How SMS sales automation can scale your business

Advanced SMS guides 5 min read Sep 2022 |   Author: Sinch MessageMedia

Do you work in sales? Then you’ll know that building your pipeline, chasing leads and closing deals is where it’s at. What you might not know is how powerful text messaging can be in this process. 

Savvy salespeople love SMS for its quick delivery and high open rates. Even better, with SMS sales automation, you can build a journey that scales with you. Let’s take a look.

[SMS] is the biggest return on investment that any sales agent can get. You can’t get that kind of ROI on the share market. You can’t get that anywhere.

Luke Newton, Director and Co-founder, LockedOn

First, what exactly is SMS sales automation?

From prospecting to lead management and closing deals, your sales team can use SMS sales automation to help move customers through the sales pipeline. It works by programming text messages to be sent once specific sales steps, conditions or qualifications have been met on the sales journey.

SMS shines in a wide range of sales activities, including:

• Sales prospecting (cold and warm)
• Follow-ups and reminders
• Relationship building
• Sales touchpoints
• Scheduling appointments, demos and consultations

RELATED: Learn how real estate CRM LockedOn has been helping their clients achieve 500x ROI by adding SMS messages to the sales process.

Your sales team reaps some big benefits

To the buyer or prospect, SMS looks and feels like a personalised, one-on-one conversation. To you, however, it’s just one of potentially thousands of personalised messages you can send with the click of a single button. 

By adding automated text messaging to your sales process, you can:

• Drive maximum ROI. Instead of the time-consuming task of manually sending out individual messages, you can send potentially thousands of personalised messages at once to help maximise ROI. 
• Effortlessly scale sales processes. You can add as many prospects as you like to your nurture journey. SMS automation programs grow with you.
• Get your sales messages across fast. Want to capture leads faster than your competitors, but in a less intrusive way? Instead of chasing them over the phone, send them a quick text message inviting them to get in touch when it suits. 
• Build personalised relationships. Text messaging strikes that magic formula of feeling both personal and informal. It’s perfect for building relationships and gaining the trust of prospective clients.

SMS automation shines at every stage of sales

You can use text messaging in all stages of the sales process. Map out your entire sales journey and consider which moments are ripe for a text message or two.

Here’s an example of an inbound B2B sales pipeline that could benefit from SMS automation:

In the awareness stage

Using the example above, a customer downloads an ebook from your website. Instead of following up with email marketing (which, let’s face it, has lower open rates than text messaging), use SMS sales automation instead. Give the customer a few days or a week to read the ebook, then send some helpful texts with additional links to content they might find interesting.

In the consideration stage

In this stage, your customer has requested a product demo and booked an appointment with one of your sales reps. Send an automated SMS reminder one day before the meeting – it’s a helpful gesture and also reduces the likelihood of a no-show.

In the decision stage

The customer is so close to buying. They’ve got the contract, but they’re stalling on signing. Send a quick text reminder, asking if there’s anything you can help with. Or, to get the customer across the line, offer a discount on the original offer if they sign and send the contract back within the next 24 hours.

Integrating with other platforms makes all the difference

Already use other sales automation tools and systems? Integrate text messaging into your preferred platform for maximum scalability and minimum effort.

For example, MessageMedia integrates with some of the most popular sales automation tools in use today. It means you can easily add text messaging to your existing workflows and sales processes. You can even add SMS to your internal triggers to let sales leads know when a customer needs a follow-up. 

Here are three powerful integrations between MessageMedia integrates and sales tools.

HubSpot

Using SMS for HubSpot, you can easily add SMS to different sales journeys in HubSpot’s workflows builder. For example, by adding text messaging to their campaigns to re-engage customers, ecommerce retailer Vinomofo boosted conversions by 21% and won back 50% of churning customers.

Zoho CRM

By integrating SMS for Zoho CRM, your sales team can build effective sales funnels and better engage with customers through the power of SMS automation. Cut out manual tasks that take time away from building relationships with leads.

Salesforce

With Mercury SMS for Salesforce, it’s easy to send text personalised messages to leads and contact records in Salesforce. You can create a library of SMS templates to send messages automatically or on an ad-hoc basis. Like HubSpot, you can also build workflow journeys that include text messaging, too.

Ready to transform your sales?

Give your sales team the winning edge by adding personalised, meaningful SMS messages to your sales strategy. Get started with 25 free SMS today.