Becoming a Category Leader with Salesforce AppExchange Partners From the very onset, our aim wasn’t just to be another entity on the Salesforce AppExchange. It was to redefine how businesses connect with their audience. Texting, in its essence, is immediate, personal, and direct. To harness its potential, we had to delve deep, understanding the nuances of businesses and the expectations of customers, especially when aiming to be among the top 5 smartest apps on Salesforce.

Unparalleled Features – Our Cornerstones of Success on Salesforce AppExchange

Compliance – In today’s digital age, data privacy and regulations cannot be an afterthought. Recognizing this, we’ve been proactive. By integrating TCPA, GDPR, CCPA, and CASL compliance mechanisms, we’ve provided businesses with a safe platform free from the worries of unintended regulatory breaches.

Omnichannel Connectivity – The digital consumer is omnipresent, spanning various platforms. Our solution ensures that businesses can meet consumers wherever they are. Be it SMS, MMS, Facebook, Chat, WhatsApp, or Line, the promise of conversational messaging remains unbroken.

Analytics – Data drives decisions. Our robust analytical tools provide detailed insights, helping businesses fine-tune their strategies and foster more meaningful customer interactions.

Global Text Messaging – Conversations know no boundaries, and neither do we. With our global text messaging capabilities, we’ve erased geographical barriers, bringing businesses and customers closer.

SMS Delivery – It’s not just about sending a message; it’s about ensuring it’s received. Our commitment to robust delivery mechanisms remains unwavering.

SMS Templates – We understand that in business, time is of the essence. Our advanced SMS Templates not only speed up the communication process but also ensure that every message sent is impactful and aligned with the brand’s voice.

Conversational Messaging – Building and maintaining customer relationships is at the core of any successful business. With our Conversational Messaging feature, businesses can now have meaningful two-way conversations, deepening trust and enhancing customer loyalty.

Each feature aligns with our goal of being the smartest app on Salesforce, ensuring that when businesses talk, customers listen. Whether it’s adhering to compliance standards, enabling omnichannel connectivity, providing robust analytics, offering global text messaging solutions, ensuring SMS delivery, or crafting impactful SMS templates – each element of our service is meticulously crafted.

Salesforce AppExchange Partners: A Journey of Trust and Innovation 

Integration with platforms like Salesforce is not just a feature – it’s a commitment to excellence. Our partnerships with Salesforce AppExchange partners and others like Zoho elevate the CRM experience, making it more insightful and enriching. Our Conversational Messaging Hub is a culmination of years of learning and innovation, and our reviews on platforms like Salesforce and Zoho bear testimony to this commitment.

Voices of Trust – The true Measure of our Success on Salesforce Appexchange

Feedback from our esteemed clients who have discovered us through the Salesforce AppExchange underscores the value we bring to the table. Words from pioneers in various industries only further our belief in the transformative power of our solutions.

2nd Smartest App on Salesforce AppExchange: Crafting Trusted Conversations

At the heart of our journey is an unwavering commitment to facilitate meaningful interactions. It’s not just about being a smart app on Salesforce, but about enabling businesses to have conversations that matter.

And the rise of our company is not just our rise, as this recognition makes us aim higher, and thus we welcome you at the Dreamforce 2023, as we will be unveiling the future of Messaging Solution. 

Join Us at Dreamforce by Salesforce

As we pen this journey, we’re thrilled to announce our latest venture in the world of AI x Messaging. If you’ve been keeping up with our recent emails, you’ll know that something groundbreaking is on the horizon. We’re unveiling our latest innovation at Dreamforce, organized by Salesforce. As partners and patrons of SMS-Magic, this is your chance to get a sneak peek into the future of conversational messaging.

To ensure you don’t miss out on this revolutionary unveiling, Register with us now and be part of the conversation that reshapes business communication.

As we look to the future, we’re excited about the countless conversations and transformative stories waiting to unfold. SMS-Magic is more than just a tool. It is a revolution in conversational messaging for businesses, crafted with passion, driven by innovation, and trusted by the best.

Billions of people use messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and SMS – allowing them to make payments, talk to their bankers, and submit applications from their mobile phones. Conversational messaging has become the preferred business communication channel around the world.

Now you have a chance to test drive the newly updated version of SMS-Magic!

If you already have created a sandbox environment, we would like to push an Early Release Preview to your sandbox in the next two weeks. We’d like you to try it and let us know what you think. Here’s all you need to do:

• If you have a sandbox in Version 1.68 now, do nothing. We’ll push the new release to your sandbox automatically.
• If you’d rather not play, send an email  to marketing@sms-magic.com to tell us to exclude your sandbox from the push.
• Be sure to save your work before the auto-push.

Once you’ve tried the new version of SMS-Magic, we need your feedback. We’ll give you some time to try the new release out, then we’ll send you an email with a feedback link. Your input will help us create a better product for you.

What’s New in the Early Release Preview?

SMS-Magic is known for sophisticated, easy-to-use APIs designed for CRMs like Salesforce and Zoho. The upgrades in the new release make those integrations even easier and give you more control over how you engage your customers.

• Enhanced User Experience: Personalize your user experience with additional role-based permission sets and organize the records detail page with conversation component resizing.
• Multimedia Conversations: Send bigger rich-media files over instant messengers and set Salesforce as the storage location for them.
• Tame the Templates: Enjoy quick access to org-wide templates from SMS-Magic Global Navigation.
• Find Your Conversation Flows: Search by “app name” or “PA-Key” and view process builders, workflows and flows linked with any Converse App.
• Launch Conversations at Scale: Manage multiple high-volume campaigns directly from SMS-Magic Global Navigation.
• Engage with Customers at the Right Time, Every Time: SMS-Magic’s Early Release Preview keeps track of your conversations from start to finish in a single thread – before or after you create the record. Modifying objects and templates? No problem. Your conversations are always on. You can immediately spot conversations assigned to you and keep them uninterrupted and synched with Salesforce at all times.
• Enjoy Stronger Compliance & Support: We’ve enhanced the back-end so you can track all SMS-Magic user activity in one place and access all activity logs when you need them. Configure opt-in and opt-out keywords, templated messages, and message tags. Maintain audit trails and enable reporting for multichannel compliance, opt-out rates, message delivery, and more. Have a question? Our support team is ready to help resolve any issues you encounter. You can turn on full- or limited-access to the support team for seven days at a time.
• Confidently Continue Conversations On the Go: You can spot new messages anytime, anywhere. The upgraded SMS-Magic Mobile App prominently displays how many unread messages you have. The app also lets you continue conversations from your mobile phone and tracks them in your CRM. You can share exact map locations in conversations to improve any in-person meeting experience.

The new release of SMS-Magic’s Early Release Preview is your perfect partner to power high-stakes conversational messaging for moments that matter. Help us make it the best it can be with your feedback. If you have questions, please contact customer support.

If you haven’t tried SMS-Magic yet, our customer support team would love to show you how SMS-Magic can make reaching your customers easier and more effective. Ask for a demo or a free trial!

To help you master this part of text messaging campaigns, we have compiled 6 things that we’re sure your boss wants you to know. Here they are:

1. You must have express written consent before your company can legally send text messages to anyone. That means more than just asking for their phone number. It doesn’t matter who it is – an existing customer, a former client, a trade-show lead, or someone on a purchased marketing list. Before that first message goes out, your customer must say it’s okay. In other words, they must opt in.

2. Several governing bodies regulate commercial text messaging. They include individual countries, including the U.S., consortiums of countries like the European Union, state or local governments, and the carriers who deliver messages around the world. Your text messaging partner, like SMS-Magic, should be able to help you navigate the rules for your campaigns.

3. Include the following in your first text:
   • Your company name. Don’t make your customers guess who’s sending the message.
   • The promotion premium. If you’re offering a coupon, discount or e-book in exchange for permission to text, do it at the beginning of the text.
   • Message frequency. Let your customers know how often you plan to send.
   • Message and data rates. Remind customers that they might be charged to receive SMS messages.
   • How to opt out. “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” works well.
   • How to reach customer service or ask questions.

You’ve probably received opt-in requests from companies you do business with. Take a look at how well they’ve provided information to their customers. Some of the offers we’ve seen have been really creative. One was on a parking meter. Learn from the best.

4. Track opt-in and opt-out requests so that you send only to the customers who have specifically asked you to. European laws also require you to “forget” a customer at their request. That means purging all their information from your system and being able to show your work. If regulators ever ask, you must be able to prove you have permission to text.

5. In the United States, commercial text messages are governed by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). It prohibits the following types of text messages:
   • Unsolicited Text Messages – businesses are not allowed to text consumers without their permission.
   • Requesting Payment – businesses may not request payment or additional identifying information before revealing the actual message.
   • Scrambled Messages – businesses must send readable texts. They may not scramble the message or use unintelligible audio.
   • Do Not Call Registry – businesses must respect the Do Not Call registry established by the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
   • Robocalling & Automated Dialing – businesses may not use robocalling to generate phone numbers or send text messages.

6. The last thing we think your boss wants you to know has nothing to do with rules and regulations. Instead, it’s about being authentic in all your customer interactions. Behaving like a trusted friend helps you build customer relationships that can last for years. Text messaging is the perfect channel for building trust.

Staying in touch with your existing customers and getting to know your potential customers has become a requirement in today’s business world. SMS-Magic, through conversational and automated text messaging, can help you reach out to customers in new ways.

SMS-Magic offers a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how you can engage your customers in new ways!

Most of our customers say it’s virtually impossible to get a customer to return an email. And we hear comments like, “No one answers the phone anymore” or “They won’t answer if they see a strange number on caller ID.”

So the question is: If you can’t reach customers and prospects, how can you provide a service or sell a product?

As a software-as-a-service company developing SMS and MMS texting solutions, we think we know how to reach your customers, but we thought it might be better to let our customers show you how text messaging works in their businesses.

Why Use Text Messaging?

Before we get to the great ideas, let’s take a minute to talk about the reality of communication in 2022. Emails were great when everyone read them sitting in front of their desktop computers and the alternative was sending mail through the postal service. Voice mails, too, served their purpose.

These days, however, emails are easy to ignore. In fact, we only open 22% of the emails we receive. And the more mobile we’ve become; the more unwieldy emails have become. It’s just not convenient to reply on the run.

And most of us don’t even listen to the voice messages we receive. It’s likely we will wait for a text.

Texts are quick, easy and always with you. We send more than 5 billion texts every day, and we read 98% of the ones we receive. Clearly, text messaging is the channel we prefer.

Here are some great ideas from two of our customers. You can apply these ideas directly to your own business or modify them to fit your unique situation.

When You Have Seconds to Respond

In the high-stakes legal world, the key to winning new business is responding quickly. When legal prospects have a need, they normally shop for an attorney online. One of our customers estimates that he has seconds to reach out to a prospect before they move on to a competitor.

To engage a prospect quickly, our customer has developed a series of automated text messages that are triggered by where the prospect is on the firm’s website. Different practice areas are housed in different sections of the website, so it’s possible to tell where the prospect’s interest lies and tailor messages specifically for that need.

No matter what the prospect needs, the initial messages introduce the law firm and ask how the firm can help. As the prospects reply, the conversations continue with pre-programmed messages. And when it’s appropriate, a member of the intake team takes over with live messaging and continues the conversation.

The system is designed to be active 24/7. The automated messages launch even if the prospect is searching at 3 a.m. National practices can benefit from a time-neutral system because prospects may shop for an attorney at any hour of the day.

Once a prospect becomes a client, SMS-Magic makes staying in touch easier than ever. Our customer uses Litify to manage his firm, and SMS-Magic is designed to work seamlessly with Litify. Messages are tracked by SMS-Magic in the Litify environment. That means everyone in the firm opens one application, rather than two. They can see all the client’s information, including all text communications, in one place.

If an attorney is away from the office, anyone at the office can respond to queries and a different attorney can continue working on the case. The case doesn’t stop because the lead attorney is unavailable. It saves the firm time and better serves the client.

When You Must Respond on the Fly

Another of our customers manages large rental properties. They wanted to handle maintenance issues as quickly as possible, and they asked their residents to email maintenance requests to a dedicated address. Staff members responded as soon as they were in front of their computers.

It was a great plan, but it didn’t work. Residents complained that their requests weren’t handled quickly enough and started texting requests instead using email. Residents liked the immediacy and the convenience of texting.

The workflow, however, wasn’t designed to accept requests via text. Trying to make sure texts were transferred promptly and accurately created extra work for the management staff. The staff was missing requests and couldn’t always be sure issues had been addressed. And staff members could only respond to requests when they were in the office.

Our customer’s CRM was Salesforce. SMS-Magic is designed to work with Salesforce, as well as other CRMs, and the integration made using a text-based system for maintenance requests easy. Once our customer installed SMS-Magic to handle all their text messages, maintenance requests began to flow smoothly.

SMS-Magic tracked all customer contacts, no matter what the source of the contact. Our customer was able to track all maintenance requests – by email, phone or text. And anyone on the staff could access the record. That meant anyone could give a resident an update on their request.

It also made sense to equip each staff member with the mobile version of SMS-Magic. With the app, they could answer texts from either their own phones or from company phones. The system would track the contacts in Salesforce no matter what phone was used. No longer were staff members tied to their desks. They could visit company properties and respond to maintenance requests at the same time. Our customer said it was a game changer for their business.

How Can You Test Drive SMS-Magic?

Would your business benefit from an integration between your CRM and your texting platform? We’d love to help you start texting or help scale your texting to a higher level.

We have experts ready to help you take SMS-Magic for a spin for FREE! Schedule a demo or start a free trial today! We think you’ll love what you see!

It doesn’t have to be that way!

We’d be willing to bet that your customer relationship management system (CRM) contains an incredible amount of information about your customers, even first names. By using a name in your emails and texting campaigns, you personalize the communications right from the start. But that’s just one way for your CRM to help connect you to your customers.

Try a Conversational Messaging Hub

If your customers contact you more than once, they may not always reach the same person on your team. For example, a law firm may have a team managing the case load – attorneys, paralegals, intake specialists or other administrative staff members. When clients reach out, their lawyers may not be immediately available, but the clients still need updates. The team member who responds needs information quickly to serve the client.

If your CRM and your texting system work together, it would give you a single record that shows your staff all the interactions with the client, no matter what channel the client uses – text, email, phone or mail. When a text comes in, your staff members would be able to continue the conversation because they have the history at their fingertips.

If you have a customer service team, they will find this capability very useful, as well. One of the most often cited customer complaints is being bounced from person to person trying to solve a problem. If the customer must repeat the problem over and over, frustration can build quickly.

A conversational messaging hub stores all contacts for an individual into a single record. If a customer service rep must transfer a call, the next rep has all the information in front of them. It saves time, aggravation, and maybe, a customer relationship.

Compliance Laws are Getting Tougher. Are You Ready?

The European Union has recently adopted new privacy regulations, and we expect other countries to follow suit. Can your system handle customer requests?

You can send texts only to customers who have given you express written consent. In other words, customers who have opted into your communications. They can also opt out by asking you stop sending texts to them. If regulators ask to see your records, you must be able to prove you are following your customers’ requests.

Opting in and out of texts, however, are not the only customer requests you might be asked to verify if regulators come calling. A customer can ask that you “forget” them entirely – that all mention of them in your system is erased.

If your CRM works well with your texting capabilities, you won’t ever have to worry about compliance with GDPR or other rules and regulations.

Security is Everyone’s Concern

Even the smallest databases can contain enormous amounts of personal information that thieves want. In the past several years, criminals have hacked into the data of some of the largest and most successful companies in the world, and it isn’t pretty.

Keeping your CRM and texting capabilities secure is a shared responsibility, but your texting partner should be able to assure you that they have strong security policies in place. Their policies should be designed to keep all aspects of the system – technological, physical and administrative – secure.

What’s Your Next Step?

Knowing the vital role your CRM plays in your quest for more customers and higher revenues, what should you do next? Of course do your homework, but we would like to suggest that SMS-Magic is the best solution in the marketplace.

Why? Here are just a few reasons:

1. SMS-Magic works with your favorite CRM.
   We work and play well with others. We are a preferred provider for Salesforce and Zoho, and we integrate easily with Litify. Contact us to see what we can do with your existing architecture.

2. SMS-Magic helps you automate texts while keeping it personal.
   SMS-Magic is perfect for sending automated messages to your customers and prospects. We provide templates for your use and have lots of information about creating effective messages and campaigns. You can switch from automated to live in an instant so your customers know they’re talking to a person – not a bot.

3. SMS-Magic’s Conversational Messaging Hub Gathers Contacts into One Record
   Working with your CRM, SMS-Magic consolidates all contacts from a customer into one record, including phone calls, emails and messages. Our conversational messaging hub is the first of its kind and is designed specifically to meet your needs. Never again will your customers be forced to restate the problem – making them and your service reps happier.

4. SMS-Magic helps you stay compliant.
   We can help you keep up with the details like customer permissions as they opt-in (and perhaps opt-out) of your messaging campaigns. Our back-end systems are structured so that we can display individual requests, and we can prove you’ve complied with customer requests. You won’t have to worry about regulators asking to see your records. We use on-going processes to collect and store information about distribution and can share it with regulators, if necessary.

5. SMS-Magic provides technical, physical and administrative safeguards.
   Our technical safeguards include use of access controls, integrity controls, audit controls, identity authentication, and transmission security to avoid unauthorized access. We take extra precautions to ensure the physical security of our servers and systems. Our administrative measures include administrative actions, as well as policies and procedures, to manage the selection, development, implementation, and maintenance of security measures to protect electronic information.

We have experts ready to help you take SMS-Magic for a spin for FREE!

Schedule a demo or start a free trial today!

We think you’ll love what you see!

SMS-Magic is a great messaging solution for businesses of all sizes, but our experience tells us that it’s especially effective if you’re working with a CRM like Salesforce and a developer or two. Making all the moving parts work together seamlessly is critical to your success, and SMS-Magic works to make it so.

Michael Copley, chief technology officer for Barsala, an SMS-Magic client, said his Salesforce developers have easily been able to access the functionality of SMS-Magic and share it with other developers on their team. Developers working on Barsala’s API can ping a simple endpoint to send a message through the SMS-Magic package. It shows up in Salesforce attached to the appropriate records and in all relevant user interfaces for their support team.

Your developers will find that our team has created a product to make life easier. Here’s how:

1. SMS-Magic integrates directly with Salesforce automation.

Salesforce Flow is one of the tools that helps developers build complex processes easily inside Salesforce. Just to give you an idea of how it works, it makes things easier by providing automated triggers, reusable building blocks and prebuilt solutions, among other functions. With these tools, a developer doesn’t have to create everything from scratch every time something is needed. Similarly, Lightning Platform helps to build enterprise mobile apps. The good news is that SMS-Magic fully integrates with Salesforce automations like these, enabling messaging from just about anywhere in the CRM.

2. SMS-Magic contains well-documented APIs.

Developers already know what that means. For the rest of us, an application programming interface (API) helps two computers or computer programs talk to each other. For example, an API can update, add, delete or move a record, helping an outside solution, like SMS-Magic, work with Salesforce. Some APIs work well but aren’t well documented. That means developers have to figure out how the API works and how to use it without any help from the team that created it. On the other hand, well-documented APIs make the job much easier by providing background information necessary to integrate the API. Documentation saves time and effort, which means it saves money. SMS-Magic is a well-documented API, ensuring your developers will have the information they need to do the job.

3. SMS-Magic is a managed package easily installed inside of Salesforce.

When SMS-Magic is embedded into Salesforce a developer can leverage any Salesforce object and extend the function of texting to work with the parts of Salesforce they create. That means any new function your developers might create inside Salesforce can work with SMS-Magic. Think of the possibilities that gives you! If your use case requires something new in Salesforce, SMS-Magic is available to you without extra effort.

4. SMS-Magic manages all your carrier interactions …

… so you don’t have to. We obtain all the short codes and long codes your team needs, and we deal with the provider or carrier if any issues arise. Long codes are the 10-digit phone numbers most of us use to text our friends. Businesses use them too, but it takes about a second per code to send those messages. Too long if you’re sending thousands. Short codes are five- or six-digit codes that customers use to reach you. For example, pizza customers might receive the message “Text CHEESE for a 10% coupon.” CHEESE is the short code. No matter how many codes your campaigns require, we take the hassle out of managing them.

SMS-Magic is an expert with Salesforce integrations. The company is a Salesforce Partner and the top-rated messaging application on the Salesforce AppExchange. We also work with other CRMs like Zoho, and we have a product designed to work without a CRM.

Does SMS-Magic sound like the answer you’ve been looking for? We hope so!

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you why your developers will love working with SMS-Magic!

That first company said they could provide customization within Salesforce,” he said in a recent Zoom chat, “but they really screwed it up.

The chosen company’s inability to work in the Salesforce architecture caused HeyTutor to delay their outreach at a critical time and slowed their growth. “We ended up circling back to SMS-Magic

Now, McClure said, everything that HeyTutor wanted to integrate has been integrated. “These guys (the SMS-Magic team) made it effortless and got everything set up right away. It’s been a pleasure to work with you.”

We hear similar stories all the time. Salesforce is a powerful tool, but you need experienced people who understand both the Salesforce architecture and the structure of their own messaging platform. Otherwise, you run the risk of crashing both systems – something no one wants!

No one wants to spend time, money and resources on a new platform just to learn that they don’t have what you need. So what should you keep in mind as you search for a messaging integration platfform to use with Salesforce?

1. Hire Experienced Salesforce Developers.

It doesn’t matter if you have Salesforce developers on staff or use contract developers; you must ensure you have experienced people at critical points like initial implementation or integration. We hear horror stories of inexperienced people changing security settings and unwittingly shutting down entire systems. Salesforce is very flexible, so your team must have a strong background in the basics.

2. Clarify What Customization Means to Potential Messaging Developers.

There’s a difference between “our messaging system can work with Salesforce” and “our messaging system is designed to integrate with Salesforce.” You want to choose a messaging platform that is ready to mesh with Salesforce. McClure said SMS-Magic had already built many of the customizations he needed, and quickly created new “stuff” to support the independent use case his company required. Don’t be taken in by promises. Ask for references from satisfied customers.

3. Always Test in a Testing Environment.

One of the first tasks your integration team should undertake is to create a testing environment. If something breaks there, no harm done because they haven’t made changes to the live system. Experienced developers will tell you that testing in a live environment is very risky, and it hinders trying new ideas. If you get the new idea wrong, it might take your system off line until you can fix it. Delays cost money.

4. Find a Team Already Using Salesforce Best Practices.

Salesforce is a great partner and can help your developers use best practices to get the most out of your system. Check your potential partner’s relationship with the Salesforce team. Are they a preferred client? Do they regularly discuss modifications with Salesforce? Do they have an easy working relationship with Salesforce? If not, you’ll want to move on to a provider like SMS-Magic that has a great relationship with Salesforce.

5. Ditch the Potential Messaging Vendor and Contact SMS-Magic.

You may want to interview other messaging companies, but we bet you’ll end up with SMS-Magic. We are a preferred integration with Salesforce, top-rated on the AppExchange, and enjoy incredibly high ratings with Salesforce customers. You can even give us a test drive without spending a penny. SMS-Magic offers a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.

Barsala, another of our customers, has two Salesforce developers on staff. Michael Copley, their chief technology officer, said his developers have been able to access the functionality of SMS-Magic and share it with other developers on their team. Developers working on Barsala’s API can ping a simple endpoint to send a message through the SMS-Magic package. It shows up in Salesforce attached to the appropriate records, and shows up in all relevant user interfaces for the support team.

We can provide the same service to you.

Let’s Go!

Does SMS-Magic sound like the answer you’ve been looking for? We hope so!

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how we can help you make the most of the conversational messaging!

SMS text messaging was once considered an alternative communication channel. Now it’s become a preferred channel for most consumers – 97% have said they want text messaging to be part of the sales conversation. But they won’t tolerate just any text message. Texting can help close sales faster, but if used inappropriately, it can hurt your chances of making the sale.

The Ideal Buyer Experience is Enabled by SMS Messages

Research from Ellie Mae finds that consumers are more than just receptive to text messaging with sellers. Texting is the 2^nd most preferred method of communication for buyers and its popularity is growing:

• 58% of consumers respond to text messages within 10 minutes, 17% in under 1 minute
• 76% of buyers believe text messaging speeds up the sales process
• 328% increase to sales conversions with text messaging as part of the sales process

The study also found that consumers are just as comfortable texting with businesses with which they have a relationship as they are with colleagues. While texting may not be the way to initiate a relationship, sellers can certainly take advantage to speed time to revenue by using texting to grow the relationship as the buyer becomes aware and engages with the brand.

3 Misconceptions Cause Sellers to Drop the Ball

Even though an overwhelming majority of buyers want to communicate via SMS messages, only 28% of sellers currently do so. Three reasons are holding sellers back from using text messaging, but they shouldn’t be.

1. 50% of sellers say there’s no convenient tool available for texting

Technology has come a long way. An intelligent text messaging platform does exist that not only enables sellers to text consumers from within their CRM, but to automate campaigns and outreach with preconfigured applications.

This includes alerts to a sales rep when a buyer responds to a message, so they can step in and have a 1:1 personalized conversation. With a complete conversational history tracked in the lead record, your sales rep will always know where the conversation stands and how to make the next message even more relevant.

2. 56% of sellers are concerned about compliance

Yes, SMS messages are regulated by the TCPA. However, gaining consent for email communications is also considered to be a best practice by consumers. Intrusive communications that violate customer preferences are never a good idea.

Opt-in can be handled easily with an automated App that uses a best practice double opt-in process to record consent with a time stamp in the lead’s record in your CRM, providing an audit trail for compliance. Should the buyer text STOP to opt out, our text messaging platform handles that automatically, as well, flagging the lead record and removing the buyer from any active messaging campaigns.

Since texting buyers prior to establishing initial contact reduces the likelihood of response—plus, it’s a violation of regulations—make collecting opt-ins for text messaging part of the early engagement process so you can interact with buyers in the channels they prefer.

3. 34% of sellers don’t want to use their personal cell phones to text buyers

We removed this as a reason in #1 above, but to be clear, if your sellers are using their personal cell phones to text with buyers and customers, your company has no record of those communications, limiting your visibility—and potential exposure for compliance violations. With the Converse Intelligent Text Messaging Platform, your company gains a 360° view of the buyer’s conversational history and has proof of compliant opt-in.

Smart Sellers Use Text Messaging Straight from Salesforce

Nearly all salespeople are working in the CRM constantly. It’s the system of record for many companies’ sales pipelines. An advanced text messaging platform does for text messaging what marketing automation did for email.

SMS-Magic Converse is natively integrated with Salesforce. This means that all messaging conversations are automatically logged to the object (lead, contact, opportunity) within your Salesforce Org. Your sellers will never lose track of the conversations they’re having with prospects, even if there’s a time lag while the prospect makes progress in their buying journey.

Converse is also easily configurable, whether your sales reps prefer working in the Desk, want to embed the desk within Salesforce objects, or are on the road using the mobile app. Your customers are clamoring for simplicity, information and help making buying decisions. We make it easy for your reps to make this happen on the channel customers prefer.

There’s a Huge Payoff for Sellers Who Use Text Messaging with Buyers

It has been found that sending three or more purposeful text messages—after contact with a buyer has been made—can increase conversion rates by as much as 328%. This growing trend in preference for text messaging certainly makes it possible that text messaging could become the most preferred method of communication with buyers in the years to come.

But even at #2 as a communication preference, text messaging is giving email and phone calls a strong challenge. Sellers who use text messaging to increase their responsiveness will meet buyers’ expectations for speed and a low friction, low effort buying process. In fact, 87% of sellers say they plan to increase the use of text messaging over the next five years.

Why wait? Get started now and use text messaging to differentiate your business, captivate and engage your buyers, and accelerate your sales process.

“No matter what CRM you’re using, driving a culture of CRM usage is the key to CRM success.”
– Steve Roch, founder of CRMCulture and creator of popular Salesforce app ActionGrid.

Demonstrate the value of CRM

The best reps quickly abandon processes that don’t contribute to closing deals. Spending time on data entry, CRM updates with call logs, and other tasks is usually seen as unimportant and a waste of time. Demonstrating how your Salesforce CRM will make them more successful will inspire them to adopt the tool as a part of their routine sales practice. Incorporating business messaging that drives high engagement and immediate responses from prospects will get your reps actively working in the CRM.

Make starting sales conversations easier for your sales team

Connecting with prospects is becoming more drawn out and difficult. Research shows that 80% of sales require 5 follow ups but 44% of salespeople give up after the first follow up. Regular follow up channels like calling and email have discouraging response rates of 4.8% and 20% respectively.

Business messaging solves this problem by adding demonstrable value to the CRM. With an open rate of 98%, texting is becoming the most preferred medium of communication with customers Anyone who uses a mobile phone knows how easy it is to pick up the phone and read an incoming text. Today’s customers are becoming more attuned to receiving texts from businesses—and many of them prefer it over phone or email.

When your sales reps see how simple it is to start and continue conversations with their prospects with messaging, they will understand the value and adopt the practice.

Integrating texting from CRM provides multiple benefits

When you add texting as a conversation option in your Salesforce org, you will see your customer’s response rate escalate.

Integrating text messaging with your CRM also allows both salespeople and managers to see all messaging conversations directly within Salesforce. Access to up-to-date and actionable insights to lead quality and pipeline velocity are readily available.

A case study for business messaging

A leading financial services company, Pluto, was able to maximize Salesforce CRM adoption across its sales team by simply integrating text messaging within its CRM and adding a mobile opt-in on their loan request form.

Here’s the value-add the sales team recognized after adding text messaging.

1. Prioritizing hot leads

The sales team at Pluto was allocated hundreds of new leads daily. The team was tasked to do a background study of each lead before calling. Since the team had to make so many calls, information about clients would get mixed up. Some leads had to be called multiple times, which would take hours. The salesperson also had to update every lead record with details about each call.

After integrating business messaging with the CRM, each salesperson started his day by sending a text message to all the leads assigned to him to schedule a call in response to loan requests.

Based on the responses, the salesperson had his priority list of hot leads ready within minutes. Since all the lead responses were directly stored in the CRM, the lead status could be automatically changed to hot. The salesperson now easily prioritizes which leads to research and is focused on closing the most responsive leads first.

2. Managing multiple leads

Managing the regular inflow of new leads daily and keeping the older leads engaged is a challenge that most sales teams face. With integrated business text messaging, the sales team at Pluto can now converse with multiple leads simultaneously. Each messaging conversation is located within a different tab, allowing them the agility to move between messaging conversations as needed. Based on each lead’s information request, the rep can also quickly share links from the ‘Resource Base’ saved within the CRM.

3. Tracking current and historical conversations and behaviors

One of the hardest things to do is to keep track of a prospect’s status, including who said what to each prospect, what information a prospect has seen, and how she’s responded to different topics. With integrated text messaging, the sales team has access to a complete conversational history for each prospect. If a sales rep happens to be on leave, and someone else is assigned his leads, it’s easy for the new rep to quickly scan the thread and place the lead in the appropriate stage of the sales cycle, respond to inquiries, and keep the prospect moving through the pipeline.

This history also can be used as a prompt for sales reps to quickly gauge the opportunity behind current prospects and share instant offers to accelerate time to sales.

4. Meeting reminders to avoid ‘no shows’

No shows at meetings are nightmarish for all sales reps. Apart from wasting time and energy, ‘no shows’ have an opportunity cost tied to them.

With integrated text messaging, the sales team at Pluto sends automated reminders before the calls asking the prospect to confirm or reschedule.

By knowing the status of all the confirmed meetings well in advance, the sales rep can optimize his time. The sales team at Pluto sees definite value in using business messaging within the CRM to create sales conversations that drive business growth.

Make your Sales team’s lives easier and boost your CRM ROI

Integrating business messaging with your CRM will have sales reps engaged with prospects fast and boost that ROI on your Salesforce CRM investment. Saving time by prioritizing hot leads, streamlining management of multiple leads, keeping an easily accessible record of conversations and behaviors, and reducing meeting ‘no shows’ are just some of the ways that business messaging for CRM will help your sales team close deals faster, which is what they love more than anything.

If you have questions or would like to see use cases, simply message
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