Sales Engagement vs. Sales Enablement: A Complete Definition With Examples

Sales and marketing buzzwords and acronyms abound, with new ones cropping up seemingly every day. (What is really the difference between a BDR and an SDR, anyway?) Sometimes it can be difficult to differentiate between these concepts, especially if you’re new to the world of sales and SaaS. One such pair of terms is sales engagement and sales enablement, two similar but distinct concepts for modern salespeople.

In this easy-to-read article, we’ll take a look at the definitions of both sales engagement and sales enablement, describe how they differ, and share various examples of each. Let’s dive in!

• What is Sales Engagement?
• Sales Engagement Examples
• What is Sales Enablement?
• Sales Enablement Examples
• Sales Engagement vs. Sales Enablement

What is Sales Engagement?

At a high level, sales engagement focuses on the relationship between salespeople and their prospective customers and streamlining sales interactions between sales personnel and prospects or customers. It typically encompasses sales-related activities such as communication, sales presentations, sales meetings, sales negotiations, and sales follow-ups.

Sales engagement is an integral part of driving sales success. It involves leveraging the right sales tools, sales processes, and sales approaches to engage customers, boost sales performance, and create value for both the customer and the company. By focusing on sales engagement, organizations are able to maximize their sales performance over time by utilizing strategies for attracting and retaining customers, providing better customer service, increasing product knowledge, and leveraging data analytics to inform decisions.

Every touch point a business rep has with a customer can be considered a point of sales engagement, whether it’s with new leads that have never purchased from your business before, or with existing customers that are looking to purchase from you again. Ultimately, sales engagement is about creating relationships with customers that are mutually beneficial.

Sales Engagement Examples

Sales engagement strategies in practice can take many different forms. Some of the most common include:

• Regular follow-up calls, emails, or texts to stay in touch with leads and customers
• Providing personalized customer service that addresses customer needs as they arise
• Hosting webinars or virtual events to educate customers on your products

What is Sales Enablement?

While sales engagement is an encompassing term that speaks to the seller’s role within the customer journey, sales enablement is more narrow. Sales enablement is a term used to describe the process of equipping sales teams with strategies and tools that help them succeed. This can include sales best practices, sales data and insights, sales techniques, demo materials, sales collateral, competitive analysis information, and more.

Sales enablement focuses on providing sales professionals with the resources they need to promote and sell products or services, such as sales training tutorials, product literature, case studies, and even information about new leads. On top of that, sales enablement also serves to foster collaboration between sales and marketing teams, to ensure that sales teams are well-informed about new products or services.

Sales Enablement Examples

Sales enablement materials can vary depending on the needs of the sales team and the type of buyers they are selling to (ie, B2C vs B2B). Some common examples include:

• Sales training and onboarding
• Developing sales playbooks to help reps close deals faster
• Leveraging CRM systems to display customer data during sales calls
• Creating content such as videos, podcasts, or webinars
• Case studies, testimonials, white papers, battle cards, etc.

Sales Engagement vs. Sales Enablement

Both sales engagement and sales enablement are important for sales success, and they work hand in hand to empower sales agents to perform at their best. However, sales engagement is a broader term that refers to the interactions salespeople have with buyers, whereas sales enablement is more concerned with the information and materials sales agents use when speaking with prospects.

You can think of sales enablement as more tangible (one-pagers, case studies, video testimonials, data stored in the CRM, etc.) and sales engagement as more relationship-focused (calling, texting, emailing with a prospect, speaking on a demo, meeting at a trade show, etc.).

Get Started With a Sales Engagement Platform

Now that you know the difference between sales engagement and sales enablement, you can get started with implementing sales engagement strategies and sales enablement materials to help your sales team succeed.

Set yourself up for success with Kixie, a sales engagement platform that offers calling, texting, workflow automation, and more tools that integrate with your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, etc.). Start a free trial of Kixie, or get in touch with one of our team members to ask questions about implementing a sales engagement platform.