What's the Difference? Sales Engagement Tools (Cadence Tools) Vs Intelligent Growth Platforms

I like to have 'healthy debates' on social channels. Call me weird but I find it fun. My latest debate had this gentleman bet me he could set more meetings than me with his tool vs. the InsideSales.com platform. It's a fun discussion, but also an important one as his challenge is at the heart of the difference between cadence tools (sales engagement tools) and intelligent growth tools.

Cadence tools set meetings. Intelligent growth tools increase revenue.

From our POV, the sales engagement market is flattening out, especially with Salesforce.com now offering a cadence tool. This means the competitive advantage of using a cadence tool will continue to diminish over time. So for those who aren't "versed in available sales and mar-tech tools," I think it is important to consider an additional POV where working SMARTER can provide incredible leverage on the sales outcomes beyond just more email, opens, dials and appointments.

Cadence Tools Get More Appointments

Standard cadence tools generally give you productivity as a lever to drive revenue. A typical cadence tool is designed to facilitate a more structured way to execute and analyze prospecting which does two things: 

(1) Helps you facilitate more productivity / output from your team.

(2) Helps you understand what cadence/content strategies work and don't work in the pursuit of getting a hold of people and ultimately setting appointments.

The problem is, if you ask a CRO if they'd rather have more dials/ appointments or more revenue... You know what they'll say 10 out of 10 times.

Ok, so ... do more dials/emails + appointments translate to more revenue? In theory yes ... if you assume stable conversion rates in your funnel (although in reality it isn't perfectly lossless ... discussion for another time). Ok cool. Cadence can drive revenue down funnel by increasing productivity and appointments. Certainly that is valuable.

Intelligent Growth Tools Uplift Revenue

Now let's look at intelligent growth tools. These can help set appointments, but they can also do so much more, like: identify the best accounts to target, suggest people to engage at those accounts, stack rank your engagement efforts by likelihood to engage, optimize your targets by potential deal size, and optimize your next best action by $$ potential dollars returned for that action.

So now let's compare. Which one do you think will have the greater impact on revenue? A basic cadence tool that drives more productivity and helps you optimize to appointments? Or an intelligent tool that increases productivity, increased contact rates, increases appointments, increases conversation rates, and increases deal size.

When you compound all of that down funnel the difference in real revenue results are HUGE.