Sales engagement is a critical part of any successful sales team. However, with so many options available, it can be difficult to choose the best sales engagement platform for your business. To make the selection process easier, it helps to consider the customer relationship management (CRM) system that your sales team uses.
After all, no one wants to uproot their entire tech stack in order to accommodate a new software, no matter how helpful sales engagement platforms may be. Depending on which CRM you are using, some sales engagement platforms may be a better fit than others, because of their integration capabilities. We’ve compiled some of the best options for sales engagement software, that play well with major CRM systems.
Take a look at which sales engagement platforms we recommend based on your CRM, via the article section links below.
Don’t see your CRM on this list? Check out all of the CRMs that Kixie integrates with, to see if Kixie’s sales engagement platform is right for your team.
What is a Sales Engagement Platform vs. a CRM?
Sales engagement platforms and CRMs both serve to help sales teams increase productivity, close deals faster, and improve customer satisfaction. However, sales engagement platforms are tailored for sales professionals who need an all-in-one tool that helps them stay on top of their sales pipeline. This tool allows sales reps to manage leads, accelerate the sales process, and foster relationships with customers from a single platform.
On the other hand, a CRM is designed to manage customer data and provide sales reps with insights based on that data. In this way, CRMs are more focused on tracking activities than sales engagement platforms. Ultimately, by combining the best of both worlds – sales and customer intelligence – sales teams can take advantage of superior customer management capabilities to reach the ultimate goal – sales success!
Sales Engagement Platforms for Salesforce
Being the largest CRM on the market today, Salesforce has a large number of users looking for tools to help them sell more efficiently. In fact, some sales engagement platforms cater specifically to Salesforce and no other CRM. Here are a few of the top sales engagement platforms for Salesforce users.
- Outreach.io: Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps sales teams automate and streamline their communication and follow-up processes. The platform offers email and calendar sync, email templates, automated pipeline sequences, analytics, and reporting. It integrates predominantly with Salesforce, allowing teams to manage contacts, leads, and deals within the platform.
- Salesloft: Salesloft is another common sales engagement platform that Salesforce users adopt to help streamline their sales process. You can create sales automation cadences for “hands-free” follow-up, track leads and deals with accurate sales pipeline data, and have access to conversation intelligence software.
- Kixie: In addition to the workflow automation and prospect cadences offered by Outreach and Salesloft, Kixie also offers business calling and texting. With Kixie’s sales engagement platform, you don’t need another telephony provider (like Twilio or Ring Central). Kixie also offers analytics and reporting for sales team performance, automated follow-up sequences, and the ability to sync seamlessly with Salesforce (both Lightning and Classic versions).
Sales Engagement Platforms for HubSpot
HubSpot is quickly becoming a CRM leader, especially because of its easy-to-use interface and simple implementation process. Plus, HubSpot comes with a ton of built-in features that make it easier to get sales, marketing, and customer support work done. Here are a few sales engagement tools that play well with HubSpot:
- Kixie: Okay, we know it’s embarrassing to toot our own horn here, but we seriously have one of the best (native) integrations with HubSpot. With Kixie connected to HubSpot (which takes less than 3 minutes, by the way), you can automatically create new contacts for every new lead that calls into your business, create custom call dispositions that log automatically, log your entire SMS and call history, trigger auto calls and auto SMS messages, and more. Plus, we offer free, unlimited solutions engineering for all of our accounts, in case everything we just said went straight over your head.
- Clearbit: HubSpot themselves ranks Clearbit as one of their favorite sales engagement tools, and we have to agree! Clearbit is a lead scoring tool that helps reps gain more information about their prospects, plus it automatically updates with the latest available data on your existing contacts! Kinda creepy, but super useful.
- Mailshake: If you’re just looking for a way to accelerate cold email outreach for your sales and marketing teams, Mailshake is the way to go. It also boasts a native integration with HubSpot, making it loads easier to get started. You can send hundreds upon hundreds of personalized email at scale (I know it sounds impossible, but just give it a try).
Sales Engagement Platforms for Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a fan favorite for many reasons, including its affordability when compared to CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. While it might not come with as many bells and whistles, there are many sales engagement platforms that can connect with Pipedrive to make it the sales engine you’ve been dreaming about.
- Klenty: Touted as the #1 sales engagement tool for Pipedrive, Klenty describes themselves as the muli-channel outreach platform for Pipedrive. You can reach out to prospects via phone, email, and LinkedIn, plus track everything within Klenty. Plus, you can make sure those scaled outreach attempts are personalized, too!
- Kixie: Similar to Klenty but at a lower price point, Kixie offers calling and texting plus sales automation workflows to make sure none of your leads get lost or fall through the cracks. (Salespeople are human, we get it!) With scheduled call notifications, auto-SMS, bi-directional automatically logged data, and more, Kixie makes it easy to turn Pipedrive into a true sales engagement platform.
- Outfunnel: A great option for scoring leads, Outfunnel helps sales and marketing teams keep contacts in sync and up to date, with marketing engagement data populated in contact records within Pipedrive. Sales teams can leverage this data for smarter follow-ups.
Sales Engagement Platforms for Zoho CRM
Similar to the other CRM systems mentioned above, Zoho CRM is a customer relationship management solution designed to streamline sales processes, boost sales productivity, and improve the sales experience. Zoho CRM offers add-on products that can give you a more robust sales platform, but sticking with their basic plan still gives you a great CRM at an affordable price point. Choosing a sales engagement platform that integrates with Zoho CRM is another way to level up the performance of your sales team.
- Klenty: We mentioned Klenty above as well, but in this category, it’s the only native sales engagement integration for Zoho CRM. Klenty focuses on creating outreach cadences for leads in your sales pipeline, using an omnichannel approach (LinkedIn, email, texting, and calling).
- Kixie: Again, we’re bringing up Kixie thanks to the custom sales automation and event-based workflows that are possible with Kixie and Zoho CRM. Plus, we offer free sales engineering consultations and build-outs for all of our clients, so you can create a truly custom workflow between Zoho CRM, Kixie, and other tools you may be using in your tech stack. Here’s one of Kixie’s clients describing his experience working with the solution engineering team at Kixie to create a custom outbound sales process: [insert video]
Sales Engagement Solutions With Kixie
Overall, there are a wide range of sales engagement platforms available to you depending on the CRM system your team uses. Whether it’s Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive or Zoho CRM, each platform offers its own set of features and sales engagement integrations that can help improve the performance of your sales team.
With Kixie as an additional option for all four systems mentioned above, you’ll have access to custom automation workflows and event-based triggers that make sure no lead falls through the cracks. So don’t wait any longer – explore these helpful tools today and start engaging with prospects in smarter ways!
