How to Adapt Return on Engagement to Increase Sales

Return on Engagement (ROE) Is Not for Just Marketing Anymore. Repeatedly, you hear sales reps and leaders say, “we hit the activity model, but we are still missing our targets.” Brian Burns would say they are myopically be realizing Goodhart’s Law. This states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Simply put, the emphasis is overtly on the activity but not the quality or value of the engagements.

That said, we are going to adapt the term ‘Return of Engagement’ for sales. We will take lessons from this marketing measurement for media content effectiveness. Then adapt into a process for measuring the quality value of the sales activities and customer engagement sessions.

What is Return on Engagement?

“Return on Engagement” (ROE) is a metric used to measure the effectiveness and success of an organization’s engagement initiatives, particularly in the context of digital marketing and online presence. It focuses on assessing the level of engagement and interaction between a brand or company and its audience across various online platforms.

In the marketing world, the term return on engagement has displaced some of the typical return on investment measurements. The way marketing defines return on engagement is the return you would expect by leveraging and investing through social media and other outlets. This measurement has proven particularly useful with current marketing platforms in online and social media platforms. Return on investment would have measured page views, clicks, or click-through rate. Return on engagement measures time spent on a page, watching a video, or whether someone clicks ‘Skip Ad’ or watches the ad.

Additionally, return on engagement would measure the media’s ability to transform page views into valued transactions. These transactions include subscriptions, downloads of whitepapers or eBooks, sharing the page or link via mediums like LinkedIn (hint hint), and any form of positive. The measure tracked how the medium was engaging in interaction with their brand.

Marketing ROE- Art Vs. Science-

Admittedly there may be a hint of art versus exact data science to this measurement present. How can one determine whether a lengthy visit to your site while ads or videos run is not due to a bio break or dog that needs to go out? That aside, in this massive battle for drawing attention to your brand in the sea of data-driven, bot manipulated media content, return on engagement is a powerful tool to making your brand stronger and broadening your influence.

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Adapting Return on Engagement for Sales-

We are not looking to convert marketing’s return of engagement apples for apples into a sales engagement methodology measurement. However, successful sales results are a continuously compounded equation of quality engagements with your clients. Similar to the marketing example mentioned above, sales organizations tend only to measure return on investment as the touchpoint activity. These activities are the number of calls, emails, appointments, proposals. The qualify the activity occurred without measuring the value or quality of each engagement. The steps below will adapt the return on engagement model to measure the impact, content, and development of a high-quality engagement process.

Let us first scope the adaptation out before we get started. Where does this transformation take place? Some might jump right to sales enablement to ensure the incoming new sales professionals receive this training. It is important your new reps can execute a high return on engagement model, yielding them successful results. Others might go to the battle-hardened sales professionals that have been to war but are not hitting the target. The answer more frequently is ‘YES.’ Those are the groups you will focus on with this program. However, they are not the starting point of this process. It starts with the content, materials, and tools provided to the sales professionals.

The outline below is the five steps to convert your widget-based activity model into a return on engagement model. These steps will increase the quality of your funnel, larger deal sizes, increase wallet share, and creating trust in the marketplace with your clients.

Step 1- Develop and Provide Customer-Centric Product Content–

The process needs to start educating sales professionals. Please provide them with propensity modeling information on where, why, and what clients are buying and using regarding your portfolio. The “Challenger Sales” prospecting outlines providing quality business insights for the reps to lead with correlating materials. These would include white papers, articles, eBooks, case studies, web pages, and sharable online posts. The materials should include branded and non-branded materials regarding the solution or service to the current segment in the client’s industry. Additionally, look at platforms like everyonesocial.com, where you can publish this material alongside industry material for sharing on social media platforms. Publishing relevant materials make your teams look and feel like true industry gurus.

Step2- Sales Enablement Starts at the Top and Coaches to the Bottom, CONSISTENTLY–

Do you ever wonder why we say the same sayings our Mom or Dad did? Ever wonder why the entire office says, ‘Got it’ or ‘Right?’ or some stupid tagline in the office? It is usually because the top sales director of the office says it constantly. That is because it imitates success and what is perceptually needed to succeed. Proper execution means there is a great need to speak the language at the leadership level. Leaders must understand what quality engagements look like to the client and ask the teams guiding engagement questions.

Put aside the ‘Why did you miss your funnel target.’ Start asking something more like ‘Walk me through the content you discussed in the discovery session with the client.’ Along with being an advocate for the return on engagement practice, this needs to be wired in your sales enablement/sales support process. It also needs to be included in your existing onboarding training and your continuous learning program (you have both of those, don’t you?).

I recommend either layering or adapting something like the ‘Challenger Sale’ or my favorite Keenan’s Gap Selling These are solid solutions/serving client needs selling model. They deploy an insight-driven sales process into the fabric of your coaching practices. We should be solving the client’s needs instead of leading with your chin (aka your product). These methods should include how to use the content and the timing of when to use the content. You need to ensure the sales leaders, sales enablement, and sales support are coaching and executing value-driven engagement sessions.

Step3- Change the Lens of How You Look at Activity–

‘What weighs more than one hundred pounds of feathers or one hundred pounds of bricks?’ This adage is an excellent example of how many organizations look at activity. The question should be more whether it is denser (bricks) or more volume (feathers). Let the CRM measure the tasks while you leverage a coaching-based review of the contents of the activity.

Calls

Regardless of what type of sales call the sales professional is making (cold, warm, appointment, or follow-up), each one of these is an interaction worthy of assuring engagement was valuable to the client and impactful. My fear has always been that the first call from my team would be the last one the client takes from my company. Please do yourself a huge favor by getting on solid podcasts like Josh Braun’s Inside Selling to improve your calls. Then get yourself a copy of Keenan’s book Gap Selling, where he guides you through finding the customer’s gap. Practicing these calls amongst the peer group is one of the best ways to overcome fears and rejections. Listen to calls with your reps, and giving them pointers after the call is another way to help sharpen the skill set

Emails

Very few clients can say, “Wow, I love how many sales spams I get from all these salespeople.” There is generating demand, and many companies require sales reps to email their modules or prospects. However, let us pull up for a minute before we load all our contacts into our outreach program. What are you sending out to them? Is it relevant to all your customers? Is it a fishing exercise (not a phishing exercise)? Josh, Keenan, Challenger, and I would prefer a tactical pinpoint recommending a customer’s solution truly needs or is it something they might not be thinking they need. If it is the latter, you are on to a better email process.

A few tips here, sometimes you need to do the fishing exercise but make sure it is content and meaningfully rich to specific client needs. If it is a tactical pinpoint, use a personal touch like have your support FWD: it to you with something like, “Hey Ken, this solution reminds me of that client we discussed the other day.” Then FWD it to the client to message how the solution would do X, Y, Z for them specifically. Xant (formerly InsideSales.com) found emails with FWD: in the subject had an open rate of over 50%.

Have a Social Persona

Yes, calls and emails are tried and true to varying degrees throughout sales history. However, today you have tools like LinkedIn, Facebook Groups, Twitter, and multiple industry networks to show you are the industry professional and connect. Make sure these things are tight, and you leverage your persona. As I referenced in the first point, this is a place for you to share rich content. It is also a place for you to establish interest that could yield your appointments and engagements. This is a good place to leverage tools like LinkedIn Navigator, everyonesocial.com, Outreach, and Marketo.

Step 4- Turning Appointment Meetings into Engagement Sessions-

Outside of the client engagements that start with a meeting at the nearest craft java introduction meeting where you establish the potential of doing business together, it would be best if you genuinely worked to get any meeting with the customer to a meaningful engagement. If you follow a good challenger, gap selling, or solution sale model, you lead intelligent research on the clients and their shortcomings you can solve for them.

Therefore, your first actual appointment should be prepared with your support resource on the topic at the ready or presenting. You need a prescriptive agenda (and NO, an agenda of intro’s, bill review, needs, and closing action items does not cut it). Be sure you include presenting the initial topic and open-ended mapping questions. Your goal is to get to the root of what the customer needs you to solve. Focusing on their needs transforms your meetings into engagements with intentional discussion on solving their gaps with your product, service, or solution set.

Step 5- Make Entrenched Long Term Customer Relationships the Objective-

From the initial contact, through engagement sessions, through proposal review presentations, contract negotiations, the signature, and implementation of the contract, the primary viewpoint should be a long-term relationship between you (for as long as you have the account) the company. Sales cycles like small business transactional sales, maybe 20-30 days, may dictate how engaged you stay with the customer. However, if you aim for long-term satisfaction, this becomes reciprocal growth and revenue. The ROE cadence focuses less on the number of actions but the quality of the engagements through implementation.

If you own the customer in your sales module or partner with a Customer Success organization, the engagement is continually ongoing with account reviews, solution or service updates as the life cycle evolves, and solid, meaningful engagement on a cadence. Through my career sales leader and a client myself, the most successful reps would stop in genuinely seeing how the client was doing or if they needed anything. It felt like they were part of the client’s team doing projects on their behalf.

Final Thoughts-

In conclusion, if you lead a sales team directly or are a sales rep, do not just try to hit an activity or funnel standard with volume. Take the time to create engagements with your customers. They are not just a touchpoint or a number either. They have gaps or problems to be solved by your services, products, or solutions. Are you a sales executive or team leader looking to increase your average deal size and long-term revenue projections? Then take a detour from the standard micros to measure the quality of the engagements. It will yield you a greater ROE on your ROI.

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