Personalize Outreach at Scale with Sales Engagement Automation

This is a guest post from Zendesk, a leader in customer support software.

When prospects show interest in your product or service, they expect fast, personal responses. According to a recent study by Dimensional Research, most consumers consider fast response times to be the most important element of a sales interaction. And in today’s sales environment, when there are fewer in-person opportunities to engage with prospects, fast, proactive, and personalized communication is more important than ever to establish trust and to build your pipeline. But following up with and engaging leads is a time-consuming, tedious process. Without an automated process, reps can spend hours manually emailing leads to gauge interest and schedule calls—or worse, neglect to contact leads at all.

To help sales teams make personalized lead outreach more efficient, we’re launching new sales engagement automation tools for Zendesk Sell. With these new features, reps can schedule a series of personalized emails to leads, so they’re able to engage and qualify more prospects in less time. Built into the Zendesk Sell sales CRM, these tools fit right into reps’ workflows, so they can get up and running in no-time without any additional software. Read on to learn more about how sales teams can benefit from these features.

Ensure Fast, Personalized Follow-Up

In sales, speed matters. Deals often go to the vendor that responds to prospects first. With sales engagement automation tools from Zendesk Sell, reps can send instant follow-ups to multiple leads at once, so they don’t have to worry about missed opportunities. Reps can enroll individual or multiple leads in customized email sequences to conduct ongoing sales outreach at scale. With merge tags, email templates auto-populate information specific to leads so emails are instantly personalized.

Before using Zendesk’s solution, global design and development consultancy, thoughtbot, relied on a marketing tool to automate initial outreach emails. But their reps also manually sent follow-ups to make personal connections, which took up a large portion of their time. With sales engagement automation tools from Zendesk Sell, their team was able to automate their outreach process without sacrificing personalization. As thoughtbot founder and CEO Chad Pytel put it, “With Sell’s sales engagement automation features, our reps can automate personalized outreach with leads, allowing them to qualify prospects faster with less manual work.”

Boost Rep Productivity

Ad hoc, manual prospect outreach takes time away from reps—time that could be spent building relationships and selling. Sales engagement automation removes the pain of having to manually email leads to gauge interest and schedule calls. As a result, your reps can spend time focused on more complex conversations and building relationships. Since these tools are built right into the Sell sales CRM, they fit into reps’ existing workflows.

Mailchimp, the all-in-one marketing platform built for growing businesses, understands first-hand how sales engagement automation can boost productivity. Previously, the company was struggling to deliver fast and friendly customer experiences to a large volume of inbound leads. Their business development team was spending a lot of time manually responding to prospects to gauge interest and move them through the sales funnel. With sales engagement tools from Zendesk Sell, Kyle Raymond, Customer Engagement Manager, Business Development, estimates that his reps save, “at least four hours each a week. And we love that these tools are built right into Sell—the more we can do right in our sales CRM, the better.”

Align Your Team and Improve

It can be difficult to ensure reps stay on the company’s messaging or adhere to prescribed processes without an automated outreach solution. Plus, without visibility and the ability to track all customer communication, it’s difficult to know what’s working and how to improve.

With sales engagement automation, you can equip reps with templates and cadences that have been proven successful, so there is less rogue content and more process adherence. All emails from a sequence show up in lead activity feed and reports—just like any other communication—so teams can have full visibility into rep activity and learn how their outreach strategies impact pipeline and deals. Plus, with sequence reporting, including reply rates, teams can iterate and tweak email sequences to make sure they are driving effective engagement.

For thoughtbot, Zendesk’s sales engagement automation tools have helped their team stay aligned and collaborate to close deals. “Because these features are built right into the Sell CRM, our whole team has visibility into all customer communication so we can work together to bring on new clients,” said Pytel. “That’s really key for us.”

Get Started in Minutes

In these uncertain times, more prospects are tightening their budgets and fewer are buying. That’s why it’s more important than ever to connect quickly and personally with prospective buyers. The good news is, teams can start improving their outreach processes today and reach more qualified prospects in less time with sales engagement automation tools from Zendesk Sell.

These tools are included in our Reach add-on, creating an all-in-one lead generation and engagement solution that doesn’t require any additional software or set-up. Combining powerful prospecting and enrichment tools with sales engagement automation, Reach allows sales teams to automate prospect outreach so they can reach more qualified prospects in less time.

This post originally appeared on the Zendesk blog.