Sales Engagement Platform vs. CRM: Why both are essential

Winning at sales means winning at the two “p”s: profitability and productivity.

To work efficiently and effectively, your team needs to be leveraging the right tools. And whilst most sales organizations rely on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems - like Salesforce or HubSpot - to centralize their prospect data, these platforms alone aren’t necessarily enough to make deals happen.

Enter sales engagement platforms. These innovative tools fill the gaps left by traditional CRMs, supercharging revenue efforts through automation, deal analysis, and streamlined communication. 

Let’s explore the distinct roles of CRM systems and sales engagement platforms in a little more detail and see how integrating both can accelerate your deal velocity and drive sales success!

What's the difference between a CRM and a sales engagement platform?

As tools have evolved, these terms have been used more and more interchangeably. Strictly speaking however, CRM and sales engagement platforms actually serve distinct purposes in the sales process. 

While CRMs focus on storing and organizing customer data and interactions, (hence the name Customer Relationship Management) sales engagement platforms are usually more geared towards communication and automating sales activities. 

Your CRM is your central source of pipeline truth. Sales engagement platforms are what you use to keep your pipeline filling and flowing.

But whilst these concepts are distinct, you’ll see why integrating both tools together is crucial for optimizing sales activities and driving revenue growth.

What is a CRM in sales and why is it so essential?

CRM systems serve as repositories for customer data and insights crucial for nurturing relationships.

Your CRM accumulates and maintains customer records throughout their journey with your company, functioning as a single source of truth for your customer and prospect data. 

Conscientious teams understand the importance of keeping their CRM up to date with the right contact information and sentiment data because it can inform virtually all of their other sales and marketing efforts.

The benefits of utilizing a CRM include:

• Integration of customer and prospect data: Much like an intelligent Rolodex, a CRM system stores a wealth of emails and contact details. These contacts are automatically synchronized onto a centralized dashboard, ensuring seamless access for the entire organization.
• Streamlined task management: Your CRM empowers teams to schedule and allocate tasks across various departments within the company. Typically centered around customer and prospect interactions, these tasks might include reminders for specific follow-ups, check-ins, trainings, or other actions to optimize your customer experience. The fact that multiple teams can have visibility over your full pipeline makes it easier for you to keep all sales, marketing, and customer-facing initiatives on track.
• Generation of insightful eeports: By analyzing sales data, your CRM enables the creation of reports that inform revenue strategies. These reports play a pivotal role in crafting an enhanced customer experience and fostering customer loyalty by identifying trends and areas for improvement.

But your CRM doesn’t only help your organization to enhance existing customer relationships and bolster retention rates; it’s also packed with data that can help you refine your future sales and marketing strategies. That’s where your sales engagement platform comes in.

What are the benefits of using a sales engagement platform?

Sales engagement platforms serve as the proactive force behind sales activities, revolutionizing communication with buyers. While your CRM may capture certain sales interactions, sales engagement platforms offer a more in-depth perspective on deals currently in progress and the state of your prospective pipeline. 

Sales engagement platforms like Amplemarket include a range of features designed to help sellers put their strategies into practice, including a prospecting database, LinkedIn extension for social selling, multichannel sequencing, AI-powered workflow automation, prospect intelligence, deliverability support, and much more.

Unlike CRMs, these platforms helps reps refine “how” they close deals and sell more productively. Many engagement platforms will offer detailed performance insights so reps can identify the most effective communication channels, optimal outreach times, and compelling scripts and cadences.

These data-driven insights also allow sales managers to make more informed strategic decisions and to check up on individual reps’ performances.

The benefits of a sales engagement platforms include:

• Increased response and open rates: By leveraging call and email connection statistics, sellers can engage with prospects and customers at the most opportune moments, resulting in higher response rates and a greater number of booked meetings.
• Identification of top-performing strategies: With a dedicated sales engagement platform it becomes easier to identify the strategies employed by top performers. This knowledge can be shared with the rest of the team, enabling them to replicate successful approaches. For instance, reps cancollaborate with standardized email templates, call scripts, or exemplary call recordings to strengthen team performance and streamline onboarding for new joiners.
• Clear pipeline breakdown: Sales success hinges on having a clear understanding of the pipeline, but manual data updates can eat into valuable sales time. Sales engagement platforms alleviate this burden by automatically recording prospect responses so they’re ready to sync with your CRM.

How to integrate your CRM and sales engagement platforms for sales success

So if both your CRM and sales engagement platform are critical for managing your pipeline, how do you get the tools to work well together?

To start with, you need to make sure you choose a sales engagement platform that aligns well with your CRM!

Here are some things to consider when you’re scoping out new sales engagement tools:

1. Engage CRM support early: Inform your CRM administrator about your plans to evaluate sales engagement solutions. Request a list of integration requirements and specifications to facilitate the decision-making process. Involving your CRM support team early on ensures smoother coordination and alignment and prevents unpleasant surprises or major blockers later on!
2. Assess your current tech stack: Compile a comprehensive list of your existing sales technology vendors. This inventory will help you identify redundant tools that can be eliminated and non-negotiable ones that need integration with your chosen sales engagement platform.
3. Define sales process steps: Plan out workflows from your CRM and other applications, ensuring seamless data flow into your sales engagement platform. This proactive approach enables you to capture granular analytics and streamline processes effectively.
4. Collaborate with prospective providers: Share your tech vendor list with potential sales engagement providers to gauge their level of support and compatibility. This collaboration ensures that the selected platform can seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure.

Benefits of strong CRM integration

The good news is that once you’ve navigated your integrations, your sales workflows will be far more streamlined! By connecting your sales engagement platform with your CRM, you unlock numerous benefits:

• Reduced administrative tasks: Consolidate data entry processes and minimize the burden of repetitive administrative tasks for your sales representatives. That means more time for revenue-generating activities, which in turn feeds better productivity and success rates!
• Improved data quality: Eliminate manual data entry errors and latency issues by leveraging the automated data update capabilities of sales engagement platforms. Real-time syncing ensures the accuracy and integrity of your customer data, which means more precise pipeline management and forecasting!
• Enhanced CRM utilization: No reps enjoy manual CRM data entry, but you still need it to be your single point of truth. Fortunately, sales engagement platforms enable seamless interaction with CRM records directly from email inboxes, maximizing user adoption and extracting maximum value from your CRM investment.

While CRM systems and sales engagement platforms serve distinct roles in the sales process, integrating the two means you can dive deeper into your data to accelerate deal velocity, enhance customer relationships, and drive revenue growth more effectively.

If you’re a sales engagement platform that integrates seamlessly with HubSpot, Salesforce, and many other CRMs, check out Amplemarket!