“As long as you understand those needs and expectations for your busy execs and you weave it into the SMS conversations, not simply sending copy and paste templates, SMS can be a great strategy for you to consider.” – Sean Whitley in today’s Tip 583
How about you? Do you use SMS to accelerate your sales process?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Sean Whitley. Sean is the VP of Sales, Americas at Mitto (Me-Tow), a leading provider of global omnichannel communications solutions. He also co-founded OneRep.io (now Sales Clover) in 2018, which helps organizations engage decision-makers into meaningful sales conversations. Here he is:
Sean Whitley: SMS is on the rise. Having an Omnichannel communication strategy has become table stakes for businesses and COVID-19 has us all reconsidering our approach for customer outreach. Nearly 50 million people are expected to opt into business SMS messaging in 2020 as more brands move towards omnichannel technologies and sales is no exception.
SMS is a great hack for creating many more opportunities to get in front of the right executives at the right point in their buyer journey. Your target buyers, generally a busy executive juggling a ton of priorities. So when you get those leads into the buying cycle, and you’re trying to nurture those relationships, email’s not always the most viable communication option. Executives receive hundreds of emails a day, and the open rates only about 20%.
It’s easy to see why SMS may be more effective to get in front of them because SMS rates are typically around 98%. Now to be clear, an SMS strategy for engaging this audience should be brought in methodically. You should almost never be used to reach out to a net new context because this risk, the executive feeling violated on their personal device and could end a potential relationship altogether. But when you’re deeper into the sales process, once relationships have really been established in other ways, and SMS can feel more personal and less of an effort for them to reply to then maybe an email or jumping on a zoom call. SMS can be short. It can be to the point responded to at their convenience with immediate back and forth between the two of you creating a dialogue and giving you a chance for follow up questions while you have them engaged versus these one-off emails.
Building the relationship through SMS can even open up additional opportunities within the larger organization. For example, I previously relied on your typical combination of followup emails and the occasional call just for the sales cycle to take about two months to close. But once I started texting with the decision-maker, I was able to get the answers I needed almost immediately quickly advancing my opportunity and rather than waiting days for him to reply to my emails. Also, once I was able to show real value with him, I was able to ask for an introduction to his colleague in a different product team, would you believe it? He actually sent me his cell phone number and said that he would be expecting my text.
Customers want a tailored experience as they progress from first hearing about your company’s existence, all the way through to deciding to buy from you. And in fact, most customers, they say about 73% now expect companies to their needs and expectations. So as long as you understand those needs and expectations for your busy execs and you weave it into the SMS conversations, not simply sending copy and paste templates, SMS can be a great strategy for you to consider. See for yourself, texts that decision-maker, question that you need an answer to right now. Let me know how it goes.
Scott Ingram: For more about Sean and to connect with him on LinkedIn, just click over to DailySales.Tips/583 and we’ll have those links for you there. Once you’ve connected with Sean, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!