Meet Alex, a sales rep at an early stage Martech company. Currently, he is working on building a list of qualified leads. For this, he is actively using different communication channels: email, SMS and LinkedIn. 

But the problem? He sends the initial message but misses out on following up with these leads—all because he is managing his outreach manually. Result? This results in uncoordinated communication and decreased conversion rates.

If you're like Alex, you need to make the switch and use a sales engagement software to centralize your outreach from multiple communication channels. 

In this article, we discuss 5 sales engagement softwares to help you make the right decision and achieve a higher ROI. 

Let's get started.

5 sales engagement software to simplify your sales process

Happysales

Happysales is an AI-powered sales engagement platform that lets sales teams leverage AI capabilities. 

Compared to other platforms that provide a mail merge feature to personalize the emails, Happysales integrates with LinkedIn and pulls 100+ personality insights from the prospect’s LinkedIn profile. Sales reps can use these insights to personalize their cold outreach campaigns (for both cold calls and cold emails) and send emails in bulk. 

Key features

• AI agent: Build intelligent lists that match your ICPs, personalize emails and messages, and suggest email responses based on your company's knowledge base. 
• AI collaborator: Identify prospect’s pain points, automatically generate icebreakers, and get tailored messaging recommendations. 
• Bulk prospecting: Engage multiple accounts simultaneously with personality insights and 100+ intelligence triggers.

Pros

• Personality insights 
• Integration with LinkedIn 
• Cost-effective

Review

“The AI-modeled role-plays  for practicing pitches were my favorite feature, enhancing both confidence and effectiveness in real conversations.”

Cons

• No transparent pricing on the website

Pricing: Starts at $25 per user per month

Salesloft

Salesloft is another sales engagement platform that helps sales teams build multi-channel outreach and manage the pipeline. One standout feature of Salesloft is Rhythm AI—it pulls buyer signals from third-party websites and identifies hot leads. 

Key features

• Multi-touch cadence: Automate calls, emails and social touchpoints to engage the prospects and build more pipelines.
• Deals: Sync Salesloft with your CRM, speed up deals, spot gaps, and close more deals. 
• Conversations: Review the sales call recordings, get transcriptions, and analyze them to identify opportunity gaps.
• Rhythm AI: Extract buyer signals from Salesloft and third-party apps like G2, Vidyard and UserGems—and respond promptly to your most engaged prospects.
• Hot lead automation: Identify your most engaged prospects or customers by tracking email interactions and live website tracking.
• Salesloft dialer: Make sales calls right from the platform—domestic and international.

Pros

• AI-powered workflows 
• Integration with Salesforce 
• Strong user community 

Cons

• No transparent pricing

Pricing: Unavailable

Outreach

Outreach is a sales engagement platform for medium and enterprise-level sales teams. It helps sales teams streamline their day-to-day sales activities, track sales opportunities, analyze sales calls, forecast sales pipeline, and coach sales reps—all under one roof.

Key features

• Advanced email sequences: Manage multiple stakeholders within the same sequence, combine responses across multiple emails in a single thread, and send automated follow-ups. 
• OOO detection: Identify when prospects are out of the office and pause the email sequence until they return.
• Real-time call recording and transcription: Build accurate transcripts by helping Outreach’s AI assistant, Kaia, learn about the organization's unique vocabulary: product names, competitors, and other industry terms.
• AI insights: Understand what content, workflows, sequences, and rep behaviours are leading to meetings and sales opportunities.

Pros

• Better auto-sequencing functionality
• Responsive customer support
• Integration with multiple platforms, including Salesforce and LinkedIn
• Built-in outbound calling system
• AI email writer and sequence creator

Cons

• Expensive compared to other sales platforms
• Reporting feature needs to be improved
• Steep learning curve
• No transparent pricing

Pricing: Starts at $100 per month for Standard plan

Mailshake

Mailshake is a sales engagement software that enables sales teams to scale their sales prospecting through cold outreach, specifically cold emails and LinkedIn. 

It uses AI to draft cold emails, analyzes your email copy to provide suggestions and improves your campaign’s email deliverability by providing email warmup and email validation tools. 

Key features

• AI email writer: Generate emails automatically and get three variations of the email copy to test—and use the best-performing email version. 
• Email analyzer: Analyze the email copy, length and links, and give suggestions on how to improve the email deliverability and readability.
• Dialer: Dial phone calls automatically with a single click, record calls, auto-sync them to your CRM, and take notes. 
• Email deliverability: Get in-built tools like email warmup and email validation tools to enhance your email deliverability. 
• LinkedIn automation: Automate LinkedIn connection requests, profile views and messages—and include it in your sales cadence for multichannel outreach.
• Lead catcher: Get a comprehensive view of all the leads you have received via email, call or social media—and highlight the most engaged leads. 

Pros

• A/B testing 
• Email personalization
• Automated follow-ups and follow-up templates
• Integration with LinkedIn and 33 other sales tools
• Excellent customer service
• Cost-effective

Cons

• Learning curve for beginners
• Limited analytics
• No refund policy on cancellation of a subscription

Pricing: Starts at $29 per user per month

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a CRM and sales engagement tool that helps sales teams to track sales interactions and manage their sales process. Besides its interactive reporting capabilities, lead generation chatbot is a standout feature that helps first-time visitors to engage with the website and identify them as qualified leads. 

Key features

• Smart contact data: Pull web data from sources like LinkedIn, Twitter and Google, and identify hot leads. 
• Lead generation chatbot: Use a combination of custom Chatbot and live chat to turn website visitors into qualified leads. 
• Pipedrive’s automation: Schedule sales tasks, send personalized emails automatically, and create sales workflows. 
• Insights and reporting: Get an interactive dashboard to recognise winning patterns and optimize your workflow.
• Pipedrive AI: Draft emails with AI email creation tool, summarize your emails automatically, and generate deal status summaries.

Pros

• Customizable and easy to use
• Good reporting capabilities
• Onboarding available at no additional cost
• 400 CRM integrations

Cons

• Steep learning curve 
• Difficulty in initial setup

Pricing: Starts at $12 per seat per month

Key features to look in a sales engagement software

When selecting a sales engagement software, you must focus on the software’s automation capabilities, multichannel communication, personalization, lead scoring and reporting capabilities. 

Let’s understand what exactly goes into each feature.

Robust automation capabilities

With robust automation capabilities, the sales engagement software can automate repetitive tasks like:

• Sending emails
• Scheduling follow-ups
• Updating the CRM
• Automated note-taking

With these capabilities, reps can manually save time doing sales activities and improve productivity. For example, if a rep wants to send cold emails to prospects in bulk, they can decide on a specific day and time and schedule the email.

Multichannel communication

With multichannel communication, sales reps can engage prospects through email, phone and social media. 

This centralizes the communication log to track interactions and timely follow-ups with the prospects—making the communication consistent. 

The result? Enhanced communication with prospects and higher conversion rates. 

For example, if your sales reps are experiencing lower conversions because they need timely follow-ups, you can automate a multichannel sequence.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring evaluates and ranks leads based on their conversion probability using different criteria such as:

• Engagement level
• Demographics
• Behavioral data. 

By scoring these leads, sales reps can avoid wasting time on unqualified leads and identify hot leads—leading to efficient allocation of resources and higher conversions. 

Personalization

With the personalization feature, sales reps can tailor the messaging to individual prospects based on the prospect’s information and behavior. This leads to increased engagement and response rate.

For example, if you want to send cold emails to prospective customers, use tools like Happysales. It provides you with 100+ personality insights that you can use to include in your emails and make them unique. 

Reporting capabilities

With excellent reporting capabilities in the sales engagement software, you can automatically generate custom reports and get a simplified, visualized view of your sales insights like sales activities, performance metrics, etc. 

This helps sales teams simplify the data analysis, make actionable and informed decisions, and refine their sales strategies. 

For example, you're a sales leader who wants an overview of all your team's sales interactions with prospects. When you generate custom reports on call interactions, you can see the total number of conversations, time spent on conversations by each rep, longest monologue and talk time ratio. By getting this information in a visualized manner, you can spot the top-performing reps and reps who need coaching to bring in more conversions.

Benefits of sales engagement software

The primary benefit of a sales engagement software is that it centralizes your communication and organizes all the sales interactions. But that’s not all! 

Here are three benefits a sales engagement software ghas to offer you:

Provides personalization at scale

When you're executing a cold outreach campaign—whether cold emailing or cold calling—you need to personalize your outreach in order to get higher conversions. 

It's easier to personalize your outreach at a smaller scale but when scaling your outreach, personalizing your messaging becomes difficult.

That's where you need a sales engagement software to provide insights on the prospect’s behavior and personality, use this data to personalize your cold emails and schedule your emails for bulk outreach. 

Streamlines the communication with prospects

Let's consider a scenario where Sarah, a sales rep, uses a sales engagement software to reach out to her prospect—a marketing director at an enterprise company. Here's what Sarah does: 

• Day 1: Sends the initial email with the pitch
• Day 3: Sends a connection request on LinkedIn with a personalized note, referencing to the email
• Day 5: Calls the prospect, introduces herself and asks the prospects if they have received the message

With this 3-step communication sequence via email, phone and social media—she streamlines her messaging and makes the outreach consistent. 

Provides better lead management

You'll end up wasting most of your time if you're not qualifying your prospects. When you integrate a sales engagement software into your sales workflow, you can score leads and identify hot leads. 

Choosing the right software is not the end game

While a sales engagement software primarily helps you streamline your disjointed outreach and automate manual tasks, it offers a lot more: enhanced emails, qualified leads, and intelligent insights.

So pick the sales engagement software that suits your needs the best. But don't stop there. Understand the features, visualize how the specific feature can simplify your workflow, and read different use cases—only then opt for the right software. 

Remember, choosing the right software is not not the end game to simplifying your sales process. It's the beginning.  

FAQs

Q.1. What is a sales engagement software?

Sales engagement software enables sales teams to engage with prospects—making the communication consistent and improving customer relationships.

It centralizes communication, automated repetitive tasks (like sending emails, scheduling calls, etc.), personalized outreach and manages leads better. 

Q.2. What is the difference between a CRM & sales engagement platform?

A CRM focuses on collecting and organizing lead interactions whereas, a sales engagement platform