Getting Started

Generating leads and cultivating strong client relationships are important aspects to increasing revenue. However, looking inward to your own team can help drive growth as well. Sales performance is typically used as an indication of a company’s success, and good salespeople have the ability to drive business in a competitive market. 

Creating a strong sales team, as well as other departments that directly impact revenue streams, is crucial to driving growth. Recruiting and hiring strong employees is a great starting point to creating strong departments. More importantly, though, is understanding your company as a whole and making sure your employees remain engaged with the overall mission throughout their tenure.

Engagement impacts more than just sales numbers. It helps boost productivity, increase employee retention, and create a better company culture. 

Actively engaged employees contribute to the overall success of a business. The Hay Group found it’s  50% more likely for a  highly engaged employee to exceed expectations compared to less engaged workers.  

Understanding the factors that create meaningful work for employees to engage in can positively impact sales performance. In all companies, including the B2B industry, two key components of management are employment engagement and employment satisfaction. While these terms are often used interchangeably, each represents distinct aspects of an employee's relationship with the company they are employed by and the quality of their work. 

Knowing the differences between these two concepts can provide crucial insights for companies that want to drive growth through their employees.

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Employment Engagement Vs. Employment Satisfaction 

Employment engagement describes an employee’s investment within a company, including their level of involvement and the motivating factors for success. This involves treating your staff like an integral part of the company, rather than just another number on a spreadsheet. It helps monitor and acknowledge the contributions of your employees while understanding how they fit into the greater organization.

While employment satisfaction is similar to engagement, this term refers to the contentment an employee feels while doing their job. Employee happiness is important, and there are factors that can be used to measure their overall satisfaction. 

Employment satisfaction measures an employee's overall happiness in their role. This is influenced by factors like compensation, work-life balance, support, and a feeling of empowerment from management. 

Satisfied employees tend to feel content in their position, leading to increased productivity, company loyalty, and less turnover. For B2B companies who want to drive growth, a keen understanding of how employee satisfaction and employee engagement are intertwined can help unlock higher levels of productivity.

 Typically, engaged employees are not just working for a paycheck. These employees care about their company's success, as well as how their performance impacts their overall career trajectory. There are many benefits to employment engagement like customer satisfaction and boosted social media presence.

Factors for engaged employees include ‘meaningful work’, recognition, incentives for their efforts, and opportunities for growth within the organization. Committed employees are proactive in their work and help drive innovation within a company. This leads to increased productivity, which helps your sales pipeline generate new leads and sell more products. 

Employment engagement also helps with retention, including your staff and customers. When your sales, marketing, and customer success workers are motivated, their interactions with clients help strengthen the relationship with your company. Retaining employees helps cut down on costs and resources used for onboarding while driving career growth as successful staff members advance within the company.

For success, it’s crucial to understand the differences between employment engagement and employee satisfaction. While both play roles in the organization's success, their implications vary. Employee satisfaction focuses on meeting staff’s needs and ensuring they are content with their current work environment. 

On the other hand, employment engagement focuses on motivating employees to actively participate in the company’s success, which helps drive growth. While measuring satisfaction has been a traditional method of employee retention, utilizing your knowledge of employment engagement can help give your company a driving edge.

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Breaking the Habit of Only Measuring Employment Satisfaction

While the two are often mistakenly used interchangeably, engagement and satisfaction are two different concepts to measure employees. Employment satisfaction is the common term, but it’s important to understand the difference to utilize these concepts correctly within your business strategy.

Traditionally, it’s much easier for a company to look at its staff and measure their contentment. As a more intuitive concept, employment satisfaction tends to be simpler to assess. This includes looking at compensation, benefits, work-life balance, and other factors.

Many of these traits are straightforward, and information can be gathered in employee surveys. This type of assessment helps HR create policies, adjust pay scales, or reassign job duties to keep workers happy in the company. 

It also makes sense that the concept of employment satisfaction has been around longer than the idea of employee engagement. Many companies have measured their internal success based on the satisfaction of their workers. Retention strategies have been based on keeping employees happy to increase productivity and lessen turnover.

Employment engagement is a newer term that helps tackle larger ideas regarding the motivations and engagement levels of successful workers. This works to measure the level of emotional commitment from employees, which can be harder to discern than the factors of satisfaction. 

Businesses are beginning to recognizing the importance of employee engagement and its impact on productivity, customer service, and company culture. Rather than simply keeping staff happy, companies are now diving into ways to motivate and incentivize employees for their strong performances. 

The Benefits of Understanding Your Company’s Employment Engagement

Engagement plays an important role in cultivating a company culture that motivates employees to put their best foot forward. This type of encouragement helps foster strong client relationships through dedicated sales practices and excellent customer service. This will help drive sales growth by enticing prospects and retaining clients. 

Understanding how engagement plays a role in customer success can help increase the overall ROI for your sales team. Workers that feel connected to the business are more likely to go above and beyond to meet the customers’ needs. This helps cultivate lasting relationships that encourage repeat sales, rather than relying on constantly generating new customers.

For example, commitment to success from your sales team can help drive innovation within their sales cycle. Rather than doing the bare minimum to close a deal, engaged employees are likely to come up with creative solutions to provide customers with the best user experience. This includes working around a client’s specific deadline or listening to feedback to provide a better product.

To remain competitive in the B2B industry, companies rely on their product to be the best solution, as well as their ability to provide quality service to prospects. Having engaged workers will help ensure client needs are being met, and may even help anticipate future solutions.

Employment engagement fosters an environment where your staff truly cares about providing an excellent experience. This means they understand the company’s mission and use this to tailor their workflow to end with satisfied customers. Efficient response time and increased communication between salespeople and customers illustrates how engaged employees can increase overall productivity. 

In addition, these types of employees tend to have a deep understanding of the products and services your business offers. Through effective communication methods, engaged salespeople are able to help relay the solutions your team can offer to prospects. This type of expertise is invaluable for a business to remain competitive within the B2B industry.

Rather than acting simply as customer service providers, your engaged staff are able to work as  subject-matter experts knowledgeable about the products they’re selling. This helps boost your company brand as an industry leader. Strengthening this image encourages customers to continuously seek out your solutions when they have needs that must be met.

By fostering a sense of ownership among your employees, they will feel like an important part of the business. This helps strengthen their commitment to the company’s success and further motivates them to be successful in their roles. This type of ownership allows your staff to feel a personal responsibility for their workload, which encourages them to provide the best service possible. 

While increasing customer retention is a huge plus, employment engagement also helps strengthen the business through company culture. While this may seem like a buzzword, culture has an impact on employee turnover. Engaged employees can help create strong departments that operate efficiently and encourage collaboration to drive growth. 

Providing meaningful work and a sense of ownership is a great starting point for pushing employment engagement. This will help drive sales as your staff invests their own emotions into the sales process.

Defining ‘Meaningful Work’ for Employees

Meaningful work is a strong motivator that can help boost engagement. Feeling a strong connection to their job helps provide a sense of purpose to the daily workload. This encourages commitment to the company mission and can help boost productivity and performance. 

Understanding what makes work feel meaningful can ensure your employee’s needs are being met. There are several factors that contribute to this. 

Employees look for work to align with their personal values and goals. This connects their identity and ambitions to their daily tasks, which can push workers toward success. Your company can highlight its own purpose and values, as well as provide the ways in which each role contributes to these. 

Creating a good experience and having a positive impact on customers is another factor of meaningful work. This helps employees feel like the work they’re doing truly matters, and many are motivated by their desire to help others. Showcasing customer testimonials and encouraging regular communication with onboarded clients helps illustrate the ways the products are making a difference. 

Contributions to the team and company's success can help employees feel like their work is valuable. Management can play a big role in showcasing the successes of individual teams, as well as the overall impact this work has on the business. Driving sales growth is a great way for employees to see how their efforts are positively impacting the company. 

Recognition and appreciation are great ways to demonstrate how vital your staff is to the success of your business. Taking the time to thank your employees for their efforts can help drive engagement. This can be through awards, bonuses, or promotions. 

Opportunities for growth are a major factor in employment engagement. Your staff will want to feel like they can advance in their career with your organization. This helps set goals so employees can push themselves to reach the next level. 

Providing development for employees, like ongoing training and mentorship, helps demonstrate the investment your company is willing to put into its staff. This can help ensure commitment from your employees and drive engagement from those who want to work hard and strengthen their skills. 

Avoiding micromanagement and encouraging autonomy can help ensure workers feel like their jobs are meaningful. This means allowing your staff to make their own decisions and have control over their work. By encouraging personal responsibility, employees can see how they are contributors to the overall company, rather than just following the orders of management. 

Providing the space for challenging and varied work helps stimulate innovation and creativity in the workplace. Rather than feeling like their workflow is redundant, variety gives opportunities for problem-solving and thoughtful solutions. This is easily achieved by allowing your employees to work with different clients or on multiple projects where their skills can be properly utilized.

Measuring Employment Engagement

Effectively measuring employee engagement is a crucial part of increasing productivity and driving sales growth. It’s important to develop a strategy and have multiple ways of collecting this data. With this knowledge, your company will be able to fine-tune its own processes to ensure employees are engaged and motivated.

Employee Surveys

An incredibly easy and common way to measure engagement is through employee surveys. These questionnaires can easily be sent out in mass, and they can evaluate various factors that play a role in engagement. This allows employees to self-evaluate as well as provide feedback on ways to improve morale. 

Think about sending out these surveys semi-regularly to keep a pulse on the organization. It will help give employees a voice, as well as provide data to assess the level of commitment your staff feels toward the business. 

One on One Meetings

Surveys are great for getting feedback on broad topics from employees, but one-on-one meetings can provide deeper insight into employee mindsets. Managers should prioritize these conversations with their team to make sure they have an accurate sense of employee engagement. Asking open-ended questions allows your staff to share their perspective, provide feedback, and share ideas for growth strategies. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Setting metrics is a great way to gauge performance and understand employment engagement. Top performers that are committed to a company tend to exhibit high levels of productivity in their workflows. Monitoring these numbers can help the company understand areas of success as well as places where improvements can be made. 

KPIs also help keep employees on track with their own goals. These indicators should help motivate employees to succeed in their workload. Setting goals and tracking progress provides a way for employees to continuously engage with their own success. 

Observation

While this doesn’t mean micromanaging, directly observing your employees is valuable to get insight into their levels of engagement. Daily interactions can help management gauge how their staff is doing. Look for workers who show enthusiasm, take initiative, and seek feedback from supervisors as well as teammates. 

Exit Interviews

While the goal is to avoid employee turnover and increase retention rates, exit interviews can provide valuable insight when employees do leave. This tactic provides a space for workers to share their experiences, explain their reasons for leaving, and suggest improvements to the company. This feedback can encourage actions from management that can boost team morale.

Improving Engagement and Satisfaction

Measuring this information for your employees is the first step in cultivating an environment that encourages engagement. Understanding ways to get started or improve these feelings for your staff is crucial to driving sales growth. Your company can be positively impacted by the successful use of engagement strategies. 

Take feedback seriously and provide platforms for employees to voice their opinions. Most of the time, these are the people who are acting as the face of the company to customers on a daily basis. Their insight can provide valuable information pertaining to workflows, innovation, and any concerns they see in the market.

Encourage clear communication to avoid isolating departments. Employee engagement benefits when your staff feels connected to the company as a whole. By developing a system that helps keep everyone in the loop on important updates, teams can feel connected and collaborate easily.

Make an effort to ensure your staff is fully aware of your company’s mission. This allows employees to understand what they’re working for, as well as relay your company values to customers. According to a Gallup survey, 59% of employees did not have a full grasp on their company’s mission, or the ways they stood out from their competitors. 

Recognize your employees when they are doing a good job. Incentives and rewards are important for keeping your workers engaged with the business. This helps demonstrate the impact team members are having on company success and allows them to feel credited for their hard work. 

Increasing Sales Conversions Through Relationship-Based Selling

Once your team has a strategy in place for measuring engagement, it’s important to utilize your top performers to increase sales. These engaged employees should be focused on delivering quality customer experiences that can strengthen existing relationships. Capitalizing on your salespeople’s drive to succeed can help cultivate lasting relationships that drive sales growth.

With passionate team members walking leads through the sales cycle, your prospects are able to get a clear picture of the solution your company offers. Consistent follow-up and clear communication from your sales team can push a lead through the funnel and toward the finish line. Going above and beyond to anticipate and meet customers’ needs is what many engaged employees do, and this only furthers the customer relationship. 

Once a sale is made, it’s important to continue the relationship with your client. Reach out for feedback, schedule check-ins about the product, and send marketing materials about any new rollouts that may help the customer. This will increase your ROI through repeat purchases from these strong customer interactions.

Lead generation can increase if your employees are performing at high levels of productivity. Efficient follow-up and persistent communication throughout the sales cycle help get prospects to a closed deal. By encouraging employment engagement, your company will be able to boost sales and drive growth.

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