Why WhatsApp Is a Better Sales Engagement Channel

Modern customers are more connected than ever before. 

They have a digital footprint across social media, email, and several instant messaging channels. When you’re trying to sell in such a cluttered digital space, your strategy and multi-channel sales engagement platform should be able to cut through the noise. 

Creating such a strategy isn’t rocket science but a fundamental aspect that works with the basics of sales. Understanding your customer journey is key to building an effective sales engagement model.

From the first interaction with your customer till you hear, “let’s close this deal”, it’s essential to stay connected with your prospect. You must suggest and advise them at the right time to help them seamlessly navigate the sales funnel. 

Establishing that continuous communication channel and nurturing leads with personalised support go a long way in making successful sales. This is where you can leverage WhatsApp messaging platform to personalise and make your sales engagement activities stand out. 

‍Discover how Protergo improved their conversion rates by 25% after leveraging Cooby.

What is sales engagement?
Sales engagement refers to interactions between a salesperson and prospect throughout the sales cycle. These interactions can be on phone calls or instant messaging applications like WhatsApp, emails, or social media.

Sales engagement is different from sales enablement. Sales engagement strategies increase salespeople’s efficiency by establishing a structured buyer engagement approach. On the other hand, sales enablement emphasizes making sales engagement more effective by equipping sales reps with the proper knowledge relevant to the prospects.

Although salespeople can engage buyers on different channels, messaging platforms like WhatsApp make a difference. Let’s dive deeper into it.

5 reasons to use WhatsApp for sales engagement 

Phone calls and emails have been the traditional ways of connecting with leads and prospects. Earlier, these channels were highly effective, but their effectiveness is debatable in this day and age. When a consumer is continuously getting bombarded with loads of emails and phone calls, you need to think beyond traditional channels. 

‍ZipWhip’s customer survey argues that phone call as a channel is experiencing decreasing effectiveness. Standing out from the crowd and capturing modern-age customers’ attention is vital for your sales engagement strategy. WhatsApp is a more suitable sales engagement channel for personalising connections with prospects. 

Below are some benefits that make WhatsApp a better sales engagement channel. 

1. Makes communication asynchronous 

Your prospects are busy people. Giving them a phone call at busy times might not yield results. Instead, prospects might even feel distracted and disconnect your call when you try to reach them later. On the contrary, when you use WhatsApp, users don’t feel rushed and can take time to respond. 

When you drop explanatory details of your product on a busy day, prospects might not be able to give it much attention on calls. The thought would be put on back burner, kept to be visited later, and would slip out as smoothly as it came in. On the flip side, sending them details over WhatsApp lets them see your company’s value proposition when they’re less occupied. They don’t feel distracted and are more likely to respond.

Giving your leads and prospect sufficient time to absorb your pitch and build a perception is essential. WhatsApp’s asynchronous communication makes this possible and helps you improve sales engagement.

Did you know? Cooby empowers sales teams who prefer using WhatsApp as a customer communication channel. Cooby integrates your WhatsApp to HubSpot and Salesforce CRM, helping you bring all customer interactions in one place. Try Cooby now and experience hyper productivity on WhatsApp.

2. Increases potential customers’ response rates

You can raise a concern that achieving async communication is possible via Email. Yes, you’re partially correct. However, with the sheer volume of emails your prospects receive, it becomes tricky to respond or get to every one of them. Your outreach can sit in your potential customer’s inbox till you start shooting a series of follow-ups. This results in a stretched sales cycle.

Engaging your prospects on WhatsApp helps you shorten the sales cycle by improving response rates.  According to WhatsApp’s internal data, 70% of WhatsApp users check it daily. 

People are more active on instant messaging applications like WhatsApp than other channels. A Harvard’s research article shows that a new message, a “like” on Instagram, or a reaction on other social media channels have the potential to release dopamine in the brain. It makes people curious about new messages or updates on their social media in their free time. When you reach out through messaging platforms like WhatsApp, your message will likely be read and responded to. This helps you increase the response rates of your potential customers.

3. Reduces conversations’ formality

Personalizing your message and adding a human touch go a long way in improving sales engagement quality. WhatsApp, by design, is an informal platform where people can connect as real humans with emotions. The platform offers multiple options to nudge human emotions, like adding emojis, voice notes, and more. 

Keeping things informal and personalising communication improves the quality of your interactions with prospects. It drives their attention and makes them feel more connected and supported while helping you provide an appreciable sales experience.

4. Establishes stronger connections

According to McKinsey and Company, modern customers want to communicate with brands like they converse with friends and family. WhatsApp helps you bridge the gap between the company’s communication, which sometimes feels like a legal statement, and normal day-to-day communication. This makes consumers feel more connected with the brand and its representatives. Stronger connections make potential customers more receptive to sales messaging, improving the conversion rate. 

However, using WhatsApp alone doesn’t strengthen the connection. The way you use WhatsApp largely governs it. WhatsApp turns your communication into a discussion, which is more interactive. In this exchange of messages, you need to look for emotional motivators and use them to strengthen your connection with the prospect. Cooby helps your pick these emotional motivators and analyse prospects’ sentiments to enable data-driven sales messaging.

5. Enhances customer satisfaction

When trying to sell to a customer, you want to make it easier for them to understand and act on your communication. WhatsApp is easily accessible by prospects from anywhere. They don’t have to open their company laptop to access work email, making it easier for them to act on your message. This improves your potential customer’s satisfaction with your sales process and further titles their decision in your favor. 

How to address challenges of using WhatsApp for sales messaging

Although WhatsApp offers a better way to engage your prospects and nurture them, it comes with a few challenges, especially for businesses. Below are some common challenges teams face while using their personal WhatsApp for sales messaging.

• Visibility: Sales leaders do not know how a salesperson pursues a customer on their WhatsApp account.
• Administrative processes: Some sales departments require sales development representatives (SDRs) to manually take a snapshot of the conversation to upload in the CRM or copy and paste the chat. As administrative work increases, it starts hampering a salesperson’s productivity. 
• Collaboration: When two or more people are required to nurture a particular prospect, it becomes challenging for them to collaborate and achieve transparency across the conversations.
• Sales coaching: Learning and development opportunities become scarce as sales messaging is siloed. 
• Lead management: When assigning a new SDR to a sales conversation, getting a record of previous conversations becomes a puzzler.‍
• Automation: Automating conversation tracking on CRM becomes complicated as integrating personal WhatsApp accounts into CRM isn’t feasible. (*Until now!)

How Cooby addresses the challenges

Cooby provides 360-degree visibility over your team’s sales messaging on WhatsApp. The platform empowers sales managers to see the performance of sales reps, average response time, leads in the pipeline, conversations with every lead, and much more. It integrates with CRMs such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and various other CRM solutions you love. Cooby allows SDRs to sync conversations (group or individual chats with customers) with their CRM on WhatsApp. This automates administrative tasks like copying and pasting conversation history or taking a snapshot to track in CRM software.

The increased visibility helps sales leaders improve and enhance their teams’ sales messaging while using actionable insights to further advance their sales coaching. Collaboration and lead management become easier when you can keep track of all conversations with prospects in one place.

Cooby offers a Google Chrome extension to categorise conversations based on those that need a reply from sales reps, group chats, 1:1 conversations, business chats, and any other category based on your preference. Cooby syncs with the extension and allows you to send alerts to the manager, sales rep, or other team members if conversations in the “Needs Reply” category cross a particular time period (customisable by you). The software empowers salespeople to make the most of WhatsApp as a sales engagement channel.

Make WhatsApp your strongest sales engagement channel

Cooby allows sales teams to make WhatsApp the strongest tool in their arsenal. It eliminates the challenges and unveils various ways you can use conversational intelligence to inform your sales process.

The platform empowers you to increase your response rate and improve the quality of conversations, which boosts your conversion rate and enhances sales experiences for your potential customers. ‍

Discover how Wizkidscarnival doubled their conversion rate by leveraging Cooby.

Get started with Cooby and let your team’s sales messaging show astonishing results! 

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