Sales teams are accustomed to leveraging emails and phone calls to communicate with their prospects. The challenge is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to engage and nurture leads because people are too busy for phone calls and emails often go unread. That’s why it’s so important to blend SMS into your sales processes to maximize your conversions.
Analysis shows that incorporating SMS into sales processes speeds up the sales cycle by 25% and converts 40% more buyers. Messaging also offers more powerful ways to attract and engage prospects in a personal way, before you rep ever connects.
Blend SMS Into Your Sales Processes
1. Get the Conversation Started Immediately
In our 24/7 world, it’s important to be able to respond immediately when a prospect reaches out. With text messaging, you can automate the first response so you never miss an opportunity to engage. Sending an automated welcome message with the sales rep’s information and when they can expect a personal response is a great way to respond right away without seeming impersonal and bot-like.
2. Establish Yourself as a Trusted Advisor
Because 76% of consumers expect a salesperson to focus on their individual needs as opposed to simply promoting a product, it’s critical to understand each prospect’s specific needs and to address them with personal, relevant messaging. Look at your prospects message history and see how they’ve previously interacted with your company, what messages they’ve sent to and received from marketing, and what types of content they’ve viewed in the past. By leveraging this context you can engage in more meaningful conversations with your prospects.
3. Engage Prospects in One-on-One Conversations
Text messages are clearer and convey more of a sense of urgency than email. 90% of texts are read within three minutes. This means that you can can deliver information to your prospects faster and speed up purchase decisions. You can also be more productive by conversing with multiple prospects at once.
4. Streamline Sales Processes
Phone tag and missed emails tend to make scheduling meetings and getting documents signed an inefficient hassle. With the immediacy of text messages, you can speed up these processes as well. Simply send a link to your calendar app via text and allow your prospects to easily choose a time that works for both of you. Text reminders allow for easy rescheduling and prevent no-shows. When it comes time to sign contracts or other documents, texting is a great way to send confirmation of receiving the docs and reminders to sign and send contractually required documents.
Incorporating text messaging into your sales communications will create a better experience throughout the buying process, for both you and your prospects and clients. Use texting in sales to get the conversation going faster, engage more meaningfully with leads, and convert more sales, faster.
If you haven’t yet adopted business text messaging software, and are interested in learning more about what you can do with SMS, feel free to schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your sales team.
