It’s easy to confuse sales engagement software with a “CRM that has some automation.” But true sales engagement goes beyond that: it’s a full suite of tools that helps reps connect with buyers at every stage — before, during, and after the conversation.
For example, an advanced sales engagement tool can tell you who on your video call is paying attention in real-time, then show you who read the content you sent after the meeting and how much time they spent on each page.
To clarify what a sales engagement platform (SEP) really is, we’ll show you how we do it at Bigtincan — and spotlight some other tools you might want to check out.
For this guide, we’ll focus on sales engagement for full-cycle sellers with a quota when talking about Bigtincan. (It’s a little different from tools made for SDRs — but don’t worry, we’ll break down the differences and give you lists in both categories, so you’ll know exactly what to look for.)
In this article:
- What Bigtincan Engagement actually does
- Top SDR-focused engagement platforms
- Enablement tools with engagement features
Note: You can learn more about Bigtincan’s sales engagement tools and book a demo here.
What sales engagement looks like with Bigtincan
Sales engagement is all about making sales reps’ interactions with buyers smarter and more productive, from the first touchpoint to sharing insights after the meeting.
With the right tools, reps can organize their outreach, zero in on highly engaged prospects, and spend more time closing deals. This way, they can focus on the buyers that matter, speed up deals, and boost those win rates.
Below, we’ll show you exactly what that looks like in Bigtincan Engagement.
Interactive web conferencing tools
There are a few great tools built into our web conferencing software to boost engagement with prospects.
Our web conferencing platform comes with features designed for live, interactive selling. Standout perk: real-time engagement alerts — so if a participant stops paying attention (hello, email distractions!), our alert meter lets your rep know instantly. That creates perfect moments to pull them back in organically.
No downloads, no friction: our browser-based conferences let everyone join with one click. Plus, reps can do hidden content searches and instant screen share to answer questions on the fly. No more “Let me get back to you,” which just stalls deals.
After the call, you can dive into the details: see which slides hooked your buyers, so you know exactly what to focus on to close the deal.
Bigtincan also shows customer engagement insights to see who attended meetings, how long meetings lasted, and what links prospects clicked.
Reps can also send pieces of the call to their manager or participants as necessary. And the best part? MeetingsAI automatically summarizes meetings and logs notes in the CRM, cutting time-consuming sidework from sellers' post-call to do list.
Email integrations, deliverability, and engagement insights
Wondering if your emails are landing where they should? Bigtincan Engagement’s email features streamline content sharing and engagement tracking.
Users can share content directly via email, sending a message with links to files or stories. Recipients receive a branded email with access to the shared content, and engagement (opens, downloads) is tracked in a Share Console.
Email integrations with Gmail and Outlook allow users to find, attach, and share Bigtincan content directly within their preferred email tool, fitting seamlessly into their existing workflow.
Features include intelligent content recommendations based on email context, powerful search, one-click sharing, access to marketing-approved templates, and performance tracking of shared content. Content is attached as tracked links, and activity is logged back to Bigtincan and CRM systems.
Sellers can also grab marketing approved HTML or plain text email templates, quickly customize the content, and hit send.
Other email features include:
- Delegated Email Authentication: Share emails can be sent from the user’s own email address (via SMTP/OAuth2), ensuring higher deliverability and replies go to the sender’s outbox. This also maintains tracking and analytics.
- Access Forms: Optionally require recipients to fill out a form before accessing shared content, allowing for lead capture and further engagement insights.
- Performance Tracking: All email shares are tracked for recipient engagement (opens, downloads, forwards), with notifications available for the sender.
These features help sellers deliver the right content at the right time, maintain brand consistency, and gain actionable insights into buyer engagement.
Plus, our AI-powered spam detector flags risky content before you hit send, so you can tweak and boost deliverability. Plus, our contact validator scrubs unreliable emails from your list, keeping your sender reputation squeaky clean.
Digital Sales Rooms
A lot of sales happen through email, but sometimes to really get a deal moving, you need to take it out of email and into something a bit more modern and organized. If you’ve spent time searching through endless email threads and scattered attachments, you know how messy things can get.
That’s where Digital Sales Rooms come in — they’re like a single, organized hub or custom microsite where you and your buyers can always find the latest documents, presentations, and resources, all in one place.
Setting up a Digital Sales Room is quick, and you can personalize it for each buyer. Need to update a file or add something new? Just drop it in the room—no need to resend emails or worry about version control. Buyers see the most up-to-date info every time they log in.
Collaboration is straightforward, too. You and your buyers can leave comments right on specific files or sections, making it easy to answer questions or clear up confusion as soon as it comes up. No more digging through old emails to find what someone said.
You also get a clear view of what’s happening: see which files buyers are looking at, who’s engaged, and what’s getting ignored. That way, you know where to focus your follow-ups.
And if you’re sharing sensitive info, you can control who gets access and for how long. You can even hand off the room to someone else if your role changes or the deal moves forward.
In short, Digital Sales Rooms take the chaos out of sharing sales content and help everyone stay on the same page — literally.
Sales engagement platforms for SDRs
Now that you know how a sales engagement platform works for a full-cycle seller, we’ll show you what an equivalent tool would look like for an SDR specifically.
For example, let’s take a look at SalesLoft.
SalesLoft is a sales engagement platform that helps SDRs automate human interactions between buyers and sellers. That means they offer automation tools for outbound selling, including:
- Working through sales cadences
- One-click dialing and texting from anywhere
- Automatic CRM integration for all activities
- Analytics to tell leaders which cadences are working best or how many touches it takes to get a response
For more information, check out the “cadence and automation” and “dialer and messenger” pages on their sites.
Outreach.io is a similar “customer engagement platform” that helps you automate outreach, and track it automatically in a CRM. You can use it standalone or in conjunction with your CRM (it integrates with Salesforce and other major CRMs).
More sales enablement tools with sales engagement features
Many sales enablement tools throw in a handful of sales engagement features. Bigtincan now delivers engagement and enablement in a single platform.
Most other platforms don’t go as deep on engagement, but if you just need a taste of those features, here are some strong contenders.
Seismic
Seismic is more of a sales enablement solution, but it does offer a sales engagement piece that features email engagement tracking, web conferencing, the ability to personalize sales materials (which can fall under sales enablement), and insights that show which sales reps and content are driving the most engagement during prospecting or selling.
Showpad
Showpad’s website breaks down their product offerings into two main pieces: Content and Coach — both of which are usually more heavily part of sales enablement than sales engagement. That said, they do have a page that explains their analytics offerings, which dive into some useful engagement metrics.
Their Prospect Insights offer the ability to track email opens, view page-by-page views of content, and see downloads and forwards.
There’s an AI feature designed to replicate the actions of top sales performers by suggesting content, next steps, and coaching, but the focus remains on enablement rather than engagement.
For web conferencing, Showpad allows users to present from one platform via integrations with Zoom and Google Calendar. You can see what meetings you have coming up, and you don’t need to leave Showpad to present, but there doesn’t seem to be any actual engagement assistance via an attention meter or slide-by-slide analytics as there is in Bigtincan Engagement.
So, Showpad is a great example of enablement software with a dash of engagement features — they work, but it’s not the star of the show.
Highspot
Highspot focuses a lot on content and sales enablement. Their sales engagement offering features email integration with Outlook and Gmail, social media engagement with LinkedIn and Twitter, and web conferencing (via their native tool Slide Casting or integrations with tools such as Zoom or GoToMeeting). It’s unclear whether they have any presentation tracking tools similar to Bigtincan Engagement.
There’s also a strong focus on customization of content, engagement on many different platforms, and integrations with sales engagement solutions such as Outreach and SalesLoft — the latter of which suggests that they don’t offer sales engagement themselves so much as just integrate with other tools that do.
Email analytics? Yes, open notifications, time on page/slide, and plenty of slicing and dicing of engagement data. But, again, no tools for email validation or “magic moment” send timing.
Bonus: Smart CRM & sales automation tools worth a look
As we mentioned in the intro, sometimes sales engagement software is considered to be just a “CRM with automation features.”
But as we’ve seen, real engagement software gives reps interactive tools they can use on the fly with prospects.
Still looking for CRM automation? Try these:
- Hubspot Sales Hub is a standalone CRM that includes a “fully-featured sales CRM,” email templates and series automation, live chat, quote features, analytics and reporting, and the ability to integrate with over 500 tools available in their App Marketplace.
- Groove is a native SalesforceCRM integration that “automates non-sales activities” to give sales reps more time to build relationships and close deals. This includes email, calendar, and activity tracking; multi-channel campaign automation; workflow streamlining and task prioritization, and various other Salesforce integration perks.
- Mailshake is an email integration provider that offers to automate your cold outreach. It integrates email providers such as GSuite and Outlook with CRMs such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, and HubSpot, with additional helpful integrations (such as Calendly) via Zapier.
Give your sales team the right platform to connect, engage, and close more deals
The right sales engagement platform lets your reps do less busywork and more selling. No toggling between tabs or losing track of who's interested in what. And no guessing which prospects are worth the follow-up.
We've covered everything from full-featured platforms to specialty add-ons. The key? Pick one that solves your team's actual problems, not just the one with the shiniest features.
Want to see what real engagement looks like in action? Book a demo and we'll show you how Bigtincan Engagement helps your team connect with prospects who want to buy.
