Email continues to dominate as preferred channel for sales engagement

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If you follow much of the news in the sales and martech space, you might think that, for B2B sales professionals, social selling is the best channel to reach and engage potential buyers. But you’d be wrong.

Initial findings from a study by VanillaSoft, a leading sales engagement technology company, found that email and phone remain the preferred B2B channels – by a big margin.

The company surveyed 2,000 executives to better understand B2B buyer attitudes and preferences at three phases of the sales engagement process: the identification of need, the search for solutions, and the evaluation of alternatives. The chart reflects respondents’ channel preferences for receiving information or being contacted.

In the words of VanillaSoft CEO, David Hood, “we often read and hear about the rise and role of social selling at various points in the sales engagement process. However, as these initial findings show, more traditional channels – from email to phone to simple word-of-mouth – are actually preferred by B2B buyers.”

Even among young professionals (25 to 34) only 18 percent expressed a preference for social as a contact channel – as compared with 41 percent who said they preferred the telephone.

And while the phone channel grows in importance through the engagement stages, from 39% at the Need stage to 54% at the Evaluation stage, this is still dwarfed by executives’ preference for email, averaging 88% across the 3 stages.

Contact us here if you’d like to learn more about how Rhetorik can help with your B2B email engagement objectives.

About Rhetorik
Rhetorik provides data that sales and marketing teams can use to improve their marketing campaigns immediately and has been leading the way in marketing intelligence for enterprise technology vendors for two decades. Based in the UK, with its data science and engineering hub in Quebec Canada, Rhetorik’s sales and marketing intelligence platform offers the highest standards by combining big data, automated information handling, human curation and meticulous quality control. Rhetorik serves customers globally with UK, Europe and Asia-Pacific coverage.

Meet The Author

Kevin Savage

Former VP of Sales & Marketing at Yankee Group with research expertise for the technology sector Previously: Successfully growing new data and analytics markets for CEB/Gartner as well as Communispace, Jupiter Research, Forrester Research.

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