Your ability to create meaningful, timing conversations with your prospects depends on the sales engagement tool you choose for your tech stack. Here's a quick overview of key features every sales team needs in their sales engagement tool and top tools currently in the market.
by
The Apollo Team
PUBLISHED Dec 12, 2023
5Min Read
UPDATED Aug 24, 2025
Are you having meaningful conversations with your prospects that are moving them towards a purchase? That's what sales engagement is all about.
It comprises all your interactions with potential clients, from how you communicate with them to how they respond to your calls to action. The objective is to create meetings or opportunities and eventually close the deal.
That is where sales engagement software or sales engagement platforms come in. These powerful tools help you automate, track, and optimize every interaction with prospects — from first touch to closed deal. In this guide, we'll walk you through what sales engagement platforms are, the key features to look for, and how to choose the right one for your team.
According to Gartner, sales engagement is such a high priority that 90% of sales leaders plan to invest in technologies and methodologies to help their sellers engage effectively with prospects and customers.
A sales engagement platform allows sales reps to automate the process of keeping track of every call they make, every email they send and receive and any other activity they conduct with their prospects and customers.
Using a sales engagement platform will save you time and allow you to analyze your results. The sales engagement software provides analytics about open rates, click-through rates and more.
When you're evaluating different platforms, it's easy to get lost in the details. But a few core features are non-negotiable for any team that's serious about scaling its outreach. Here's what you should look for:
The 2017 TOPO Sales Development Technology Benchmark Report indicates that 87% of sales development organizations have adopted a sales engagement platform. In fact, sales engagement platforms are the top-rated technology in terms of positive ROI.
According to G2 (at the time of writing), the highest rated sales engagement platforms are:
The above are just a few of the many platforms available in the market. So, how do you choose between all the available options? Here are some questions you should consider:
One of the complaints many sellers have is that they waste a lot of time hopping between different tech tools.
For example, they may use a sales intelligence tool like ZoomInfo or Seamless to gather prospect data. After collecting the data, they would load it into an engagement tool, which then allows them to A/B test emails, see when prospects open them, and track open/reply rates.
The Apollo Advantage resides in that the contact's database (210 million business records and more than 20 million companies) and the engagement solution are in the same platform. You can add a record to a sequence with one click and sync it with any CRM automatically.
That means that sales intelligence and sales engagement are in one place.
Because Apollo has a database and can enrich the data of everyone you reach out to before your messages go out, Apollo has the ability to automate a lot of the personalization to improve conversion rates in a way that other sales engagement tools can't. This gives sales leaders the power of having a 10x larger sales team without having to hire any additional sales reps.
From within Apollo you can create and automate messaging sequences, use an international dialer for your cold calls and more.
Furthermore, Apollo's analytics provide sales professionals more insight into how to improve their conversion rates and be more successful overall.
Apollo is an all-in-one platform that combines data and sales engagement, so you have the ability to seamlessly find leads and reach out to them in one place, which saves time and hassle from integrating multiple platforms.
Choosing the right sales engagement platform isn't just about adding another tool to your stack — it's about fundamentally changing how your team sells. It's about giving them the power to have more meaningful conversations, close deals faster, and stop wasting time on tasks that can be automated.
By unifying data, AI, and outreach in a single platform, you can build a more efficient and effective sales engine. Ready to see how it works? Get Started with Apollo and turn your sales process into a revenue-generating machine.
Think of it this way: a CRM is your system of record for customer relationships, tracking the entire history of interactions. A sales engagement platform is your system of action, focused on automating and optimizing the outreach that creates those relationships in the first place. While they can overlap, they serve two distinct but complementary purposes.
Most leading platforms offer deep, bi-directional integrations with popular CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. This means data flows seamlessly between the two systems, so activities logged in your engagement platform automatically update in your CRM, and vice versa. This keeps your data clean and saves reps from manual entry.
While it varies by team size and adoption rate, many organizations see a positive ROI within the first few months. The immediate gains come from increased rep productivity and efficiency. Long-term ROI is driven by higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, and better data-driven decision-making.
Not usually. Modern platforms are designed to be user-friendly and intuitive. While an admin or RevOps professional might handle the initial setup and CRM integration, individual reps can typically get up and running with minimal training. The best platforms offer robust onboarding support and resources to ensure a smooth rollout.
Top-tier platforms use a variety of techniques to protect your sender reputation and maximize deliverability. This includes features like email validation, send-time throttling to mimic human behavior, custom tracking domains, and clear analytics on bounce and spam complaint rates so you can address issues proactively.
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