For every dollar your management invests in a CRM system, they expect you to get more than a 5X return. Your sales team can contribute to this ROI by embracing the CRM as a valuable part of their daily sales activities. Integrating business messaging with your CRM is one way to help salespeople use it as a powerful sales tool to start sales conversations.

“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
DEMO, Name, CompanyEmailID to
36343 (USA),
61427142795 (AUS),
00447860017097 (UK & Other Countries)
or contact us at sales@sms-magic.com