cadences make handling large numbers of prospects easier, and measurable results provide better visibility into return on investment (ROI).

Cloud Kicks can use all of today’s digital touchpoints—email, phone, text, LinkedIn—to deliver the perfect content a buyer needs, when they need it. Buyers receive personalized content in an integrated experience to accelerate their buying journey. Sales teams can track these deals across Salesforce and all their channels. With Sales Engagement and its automation at scale, sales teams can focus on closing more deals, faster.

Next up, the Cloud Kicks team gets their first look at the Sales Engagement user interface. Follow along as the team gets a broad overview of how the components work together and integrate with Salesforce CRM.

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