The 10 Best Sales Engagement Platforms For Your Team

As a salesperson, every interaction and exchange you have with a prospect or customer matters. These interactions — called sales engagements — impact the buyer’s journey, conversions, loyalty, and the bottom line.

In this post, we’ll explore the importance of high-quality sales engagement. We’ll also share 10 tools that can help you manage these interactions.

• What is a sales engagement platform?
• The Benefits of Sales Engagement Platforms
• What to Look for in a Sales Engagement Platform
• The 10 Best Sales Engagement Platforms

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Sales engagements can happen via many channels, including email, phone calls, video conferencing software, and social media.

Sales engagement tools have the power to help your sales team manage these interactions and ensure communication with prospects is effective.

The Benefits of Sales Engagement Platforms

Modern sales engagement platforms are a game-changer for sales teams. Not only do these tools provide a central way to track and manage prospect information and interactions across teams, but they can also help streamline communication and lead generation.

Let’s dive into each of these benefits.

Automation

Through automation, sales engagement platforms have allowed teams to maximize efficiency and improve productivity. How? Instead of spending time manually moving prospects through the pipeline, the system will automatically do it for you.

Say goodbye to painstakingly combing through each interaction and figuring out how to categorize each prospect or when to follow up. Sales engagement platforms will automatically do the work so you can focus on doing what you do best.

Lead Generation

Most sales engagement platforms also make customizing client outreach at every touchpoint easy. And sales leaders know that personal client engagement goes a long way in your sales efforts.

The customization capabilities and built-in automation make sales engagement platforms a powerful way to boost lead generation.

Improved Communication

Having a sales engagement platform helps streamline your sales organization’s overall communication. Not only do these tools make it easy to engage prospects, but they’re a seamless way to collaborate and coordinate between different sales team members.

Plus, depending on your sales engagement platform, it may also connect with your CRM. This allows you to establish an integrated platform between sales and other departments, such as marketing or customer service, improving team communication and collaboration.

What to Look for in a Sales Engagement Platform

The best sales engagement platforms offer comprehensive features that go hand-in-hand with the sales process — everything from personalized campaign options to multiple outreach channels.

However, if you’re only seeking the essentials, here are the key features to look for in a sales engagement platform.

Multichannel Communication Options

Start by considering how your sales team will work within the platform and how customers will interact with the system. For example, if digital communication is a key component of your sales strategy, you’ll want to look for a sales engagement platform that uses email as a core channel.

But because you don’t want to limit your sales tactics, you’ll still want to have multiple communication options on your sales engagement platform and should look for additional channels such as integrated voice and phone capabilities.

Personalized Campaign Capabilities

92% of customers expect a personalized experience, meaning outbound sales campaigns must be customized for personal outreach. To optimize this strategy, look for a sales engagement platform with personalization capabilities.

From personalized email outreach to multitouch campaign capabilities that help you meet customers where they are, the best sales tools optimize the personalization process so you can reach hundreds of prospects while still infusing a human touch.

Provides Sales Intelligence and Conversational Insights

With the right insights, both the sales process and customer experience can reach their highest potential.

Look for a sales engagement platform that provides visibility into your sales performance by tracking analytics — everything from open rates to page clicks to emails sent. By leveraging sales intelligence, your team can better predict outcomes and reach sales goals.

The 10 Best Sales Engagement Platforms

1. HubSpot Sales Hub

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HubSpot’s Sales Hub is a powerful sales CRM — it includes best-in-class sales analytics, sales engagement, and configure-price-quote (CPQ) tools.

The tool is built for any sales team — whether you have 2 or 500 reps. This sales engagement platform grows and scales with you, especially since there are four editions of the software with a variety of capabilities and pricing levels:

• Sales Hub Free ($0 per month).
• Sales Hub Starter ($45 per month).
• Sales Hub Professional ($450 per month).
• Sales Hub Enterprise ($1,200 per month).

Sales Hub is unique because it combats the issue of friction, which is a natural result of growth. Sales Hub will resolve this problem by:

• Automating the sales process so reps are able to spend time elsewhere.
• Giving you complete visibility into your sales team’s success with analytics (which also helps you offer a consistent customer experience).
• Streamlining and personalizing outreach by keeping your customers at the center of everything you do.
• Closing more deals faster with CPQ support.

Best for: Sales teams of all sizes can easily get started with HubSpot’s Sales Hub, no matter what stage you’re at in your sales strategy. Plus, the Sales Hub is part of HubSpot’s larger CRM platform, so you can easily integrate data with other teams for a complete glimpse into each customer’s journey.

2. Mailshake

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Mailshake is a sales engagement and automation software that’s meant specifically for sales and marketing cold email outreach.

With Mailshake, you can send personalized emails at scale, engage prospects over the phone, or reach customers on social media. Plus, this platform gathers all information into a single sales cadence and dashboard.

The tool also has various third-party and native integrations, such as HubSpot. This lets you easily connect to your CRM, contact database, and other email marketing tools.

What we like: With the platform’s automated email campaigns, sales teams can personalize the content and cadence of each message. Personalization makes for a more meaningful conversation with customers.

Pricing: Mailshake offers two pricing levels, one geared towards marketers and founders and the other meant for sales teams.

• Email Outreach ($58 per user a month)
• Sales Engagement ($83 per user a month)

3. Hippo Video

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If your team wants to take your personalization up a notch, consider using Hippo Video. Hippo Video is a platform designed for video personalization and distribution that allows you to create videos and video workflows all within the platform.

Use the platform to assist with tailored video creation for your account-based selling strategy.

Additionally, your videos are a great way to offer support and product education for customers after your sales team finalizes the deal. You can also integrate Hippo Video with HubSpot to send video emails to your prospects seamlessly.

What we like: Hippo Video makes content creation easy. Anyone can record and edit a video with little training. Hippo also uses AI technology to generate videos from text with just one click, making sending a personal, interactive video to hundreds of prospects easier than ever.

Pricing: Hippo Video offers a range of pricing levels and solutions for varying needs, whether you’re in sales, marketing, or customer service. No matter which level you choose, each one comes with the following:

• Seven-day free trial.
• No setup fee.
• 24-hour live customer support, five days a week.

4. Clearbit

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Clearbit focuses on B2B lead enrichment, qualification, and scoring. The tool uses data to help reps identify qualified prospects and discover where they can find more prospects like them.

Clearbit then lets reps know when they should reach out to those prospects based on real-time alerts. These alerts may occur when a target account visits your website and searches for products.

Additionally, you can use Clearbit Enrichment to add contact information to your HubSpot CRM with the platform’s integration.

What we like: Clearbit provides sales teams access to more than 200 million contacts, allowing them to identify prospects quickly. Along with its database, Clearbit also updates and enriches contact information automatically, ensuring that inaccurate or incomplete entries are updated.

Clearbit offers pricing solutions for the following:

• Marketing.
• Sales.
• Operations.

5. Klenty

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Alt: Sales engagement platform, Klenty

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Klenty is a sales engagement platform that helps teams with outreach, email personalization, and follow-up automation.

The tool makes the process of tailoring emails for individual prospects simple. It also uses factors like the last time you sent an email to a prospect or the prospect’s office hours to determine the right time to send them a message.

With Klenty, emails will be sure to land in prospects' inboxes rather than spam.

Klenty can help you integrate sales engagement with your data-based strategy. The platform generates data, reports, and performance metrics. You can sync all of your emails and related actions taken by prospects and customers in your HubSpot CRM with Klenty’s integration.

Best for: Klenty is a perfect option for companies looking for an all-in-one solution. With the abundance of sales support features and personalization, the platform makes it easy to communicate with prospects.

Pricing: Klenty offers three pricing plans billed annually or quarterly. Each plan comes with a 14-day free trial, and there’s no setup fee.

• Startup plan (starts at $50 per user a month)
• Growth plan (starts at $70 per user a month)
• Enterprise plan (customizable pricing plan)

6. Salesloft

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Salesloft is a B2B sales engagement platform for businesses focused on sales acceleration and sales forecasting. The tool has a wide range of capabilities for your entire team — sales leaders, managers, ops, SDRs, BDRs, marketers, and customer success reps included.

By pairing Salesloft with a CRM like HubSpot (which integrates with the platform), you can automate, personalize, and sync rep-to-prospect communication. Salesloft collects engagement wherever they take place — over email, phone calls, social media, video, etc.

Best for: Salesloft’s sales forecasting software is a valuable tool to help guide your sales team’s initiatives over a certain period of time. The forecasting tool uses both AI and real-time human insight to determine an accurate forecast of a sales team’s revenue.

Pricing: Salesloft offers plans for different levels, whether you’re focused on generating leads or working on every stage of the revenue cycle at the enterprise level. Each plan comes with several key features, including:

• Email cadence and automation.
• Analytics and reporting.
• 160+ integrations.

7. Pipeline

Pipeline is a CRM that manages sales productivity and engagement. The tool organizes all parts of your sales pipelines in a central, customizable list for easy access.

There’s a daily agenda that builds itself to save reps time and ensure they know which prospects they should engage that day. The tool makes all follow-up communication easy, streamlines the processes of crafting emails, and segments your customers.

Pipeline is also mobile-friendly, so your remote team can easily access the information they need from anywhere.

What we like: Along with an interactive system for sales reps and customers, Pipeline also has a robust email marketing portion. The platform allows sales reps to create email campaigns and track data, such as open rates and which prospects downloaded company content.

Pricing: Pipeline offers three pricing plan levels:

• Start Plan ($25 per user a month).
• Develop ($33 per user a month).
• Grow ($49 per user a month).

8. Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell combines a cloud-based CRM system with an easy-to-use sales engagement platform. Thanks to mobile capability, high-quality lead generation, and artificial intelligence, Zendesk Sell is perfect for businesses of all sizes.

The Zendesk Sell platform gathers insights to help foster a comprehensive relationship between the sales team and customers. Zendesk Sell also allows team members to understand what communication channels each prospect prefers.

What we like: During the communication process, the system will analyze and collect essential data on each prospect, providing a comprehensive data profile of each customer.

Pricing: Zendesk Sell offers three pricing plan levels:

• Team ($19 per user a month).
• Growth ($49 per user a month).
• Professional ($99 per user a month).

9. Zoho SalesIQ

Zoho SalesIQ is one part of the overarching Zoho CRM database. The system is designed to be used with a CRM and integrates all the company’s communication channels. The system also identifies the best time to reach out to prospects.

Pro tip: Zoho SalesIQ offers a live chat function that allows sales reps to speak with prospects in real time. If the sales team is busy or unavailable, you can create a chatbot to interact with customers and provide basic information.

Pricing: Zoho SalesIQ offers four pricing plan levels:

• Free ($0 per user a month).
• Basic ($7 per user a month).
• Professional ($12.75 per user a month).
• Enterprise ($20 per user a month).

10. Freshsales

Freshsales, formerly Freshworks CRM, provides support throughout the sales process. The highly flexible system lets companies modify the prospect’s journey with customizable web forms and email.

In addition to these customizations, Freshsales makes bringing AI into your sales process easy. With the help of the platform’s chatbot, Freddy, you can communicate with customers in real time, even when a sales rep isn’t available.

What we like: The Freshsales sales engagement platform lets teams view how prospects interact with the company. That includes their activity on landing pages.

Pricing: Freshsales offers four pricing plan levels:

• Free ($0 per user a month).
• Growth ($15 per user a month).
• Pro ($39 per user a month).
• Enterprise ($69 per user a month).

Many great sales engagement platforms are available today — review their features and capabilities to determine which option aligns best with your team and goals.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.