Sales engage(ment) – An accelerating trend for 2019

two colleagues laughing on a staircase
James T Fletcher
CEO, Principal Consultant

11/1/2019

In the last few years Marketing Automation software has progressed steadily from the early adoption phase of the curve into early majority. More and more companies of all shapes and sizes are adopting it. This increased adoption is being driven by the fact that Marketing is now considered to be, in almost all businesses, a revenue centre.

But Marketing need Sales to close deals: to turn MQLs into closed won business. Switched on business leaders know this. It’s the reason why a trend which will continue to develop through 2019 will be the coming together of Marketing, Sales and Support teams, speaking the same language, with the same objectives.

For a number of years, Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) has been an invaluable tool to help bring these teams together, enabling Sales and Support to leverage Marketing intelligence to help them close more deals, and better understand the customer.

So it wasn’t surprising when, in the middle of 2018, Marketo introduced Sales Engage, the big brother of MSI. Sales Engage provides Sales and Marketing leaders with key insights about when and how prospects engage. It offers a single workflow and screen for personalised engagement, lead insights from across sales and marketing touchpoints, and advanced analytics.

And in the recent Winter 2019 release, Sales Engage has been significantly enhanced with a variety of features to simplify management, improve the user experience, and deliver better results:

  • Salesforce Custom Profile: Sales Engage now supports unlimited custom profiles, providing a seamless onboarding experience as your team gets fully enabled.
  • Salesforce Customization: Onboard your entire team quickly and seamlessly with our latest revisions to Sales Engage’s SFDC integration. By removing non-critical custom activity fields, users can set up Sales Engage in the CRM platform without running into time-consuming custom field constraints.
  • Email Service: Enjoy better deliverability, improved Reply Tracking and Scheduled Email functionality and bulk email functionality by connecting to Microsoft Outlook — either through Office365 or On-Prem through the Email Connection tab.
  • OWA Plug-In for Windows With one single add-in, all Windows Office365 clients will be supported in Sales Engage, providing the ability to use Live Feed in Outlook, and improving the onboarding process. The new plugin will be available in the Microsoft Store.
  • Activities Pusher: Sync Sales Engage to the core Marketo platform to allow sellers to leverage real-time marketing insights.

But how many of your Sales and Support teams use Sales Engage? Or MSI? How many of them even know about it? When was the last time you ran a training session for the Sales team?

Here at JTF Marketing we’re firm believers in not only getting the software right, but making sure that it gets used by all the right people to generate more sales and deliver a better customer experience. In the case of Sales Engage – or MSI – that’s the Sales and Support teams.

We’ve not only implemented Sales Engage for a number of our clients, but we’ve run face-to-face and virtual training for their Sales and Support teams across Europe and around the world. If you are using Marketo but your Sales and Support teams are not benefiting from it, you’re missing a trick.