If you’ve decided that you want to have your sales team start texting, there are a number of different ways you could get started. As a team of SMS fanatics, we’ve seen the most success when inbound sales teams collect phone numbers during the lead stage. Following up over text message can make it easier and faster to set up an appointment or demo as you help teach your leads more about your product.
Here are a few pointers to start incorporating SMS into your sales process.
Timing is Everything – Use Process Builder
When a customer is first signing up for your product or using it for the first time, that can be a great opportunity to reach out and provide personalized assistance to help them have a smooth onboarding process.
This is a helpful process to automate for your team in order to minimize the delay between when the customer signs up and when you start communicating. You can achieve this easily using Process Builder to kick off the conversation.
Sending a message immediately on sign-up is a great way to introduce the customer to your phone number, so that future text messages already have the appropriate context that you share during sign up. However, if the automation occurs outside of normal office hours, you might want to follow-up with a more personalized message later on at a time when your team is ready to engage if the customer chooses to respond.
Leverage Personalization
When sending messages, a good frame of reference is to think about what kind of texts you like to receive yourself. A
generic “Happy Birthday! ” rarely resonates as well as “Hi Sam 🎈hope your birthday is filled with your favorite things: puppies and ginger kombucha.”
This personalization is easy to accomplish when sending individual messages, but even more important to do when sending messages to multiple members of your customer base at once. If your customers are going to take the time to read your message, you should take the time to make it worth reading.
Your Salesforce database likely includes lots of relevant information that you’ll want to incorporate into your messages. That can be achieved in a few ways. The first is by using data about your customers to send a targeted message to the specific subset. For example, if you have a set of customers who are located in a given city where your sales representative will be visiting, you could send a specific message to that subset to let them set up a meeting.
Using a messaging solution that integrates SMS with the Salesforce platform, you can identify those customers using a List View within Salesforce, then easily send a text message to the selected contacts, allowing you to take advantage of the data you have already in Salesforce.
The second way to personalize your message is to include custom variables inside your messages. A good texting solution should make it easy to send dynamic content. This allows you to include information like “First Name” within your message automatically, and gives a more personal touch to business communications.
Make Follow Up More Effective
We’ve all done it – we receive a text with a question, we read it, we think of a response, maybe we even start typing a message back, and then – life happens. We forget to send.
Texting, as with other channels, benefits tremendously from making it easier to follow up. Campaigns make it easy to schedule a follow-up message that will only be sent if the customer forgets to respond to your initial question.
As with all messages, it’s especially important to make sure that automated messages doesn’t accidentally send a message during times when your customers don’t want to be contacted. A good SMS platform offers a setting to ensure that all follow-up messages are sent during your business’s selected office hours. That way someone from your team will be available to manage any responses.
Whatever texting solution you use, make sure that it is easy to send a campaign from within Salesforce. A great place to incorporate campaigns is part of your onboarding flow by using Process Builder. Triggering a campaign from Process Builder directly frees up your team to spend more time crafting personalized responses for when your customers choose to engage.
Collect Information From Leads and Sync It
Text message surveys can be an interactive way to learn more about your potential customers. For example, if your sales team attends a large conference, you might encourage attendees to engage with your company by texting in a keyword.
Just collecting the phone number alone, however, lacks the context for your team to follow up with the potential customer. Using a survey, you can solicit basic information like name and email, or custom information like a promotional code or industry segment.
Summary
This post has given you a few pointers to start incorporating SMS into your sales process, including personalization, managing follow ups with campaigns, and collecting information from Leads using surveys.
Have more questions about how your team can start texting? Other ideas for using it for sales? Share your texting work flows ideas with us, and please reach out to the Avochato team if you want to geek out over fun ways to start using SMS.