The Best Sales Engagement Platforms
There are many categories of sales tools out there to help you build out a performance-busting stack for your team.
But the frontline in generating leads out of cold prospects ultimately lies with the interactions you have with them. The tools that help you optimize these sales touchpoints fall under the category of Sales Engagement Platforms (SEPs), and we aim to list some of the best here.
The benefits of using a sales engagement platform
The benefits of SEPs are relatively straightforward: reach out to a higher volume of prospects whilst maintaining consistent follow-ups and, if executed correctly, scale your reply rates.
They all involve the ability to build email sequences, where you can tailor send times, AB test messaging templates, and build automation triggers out of interactions such as whether a prospect has clicked-thru your mail.
The ability to scale on personalization is also becoming increasingly important to find an edge in outreach, most tools package this under what is essentially contact and company CRM field placeholders, more advanced will offer AI personalization.
Most SEPs will also offer multi-channel touchpoints, across social media, SMS, and calling. The more advanced will layer on sales intelligence and analytics capabilities.
Let’s have a look at some of the most highly rated, according to software review site G2.com.
Salesloft
The veteran sales engagement tool, Salesloft has been around for a while and through that time has built up an Enterprise-grade platform with functionality including sales intelligence and opportunity management.
At its core though is sales cadence automation, where you can set up multi-channel sequences along with a native dialler and email personalization.
Integrates with all the major CRMs and provides robust analytics for all your touchpoints.
Rating
4.5/5 from 2,900+ reviews
Pricing
4 plans, pricing on request: Prospect | Sell | Engage | Enterprise
Outreach.io
Along with Salesloft, Outreach is one of the market-leading standalone sales engagement platforms.
Self-categorizing itself as a “sales execution platform”, its UI scores highly for ease of use by sales reps and offers the omnichannel cadence capabilities you’d expect.
It also aims to pair your sales activity with AI-powered deal insights that you can leverage to plot pipeline predictability and growth.
Rating
4.3/5 from 2,800+ reviews
Pricing
Available on request
MixMax
MixMax’s workflow is centered around Gmail and it integrates with it seamlessly, so if your team spends most of their time engaging with prospects and customers there it’s a solid and cost-effective option.
The email tracking functionality, available to check out on free plans, gives a holistic view of your email outreach, and you have the ability to set up more advanced scheduling and sequence automation with paid plans.
Another handy feature is native meeting links.
With dialler only available on Enterprise plans and no social integrations you may want to explore other options if these are important touchpoints for your business.
Rating
4.6/5 from 950+ reviews
Pricing
4 paid plans from $9 per user. Free trial for limited scheduling and email tracking
Klenty
Klenty comes highly rated for its straightforward and easy-to-use email automation, where you can build cold email sequences along with a 1-click sales dialler on the Growth plan. LinkedIn automation is based on task notifications.
It integrates with a range of email providers and CRM and has additional features for AB testing and website visitor tracking for your campaigns.
Rating
4.6/5 from 150+ reviews
Pricing
3 plans from $35 per user
Hubspot Sales Hub
As one component of the overall Hubspot suite, Sales Hub is worth considering if you are looking to pair a sales engagement tool with a CRM in one instance, or if your team is using Hubspot as a CRM already.
Along with a multi-channel sequence builder, there is a range of features including meeting scheduler, price & quote document management, ABM tools, and custom reporting & forecasting.
Rating
4.4 / 5 from 8,200+ reviews
Pricing
3 plans from $45pm, min 2 users
Lemlist
Lemlist is an email automation tool that allows you to create sequences with a USP of including image personalization, video, and dynamic landing pages for your prospects.
Along with pre-made templates and sales integrations, it has an email domain “warm-up” feature which essentially spoofs responses and activity to maximize deliverability for your impending campaigns, useful if you’ve just activated a new email address or if you’ve just joined a new company.
Rating
4.2/5 from 90+ reviews
Pricing
3 plans from $29 per user
Reply
With Reply, you can automate sales communication across multiple channels including email, social (including LinkedIn and Whatsapp), calls, and SMS.
It offers additional capabilities that enhance the process of building out sales cadences and their application. These include a multi-purpose Chrome extension, which reveals emails as you browse profiles on Sales Navigator, and a streamlined workflow for adding contacts directly from your CRM into Reply sequences.
There is also a native Zapier integration, which allows you to extend beyond prospecting outreach to other engagement activities, for example adding to marketing lists and ad campaigns.
If you have a dedicated SalesOps on your team, it has a robust API that may be of interest for more advanced use cases.
Rating
4.6/5 from 800+ reviews
Pricing
No fewer than 11 combinations of pricing plans depending on your use case
MailShake
Mailshake offers a simple pricing structure around two plans, one dedicated to email outreach and a higher tier if you require a phone dialler and social touchpoints.
As well as being able to create omnichannel sales cadences, there is additional potential for automating your outreach with its patented AI email writer called SHAKEspeare that could save time on personalization.
A large number of integrations available means it should fit into most sales stacks.
Rating
4.6 / 5 from 180+ reviews
MailShake Pricing
2 plans from $44 per user
How do you choose a sales engagement tool?
Ultimately the answer to this comes down to the right one for your business process, but as the costs can stack up pretty quickly as you add users to your plan, we recommend taking your time to demo the options out there and make use of free trials if available.
Other factors you will want to consider are what integrations you need and what is the existing make-up of your sales stack - if you have an already complex workflow across a larger team, for example, then you're likely going to want to consider platforms that offer you high levels of support and setup assistance.