Time is money. A long and complex sales cycle with multiple touchpoints that includes getting to know a lead, providing useful product information, scheduling phone calls, running demos, and answering questions can easily get stalled.

And forget eliminating a step or two, right? Selling your product or service may require all of these stages, activities, people, and more. In short, it takes a motivated team and a robust toolbox to keep things moving一and keep that ROI in positive territory.

Here’s something that will help一a lot. In fact, we think of it as the key to speeding up your sales cycle. Using SMS for sales outreach can accelerate your process in several key ways:

• SMS is versatile enough to use throughout your sales cycle and is delivered rapidly.
• SMS’ opt-in requirement ensures that recipients want to hear from your brand, which can result in better quality leads.
• SMS helps streamline workflows.
• SMS integrates with your CRM which makes segmentation and personalization easy and quick to implement.

Check it out.

SMS Can Be Used Throughout Your Sales Cycle and Is Delivered in Seconds

No more hopping from one channel to another, shuttling content back and forth or waiting for people to open their email. Save time by using SMS for communications throughout your sales cycle: from introductions and product descriptions, to call invites, offers, responses to questions, order confirmations, feedback, and so on. The list is endless.

SMS has an easy setup for individuals or across a sales team too. With a comprehensive business text messaging software platform like Salesmsg you can even text-enable your existing landline一no need to get a new phone number or carrier. Or, if you’d prefer that texts originate from a local number that’s also possible.

And by the way, the average SMS is delivered to your recipients’ mailbox within seconds. Yes, you read that right. With a jump on engagement opportunities like this, who knows how many hours you’ll save?

Requiring Recipients to Opt In to SMS Messaging Can Improve Lead Quality 

Deploying SMS for business requires that your recipients opt in before they receive any promotional messages from you. And while the opt-in generally occurs earlier in the funnel during the marketing phase, recipients that choose to hear about your brand via text mean good news for the whole funnel一including sales. 

For one thing, texting creates a sense of urgency that email, social, and other platforms can’t really match, no matter the buyer’s journey stage. Sure, texting is messaging, but people often respond more quickly to texts than to other types of messages, as if they are answering phone calls rather than writing. This offers a huge opportunity for quicker engagement. And frankly, people like texting. Take a look, the stats bear this out: 

• 68% of people say checking, sending, and answering text messages is the activity that they’re most engaged with on their phones throughout the day.
• 60% of people respond to texts within the first five minutes of receiving them.
• 74% of customers prefer to interact with a human via text rather than a chatbot.
• 45% of potential customers would choose a product or brand after receiving an SMS.

And here’s something else: Leads can also opt out of receiving texts at any time. So if they decide to bail after seeing your pricing schedule, all the better. You’ve just saved yourself a gazillion hours talking about a product that that lead probably isn’t going to buy. Who needs that headache?

SMS Helps Streamline Workflows 

We all know that the sales cycle can be prolonged by delayed customer responses, phone tag, and no-shows. Often customers don’t have an easy way to respond in the first place. How many times have you received a text or email that includes a “DoNotReply” notification? Not only does it protract customer response, but it often means missed opportunity. Would you believe that only 13% of companies allow consumers to respond to their SMS messages? 

The good news is that much of this lag can be mitigated with two-way texting capabilities. For example, Salesmsg enables you to send and receive SMS conversations from a single dashboard一online or on the go, and at any time. And real-time conversations mean more customer engagement, sooner. 

Salesmsg also includes a series of easy-to-use features that help reduce other workflow delays, such as call forwarding, scheduling, and shared team inboxes. Not only will you never miss a call but you can get that meeting booked right from the text chat. Bye-bye unproductive downtime!

SMS Integrates with Your CRM Making Segmentation and Personalization Easy and Quick to Implement.

By seamlessly integrating with your existing CRM system, your SMS functionality can compress the sales cycle in magical ways. For example, with Salesmsg you can easily use tags to segment your existing contact database to create specific texting groups. Simply upload your contacts to Salesmsg using a CSV file, tag, and text. And with the broadcasting functionality, you can send a single SMS, like a special offer, to multiple contacts simultaneously.

Personalization is also a breeze using merge fields with your CRM to pull the information you need一including phone numbers. And tracking texts is a no-brainer. Forget hunting for that one text on customer color preference. With Salesmsg’s CRM integration, texts become part of the contact record. Sorted! 

Oh, and you’ll be happy to know that Salesmsg integrates with more than 1,000 third-party apps, such as HubSpot, Marketo, and Salesforce, just to name a few.

How to Get Started 

Contact Salesmsg to learn more about how SMS can help speed up your sales cycle and boost conversion opportunities in no time. 

Text us at (888) 409-2298 or start your free trial today. 

Looking for some more help visualizing your SMS campaign before getting started? Check out these sample text messages for customers for some ideas.