In 2025, companies are implementing sales engagement platforms to handle the heavy workload.
90% of sales leaders plan to invest in them (Gartner). In fact, your competitors are probably already using them.
It’s now estimated that the market of sales engagement platforms will grow to $35.7 billion by 2034 (FactMR).
What can you do? Not to sleep on this opportunity.
Jump the train early by choosing one of the best sales engagement platforms we cover in this guide.
What is a Sales Engagement Platform?
A Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) is a software that helps sales teams manage, automate, track, plan, and personalize interactions with potential and current customers.
Essentially, SEP optimizes all your customer engagement processes.
By streamlining various activities like calls, emails, and other communications, the sales engagement platform allows sales (BDR) managers, sales ops, and SDRs to understand customer needs and respond more efficiently.
As a result, the use of sales engagement platforms leads to:
- more efficient sales processes,
- shorter sales cycles,
- satisfied customers and higher CLV,
- increased revenue.
Sales engagement platforms are typically:
- simple to use
- easily customizable to your business needs
- covering all stages of the sales process
- very collaborative
6 Main Benefits of Using Sales Engagement Platforms
Integrating a sales engagement platform must be on your to-do list if your company focuses on interactions with customers and prospects.
Sales engagement platforms greatly impact revenue, which is why they have become so popular in the past few years.
Key benefits of sales engagement platforms are:
- Prioritizing: They allow SDRs and sales managers to save time on manual tasks and focus on revenue-driving tasks.
- Communicating: They eliminate miscommunication between teams and department silos.
- Targeting: They highlight relevant data when needed so that sales reps can identify new opportunities that might have been overlooked.
- Planning: They allow sales reps to prioritize engaging high-value leads first, which improves conversions.
- Tracking: They allow sales, marketing, and account managers to analyze sales campaigns, performance data, and progress reports.
- Closing: They increase the volume and quality of 1:1 interactions with customers, which increases conversion rates.
TL;DR: sales engagement platforms boost revenue by enhancing sales team efficiency, automating routine tasks, improving opportunities and close rates, and elevating the quality and volume of personalized interactions.
Sales Engagement Platforms: What Features They Should Have?
Kévin Moënne-Loccoz, the VP of Product at lemlist, has been working on developing sales engagement platform features at lemlist.
He shared some valuable insights into the exact things to look for when you are in the process of deciding which sales engagement platform to get.
Here’s Kévin’s breakdown of all the sales engagement platform features, diving them into three categories.
The first category is all the essential features you must have in a sales engagement platform.
The second category lists the advanced features in a sales engagement platform that are not obligatory but will help you step up the game.
The last category is the nice-to-have features that are not the deal-breakers if your sales engagement platform doesn’t have them.
Essential SEP features | Advanced SEP features | Nice-to-have SEP features |
---|---|---|
Native CRM integration | Condition campaign steps | AI copilot |
VoIP native integration/ or native VoIP | API | |
Task management system | AI prompting | |
Campaign builder | Custom images | |
Templates | AB testing | |
Multi-channel prospection | Buy domains and emails | |
Email deliverability | Multichannel Inbox | |
People Database | Enrichment | |
Account-based prospection | Custom roles and permissions | |
Inbox rotation | 2FA login | |
Sending limits | Custom landing pages | |
Custom variables | Intents & signals | |
Automatic campaign steps | Rotating IPs | |
Manual campaign steps | Liquid syntax | |
Smart sending algorithm | ||
Technical setup |
How to Choose a Sales Engagement Platform? 7 Boxes to Check
Now that you know what features a robust sales engagement must have, it doesn’t mean that picking the best one will be easy.
The sales software market is saturated, and not every sales engagement solution is created equally.
If you struggle to decide how to choose a sales engagement platform for your business, Kévin Moënne-Loccoz has your back.
Here’s his checklist of 7 most important things you want from a sales engagement platform:
✅ Make sure your sales engagement platform supports the current sales team workflow
✅ Make sure it can scale as the Sales team grows
✅ Make sure it can deliver results by sending emails properly and having good configuration
✅ Make sure it will be easy for new Sales people to onboard themselves
✅ Make sure it is easy to use in the day-to-day
✅ Make sure it innovates versus other SEP players
✅ Make sure you have the best tool to maximize productivity and results
10 Best Sales Engagement Platforms in 2025
Sales EngagementPlatform | Rating (G2) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Free trial | Entry price (yearly) | Main feature | AI | CRM | Downside |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Salesforce | 4.4 | ✅ | 25€/user/month billed monthly or annually | Easy contact management and CRM features | ✅ | Extensive | High costs and complex to use |
2. Salesloft | 4.5 | ❌ | Not disclosed | Cadence scheduling | ✅ | HubSpot, Zoho | Platform instability and costs for larger teams |
3. Pipedrive | 4.3 | ✅ | 14€/seat/month billed annually for essential features only | Sales forecasting | ✅ AI email writing and assistant | HubSpot, Zapier | Pricey add-ons can stack up quickly |
4. Apollo | 4.7 | ✅ | $49/user/month billed annually (limited credits) | Search filters in their lead database | Search filters in the lead database | HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce | Lead database is twice smaller than lemlist’s (210M vs 450M contacts respectively) |
5. Zixflow | 4.9 | ✅ | $39/month/3 users plus 12$/user/month for additional users | All-in-one workspace | ❌ | Email sync and API | Very limited integrations |
6. Instantly | 4.8 | ✅ | $37.9/month (no advanced warmup and up to 5,000 emails per month) | Campaign pipeline analytics beyond vanity metrics | ✅ AI prompts | HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive | Entry plan offers very limited features |
7. HubSpot Sales Hub | 4.4 | ✅ | €90/month/seat + a one-time onboarding fee of €1,470 | ABM tools and automation | ✅ | Integrate with more than 1,600 tools | Expensive |
8. Reply.io | 4.6 | ✅ | $49/month (for 1000 active contacts) | Unlimited mailboxes | ✅ AI chat | Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Copper, Zendesk, Zapier | Costs stack up fast when scaling |
9. Freshsales | 4.5 | ✅ | €9 user/month | Contact lifecycle stages | ✅ Freddy AI copilot | Hubspot, Zapier, Freshworks suite | Complicated and not intuitive interface |
10. lemlist | 4.5 | ✅ | €55/month | Centralized contact management and 450M+ lead database | ✅ AI-powered multichannel campaigns | HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive | Native integrations could be better |
Implementing a New Sales Engagement Platform in 5 Steps
Now that you have decided and chosen a sales engagement platform, it’s time to implement it.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for a successful implementation:
1st Step: Set your goals
Whatever software you choose, it won’t be a quick fix. The results of successfully implementing a sales engagement tool will be visible after using it for some time.
But right after implementing a new sales engagement platform, Kevin suggests assessing a few crucial functions:
- onboarding is simple for existing Sales reps and new Sales reps
- no crucial options are missing that will prevent the Sales team from working properly
- data from your sales engagement platform is properly synced with the CRM
Kévin Moënne-Loccoz added that it’s important to “take all the essential features and make sure they work in a real-life situation.”
So, even if the features sound great on paper, you won’t be able to tell how they work in your sales team’s day-to-day scenarios without actually using them.
Moreover, clearly defining the specific goals you want to achieve with the SEP implementation, such as increasing lead conversion rates by 15% or shortening the sales cycle by 10%, must also be on your to-do list.
2nd Step: Adopt the Sales Engagement Platform
After you define what you want to achieve with your SEP, it’s time to adopt it and start using it.
Since the adoption procedure is not as straightforward as it sounds, Yann Guilleux, the Head of Sales at lemlist, shared how to do it right.
“Training your team to use SEP is fairly simple. It’s just about knowing which buttons do what,” Yann explained.
“But the adoption of your sales engagement platform is the key,” he added, “You want to be sure that the team is actually using it.”
Yann explained that to ensure you successfully adopt a new tool, you need to have multiple stakeholders in the process.
“While most roles in the team are critical, sales ops and first-line managers are the ones who make your SEP work, or not.”
Here’s Yann’s step-by-step process for adopting a new sales engagement platform:
1: Start with the technical setup.
“You have to be sure that everyone in the team will have access to the tool. It’s important to ensure that emails and domains are all set up. CRM integration to your sales engagement platform should be done properly,” Yann explained.
2: Involve the first-line manager.
“You need to make sure that the team working with you is committed to the project since they are the ones who will have weekly 1:1 with the sales team and will be able to monitor your newly implemented SEP’s use rate.”
Yann noted that when adopting a new tool, “you need to show the team what’s in it for them and to enable them with an easy report to track the whole performance and adoption process.”
3: Train your team.
“At this step, it’s important to show your sales team how the tool will work for their use cases, not some generic demo,” Yann said, adding that “it should be as simple as possible.”
When training your team to use the new SEP, “be sure that they will get at least 1 quick win out of this training, you want to show value. Right after that, they can directly add a contact in their CRM from LinkedIn, for example.”
4: Involve the head/VP of sales.
“Involve the head of or VP of sales to be sure that the first-line manager is challenged on using the sales engagement platform. The head of sales needs to monitor carefully the usage since they are the most important people.”
5: Get the champions.
Yann’s advice when implementing new software is to “pick up the most enthusiastic sales team members and ask them to share their experiences (their wins and why they are excited) of using the tool on a team meeting or Slack.”
As a follow-up, “make sure to have a feedback session after 1 month to be sure that everyone is using the tool and offer office hours to ask questions,” Yann concluded.
3d Step: Integrate
Install the SEP and integrate it with your CRM system and existing tech stack. Ensure that data flows seamlessly between the different systems.
For example, connect the SEP to your CRM to automatically capture lead and contact information, track interactions, and update deal stages.
4th Step: Automate
Automating your sales processes is why you opted for a sales engagement platform in the first place. So this step is an important one.
Kévin Moënne-Loccoz says that the key processes to automate with your sales platform are:
- Sending campaigns
- Syncing the CRM with prospection data
- Creating tasks when leads engage more than others on your campaigns
- The warm-up process for your emails so they don’t land in spam
And when it comes to more advanced SEPs with powerful features, “you can automate buying a domain and emails and have them set up,” Kevin argues.
He added that “lemlist is going to be like this soon,” so exciting things are coming!
5th Step: Evaluate
After you implement your sales engagement platform, it’s important to keep track of your performance.
Here are some key evaluation metrics to track:
- Engagement rates: Track email open rates, click-through rates, and response rates to measure the effectiveness of your outreach efforts9.
- Conversion rates: Monitor the number of leads converted to opportunities and the number of opportunities closed as deals.
- Sales cycle length: Measure the time it takes to close a deal from initial contact to final sale.
- Sales productivity: Track the number of activities sales representatives complete, such as emails sent, calls made, and meetings scheduled.
- Revenue growth: Monitor the overall revenue generated by the sales team. Studies have shown a strong correlation between faster lead response times and increased conversion rates. Responding to leads promptly, ideally within minutes of initial contact, can significantly improve your chances of securing a meeting or closing a deal.
Don’t Sleep on the New Trends in the Sales Engagement Platform Market
Since the sales engagement platform sector has been expanding so fast, software vendors have little option but to fit the needs of the sales teams.
Thus, we see 3 major trends evolving in sales engagement that will shape the way sales software is evolving.
1. AI everywhere
AI is changing sales engagement platforms by moving beyond basic automation to enable intelligent, data-driven sales.
For example, AI-powered personalization analyzes prospect data to deliver tailored messages and content, while predictive lead scoring and sending times optimize outreach campaigns.
Moreover, AI streamlines workflows and task management, which gives sales reps more time to work on high-value activities.
AI chatbots are also on the rise in sales engagement platforms, providing 24/7 lead qualification and engagement.
Furthermore, AI provides personalized coaching and real-time guidance for sales reps, which reduces ramp-up time.
2. Data-driven sales
Data has always been a part of any successful sales strategy, but recently, it progressed into a thoroughly data-driven approach to sales
According to Kévin Moënne-Loccoz, data is another big trend in sales engagement platforms where you “find companies, contacts, signals, and enrichment.”
It’s because more and more companies are shifting towards data-driven strategies to optimize their sales processes.
Therefore, the best sales engagement platforms and tools will have powerful lead databases with millions of contacts, like lemlist’s B2B database, and advanced analytics and reporting features.
3. Remote selling
The growing trend of remote work and dispersed sales teams also creates a huge demand for sales engagement platforms right now.
According to a global trend forecast for 2024-2031 (Research and Markets), remote sales teams, particularly in major markets like India, “have led to an increased need for platforms that support effective communication and collaboration.”
Therefore, you can expect to see tools specifically designed for remote selling from SEP vendors very soon.
Having said that, CRM software is not going anywhere. Kevin assured us that “working from your CRM instead of the SEP is also a type of workflow that sales teams like.”
It suggests that CRM and SEP integration will remain among the most important factors when choosing the best sales engagement platform.
Sales Engagement Platform vs Revenue Orchestration Platform
If you’ve been browsing sales engagement platforms recently, chances are you have also noticed another similar term, “revenue orchestration platform.”
In 2024, the term “revenue orchestration platform” was coined by Forrester to describe a new group of software vendors that combine key sales functionalities found in providers of sales engagement, conversation intelligence, and revenue operations.
Now, these core functionalities can be found in one platform buyers can purchase, which Forrester named the revenue orchestration platform.
Forrester defines ROP as technology that enables B2B frontline resources to design, execute, capture, analyze, and improve buyer and customer engagement while optimizing productivity and internal revenue processes.
The main difference between sales engagement platforms and revenue orchestration platforms is that ROPs cover a broader spectrum of revenue-generating processes across multiple departments, including marketing.
Meanwhile, SEPs are primarily tailored to help sales teams connect with more prospects, have more meaningful conversations, and close more deals.
In that sense, ROPs use a wide strategic approach, and SEPs employ a customer-centric approach.
To Sum It Up: Are Sales Engagement Platforms For You?
Yes, if your sales team struggles with managing high workloads and needs to streamline customer interactions.
Sales engagement platforms are designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of sales processes by automating tasks and giving you all the tools for better communication.
Investing in a sales engagement platform means shorter sales cycles, satisfied customers, and increased revenue.
Since 90% of sales leaders plan to invest in these tools, adopting one early will give you a competitive edge.
Before choosing the right SEP, ensure the platform aligns with your current workflow and provides scalability to grow with your team.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best sales engagement platform?
The top 3 sales engagement tools are:
1. HubSpot Sales Hub: Part of a larger CRM suite from HubSpot, the Sales Hub offers a good balance of email automation, lead management tools, and free features for smaller teams. It integrates seamlessly with other HubSpot products for marketing and customer service.
2. lemlist: The cold outreach tool that is a must for sales teams— from personalization at scale to multichannel capabilities, plus, its deliverability is spotless.
3. Salesloft: A popular platform known for its robust email automation features, sequence-building functionalities, and powerful analytics for tracking outreach performance. It caters to sales teams of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.
What ROI can you get from sales engagement platforms?
Companies who implement sales engagement software into the company’s workflow can get up to 329% return on their investment, according to a Forrester survey.
What is the difference between a CRM and a sales engagement platform?
SEPs help you automate and improve your communication with potential customers. CRMs help you manage all customer data and relationships.
How does a sales engagement platform help sales teams?
Sales engagement software helps sales teams boost efficiency, personalize communication, and ultimately drive sales growth. In short, it optimizes the way reps interact with their clients.
What is a sales engagement model?
A sales engagement model consists of detailed steps about engaging prospects using a suitable approach. It includes details about channels, frequency, and the content you will use.
Does my team need a sales engagement platform?
Your team will clearly benefit from using sales engagement software if they have:
- Low sales conversion rate
- Inconsistent communication
- Limited personalization
- Poor visibility of sales activities
- Difficulty collaborating
- High churn
Liucija Adomaite is a viral content writer and organic traffic expert on a mission to help turn ambitious businesses into big names.