We'll give it another minute and then we'll just get started. Sounds good. Mhm. Cool. Let's go ahead and kick it off. For anyone watching the recording. Thank you so much for tuning in. Um, anyone joining? Thank you so much uh, for joining this, this month's sales, uh, message product show and tell. Uh, we've got some exciting updates, um, coming up. Specifically going to spend a bit of time uh, showcasing our newest integration, um, uh, and contextualizing. Exactly. Uh, why do we want to have uh, our SMS integrated with Slack? As well as talking about uh, some changes that we've made on the broadcasting side for our large format mass messaging. Um, and even giving uh, you a little bit more data as you are receiving inbound calls facilitated on your sales message numbers. Um, go ahead and continue if uh, we haven't had the chance to meet. Uh, my name is Ben Francis. I had a customer success and support here at Salesmessage. Um, I am your uh, resource for how can we, how to maximize the value from your SMS campaigns. Uh, on the call with me as well is uh, for our product team, uh, who has up our product marketing, uh, initiative here. Uh, so glad you're able to join us today. Without further ado, I was going to say, uh, glad to be here and uh, looking forward to the webinar. Yeah. So without further ado, let's go ahead and uh, talk about our newest uh, and really exciting integration, which is Slack. Uh, so many of our customers have been asking um, to utilize Slack, uh, and be able to close the loop on their internal chat platform, but uh, also get the notifications where they're spending the most time. If um, your team is currently using Slack, you know how powerful the tool is. It's a collaboration hub, topical based, ah, collaboration, asynch communication, quick little meetings, things like that. Um, here at Salesmessage, we use Slack very heavily. Um, it is a core part of our ecosystem here. Um, and we've now made it easier than ever to get those real time notifications for when you get an inbound text. Um, being able to get the information right where you're going to see it the fastest, but also being able to action and respond and have that two way conversation without ever leaving the Slack ecosystem. So uh, Tall will show you exactly how it works. But really, really excited about uh, this feature, uh, because it puts those messages right where you're most likely to see them. And being able to dramatically improve your speed to lead or speed to customer. Awesome. Uh, thanks so much Ben. So maybe what I'm going to do is I will start uh, with um, how to connect Slack and how to map your inboxes. So before we go into Slack, let's just jump back to Sales message and go to integrations. So as, ah, you can see here, uh, as part of your integrations. Uh, there is a new, uh, M addition to the list and that is Slack. Uh, so it's connected for me right now, but the first thing you would want to do is to connect that integration. So one thing to note, important thing is to connect Slack. You need to be a sales message user, uh, who is using the same email on Slack as well. And in addition, in Slack you need to have admin rights because to uh, be able to add any uh, apps in Slack, depending on your settings, you might need to have admin rights. So that's just something to keep in mind once you have connected, uh, Slack. So the uh, nice thing is that we give you the ability to either use it fully or partially or a combination of both. Which means that if you have multiple inboxes, say for different regions or different individuals, and you want to map them to different, uh, channels in Slack, as you can see, we have here, we have just one channel ready for this webinar. You can do that if you have teams, uh, that rely heavily on Slack while others don't. For example, if you do support tickets in Slack, you can do that, for example, have a channel for support. Or if you want all the inboxes, right, all the inboxes that you have to be in one channel, you can do that as well. So once you've done that, um, when you try to look for channels in Slack, um, you can add a channel Slack and just hit this refresh uh, button and your channel will appear. And then you can also delete mappings, uh, should you uh, no longer need to send text messages to that channel. So once you do that, what can you actually do from Slack? So, as you can see, this is a Slack channel that we have here. It's uh, connected to our um, um, demo account. And you can send outbound messages, receive inbound messages. And as you can see here, you can see the replies, um, uh, like the incoming and outgoing text. And the nice thing here is in this channel, each conversation is like one conversation with the customer. And then from that point onward, replies are managed within the thread. So that way it's nice, it's contained and it's not cluttered for you. You can hit respond from here, right? And then a pop up for the response will come. You can select one of your saved replies, if you have saved replies just to be efficient. And then if you have an image URL that you want to add to the message, you could do that as well. You can close the conversation, uh, and you can also reassign it to a different member. So, as you can see here, we have round drop an assignment, uh, in this, inbox there's just myself and Ben in that demo inbox. So incoming messages, uh, will be uh, rotated between us. But should you need to reassign it to somebody else, you can do that here. From this pop up, you can also add notes. So as you can see here in this reply, uh, this message was just a note. And then you can also ah, add tag this contact, right. So if it's like a hot lead or like a very critical issue and you want to tag it with a tag, you can do all that from within Slack. Yeah. So just kind of elaborating this a little bit. So not only are we going to put this direct feed of inbound and outbound texting right into your slack environment wherever you want to map it to a specific channel for your team to be able to see. Uh but being able to ensure that the right eyes get on this as quickly as possible, um, by using Slack as that vehicle is, um, really, uh, valuable. Being able to assign qualified leads, even doing some initial lead qualifications and assigning to a new rep. Um, all done without ever leading your Slack environment. You're having this conversation via text with your end customer, your end prospect, um, but ultimately being able to have that quick action micro pivoting from task to task without uh, actively interrupting your workflow. Exactly. So one last thing I'm going to add here is um, ah, uh, if you have a workflow or a broadcast and you send like mass text messages, uh, like big numbers of uh, outbound messages, uh, we m added an update to Slack. So these will not populate flooding your channel. You will only see these conversations if a customer responds back. So then you are focused on the conversations that need your attention. Yeah, absolutely. We don't want to clutter Slack, uh, with your outbound volume. Um, but really the value is being able to have that individual conversational, uh, interaction via Slack. And so that's what we uh, designed this integration for. Awesome. So we can proceed uh, to the other features. But uh, if you have any questions uh, as we go, please feel free to drop another chance. Sounds good. Yeah. So on the broadcast side, our large format one uh, to many texting solution for those customers using a CRM like HubSpot or pipe driver active campaign that uh, serves more the automation engine. It doesn't always make sense to send to create an automation or a workflow just for like a one off type of message. Whether you're doing like, hey, we have an event coming up, a reminder, or just kind of like an ad hoc type of campaign. Fortunately, in salesmessage we have a large format mass texting tool called Broadcasts. And we're continuing to invest and level up the broadcast throughout this quarter. Um, and the feature that we've just released for this serves to hit a really important mark on the mass texting side, which is maintaining a high degree of personalization in mass messaging, especially for our first point of contact, our first touch with our customer directly via text, there are four primary things we want to hit. We want to first and foremost personalize the message with that person's name, knowing that this isn't a generic spam message, this is highly targeted and personalized to the individual recipient. We want to reintroduce the brand, we want to have a clear call to action, and we want to provide, uh, the reminder for that opt out or that stop, um, opt out consent. But moving forward, it's still a best practice in the mass messaging space after that first engagement point to continue to personalize the message and make it as highly relevant as possible, not only to adhere to best practices in the SMS space for mass texting, but also to really dramatically improve the engagement you're going to have with your end customer. If I can reference your specific name and a deal you're working or a specific field from my CRM that is going to help, uh, increase the likelihood of you converting and engaging with that text or tapping on the link or whatever that call to action may be in your text directly, um, the more successful you're going to be as an SMS marketer. And so we've made grabbing those data points from your CRM like HubSpot a lot easier by being able to pull in those dynamic merge fields from a CRM directly within your broadcast. So Ben, do you have it up? Do you want a demo or should I bring it up on my side? If you go and bring it up on your side, that'd be great. Okay, so, uh, let's take a look at Sales message and go to broadcast here. So I'm going to go ahead and create a new broadcast. Yeah, we'll build it on the fly for you guys. So do you want to touch upon the updates to the, um, building, like a list of recipients here? Yeah, absolutely. So while Tau is going in here and setting his broadcast name, picking his number, things like that, we've also made it a lot easier to be able to grab the list of contacts you want to send a mass text to in sales message. We have the ability to create segments or kind of saved filter combinations to be able to grab a batch of contacts at a time. You see, we've got a bunch Chris Test contacts, name, Ben, last 20, all of these different, these different segments in here. But you can also grab all of your contacts that meet a specific tag and be able to do that more on the fly than having to go in and build a really combat, really, uh, robust combination of filters. You still have the ability to create an on the fly filter combo if you want to, but you can also search for a specific contacts name and you see here. So we're grabbing a segment, a tag and individual contacts. And we're combining all of those criteria together to say anyone that meets any of those criteria, we're going to add them, uh, to the recipient list. So you see here a total of 553 contacts meet the criteria of last 20 and or have that tag. So allowing you to grab your batch of recipients a lot faster, um, and spend less time designing the broadcast and more time writing the copy, scheduling it out and moving on to the next task. Awesome. Uh, and this is where merge fields come in handy. So as you can see here, I can have uh, access to sales message properties, but also for HubSpot users, even your CRM, uh, merged fields are also available for you here. Yeah. And so you don't see the maintenance of the field you want to personalize from. Say it's like a deal value or a contact owner or whatever the case may be for your specific mass text. If you don't see the name of that property listed, uh, on that view, just start typing in the name of the field in HubSpot and uh, you'll be able to grab that directly from the list as well. Yeah, exactly like this. So I just searched HubSpot and then all other kind, um, of very specific HubSpot properties came uh, up here for me. One, uh, thing to note here, Ben, is, um, uh, with personalizing broadcast messages, if your broadcast is really large, there is a slim chance that it's going to take longer than a, uh, normal broadcast because of that personalization. But for smaller broadcasts, the difference should be negligible. And then we do show you here uh, what's the expected, um, date and time for completion, which is also a new feature. Yeah, absolutely, thank you, thanks for that call out, Tal. So as to mention those of us that are looking to personalize our message and use data from an outside source like HubSpot to uh, personalize your message, which is great, we recommend doing that. Um, because of that protocol, as we go and stack up these 553 contacts that are going to receive this message, we need to go ping HubSpot and say, grab the data for all of these contacts. And so we have to go collect that data, insert it into the message, and then schedule that out to go out on the queue. So there will be a slight time delay as it relates to that. As it relates to that. Fortunately, we're going to set that time expectation for how long will it take to get this message out to all of these people by showing you at the bottom exactly what the time estimation would be for that. If we're not using any of any of those personalization tokens from HubSpot directly, our message goes out exponentially faster. Mostly because we don't have to go look at an outside source for data. But either way, we're going to show you that time expectation for delivery. Um, so if you want to personalize and we recommend it, great. We'll help you better estimate. Exactly how long will it take for my last message to get to the last contact? Awesome. Uh, thanks so much for that walk through, Ben. Uh, just moving along here with the rest of the updates we had from, uh, last month. Next is an uh, uh, update to the Calling, uh, capability in Sales Message, and that is Call Whisperer. All right, so, uh, Call Whisper is a feature that we introduce for our customers who rely on uh, uh, Forwarding. Call forwarding and sales message. Say Sales Message is your texting solution exclusively or some of your inboxes and Sales Message are exclusively for texting. You have one or two numbers to make and receive calls. So if in case you use these numbers for texting and you want to ensure that if customers do call in these numbers, they are forwarded to the right number, uh, we added a feature called Call Whisper to help you better manage these forwarded calls and have the context that you need. Anything you want to add there, Ben, before we turn into a demo, yeah. Really just the impetus behind this feature is we recognize that Sales Message plays only one part in a larger landscape of the solutions you're using to interact with your customers. SMS Calling, um, digital marketing, uh, campaigns that are driving traffic through these channels, email, so on and so forth, and recognize that you're fielding this inbound traffic from a variety of sources. What, uh, we wanted to design here is allowing you to get a bit of context as you're picking up the phone, um, for somebody who decides to call a number that you have hosted in sales message, whether that's listed on a web campaign or even offline ad, or you're texting with someone and they decide to pick up the phone and just call you. Being able to pick up the phone here prompt get some context into where this call is coming from, what source is coming from, whatever message you deem fit. Here to give yourself a bit of heads up before connecting with the caller directly. Exactly. So, uh, let's take a look at what that feature looks like here in QA. So you would want to go to your inboxes, um, and then this is just our QA environment, so we'll, uh, pick any of the inboxes here, it doesn't matter. And then um, you will go to numbers under Inboxes, and then uh, here, under three dots, you are able to set up Call Forwarding. So I think the first step is to enable Call Forwarding. If you don't have Call Forwarding enabled on that, ah, inbox, you select the destination. This, by the way, can be one of your other Sales Message numbers. Like I said, if you have one number exclusively, you take calls on that number and then you have the rest for texting. You could do that. And then here is where you can set up a call whisperer. So a call whisperer is simply a message that will be played prior to the recipient of that call picking up the call. It uh, could be as simple as I can see here you have a call from Sales Message, but also it could be uh, customized. You can add like um, users, you can add merge fields, right? To um, customize it even more to add more context uh, to the call so that the recipient is armed with all they need to better handle the call. Very simple. There's uh, some really great power behind this, especially a uh very few things drive positive customer sentiment more than the sense of feeling known when I pick up the phone from one of my Sales Message clients calls me directly and I can address them by name. Hey, Jim. What's up? Just that little nuance by being able to know when you pick up the phone. I'm addressing this person by name dramatically lowers, uh, that sentiment of, uh, frustration, if there is any, and just really fosters a sense of connectedness with the caller if this is a potential lead, being able to address them by name if you already have their contact information. Man all right, cool. We know that we're doing business on a personal level and there are little things that 1%, that fraction of a percent difference, um, that can drive immense results for your company. You remind me of call, uh, centers I've called in the past, which is the last thing you want to do, especially during a work day. And then the first thing they open up with is my name and the last time I called my request. And I'm like, that's it, I'm already happy right there. So that's a good call out to them. All right, so uh, before we move into Q and A, there are a couple of other small features. We do have some time here that we can uh, go through real quick, uh, as part of the release from last month. Um, do you want to speak to the ability to customize your contacts for you then? Yeah, absolutely. So we're continuing to make Sales Message as robust of a solution as we can, recognizing that it doesn't fully replace the CRM, but for a lot of customers, ah, it gets pretty close. Um, so we've had the ability for a long time to be able to have a variety of custom fields on your contact record. Um, we support really as many of those as you'd like and we now have the ability from the contact view to be able to add that as a list view. Um, so in here, being able to change what columns your team sees, be able to change the sort date based on, say, like message direction or, uh, message status or any custom field that you want, um, allows your team to be able to work a lot more efficiently, especially if you're trying to do bulk action type of work. Say, I want to tag everyone, uh, in my ecosystem who has a time zone of Eastern. Uh, so that way if I want to schedule a message, I know that I'm segmenting out, uh, Eastern, Central Time, Pacific Time, things like that, like little things, to be able to make sure that I'm segmenting my audience appropriately. Using this view in the Contacts tab allows you to do that bulk action work a lot faster. And if you want to export or bulk manipulate your data using these values, you now can right from here. Absolutely. And so there is a lot, there is the normal contact feed, all the custom fields that you add, like so, uh, anything that you add here will be visible geolocation. So understanding where your contacts are based on time zone, area code, so on and so forth. And then activity, I think, is one of the key ones where you can start to segment your customers based on their interaction with you. So messages received, calls received, so on. And so forth, for sure. Last one is a very simple one, but that a lot of customers have asked for. I'm just going to quickly run through it and it's just as simple as being able to open up a closed conversation and pick up where you left off. Simple as that. So if you have a bunch of closed conversations that you, um, take us a little bit of time to load now, you can just simply reopen them and then pick up exactly where you left off. Uh, so that, um, you have all the history of that thread there for you. Yeah. And so for context, when you initiate a new conversation, it doesn't overwrite, uh, the previous conversation. If you're having a text conversation, you decide to close out that conversation, you've hit the natural stopping point and your customer then replies, it still adds that to the timeline exactly as you'd expect. Now if I want to go initiate an outbound conversation and pick up where I left off, we've just made that slightly easier. So, as Tal pulled up on the screen, we have a major change to the compliance landscape. Uh, for SMS traffic, uh, this will impact almost every sales message account. So this is super important. Um, if you are a business who has any sort of tax ID value, ein Dunn's number, any sort of federal tax number, this impacts you. So the landscape of SMS is continuing to evolve and change, especially as this becomes a more viable channel for B to B and B to C type of communication. And as spammers continue to try to abuse it, um, so the industry is getting better, locking down on spammers and really trying to ensure that everyone is operating with the same standard. So we've had this optional compliance status that's existed for over a year now called Ten DLC. Essentially think of it as like TSA Precheck for your text messaging, rather than if you don't register for Ten DLC, um, your messages still go out, but they go out a bit slower, they're more subject to scrutiny, they go through regular security. Ten DLC is effectively like going through TSA Precheck or Clear, where you become a known entity and you get through that same gate a lot faster and with less scrutiny because you're already known same exact thing for your SMS traffic. Uh, what's changing now is instead of there being a standard type of status that doesn't require a, ah, formal registration, um uh, the major carriers at TT, Mobile, Verizon, Bell, Canada, all of these others, um, are using, uh this compliance standard to essentially say any business entity that is going to be sending SMS traffic needs to register for one of two packages. We're going to go over exactly what those packages are, we're going to talk about what the new change is when it goes into effect, um, what you need to do and how easy it is to register for it. But if you are a business that is sending SMS traffic, I guarantee you you want to check out next week's webinar. I've already publicized an article in our knowledge base specifically around these changes. So please feel free to go check them out. If you just search Ten DLC or compliance, I guarantee you it's going to come up. Um, but we're going to have a more long form communication, uh, and conversation with myself and our CTO Sergey to talk about exactly what this change means as it relates to your specific business. Sweet. Thank you, Ben. And as you speak, I just posted, uh, the correct link to the webinar in the chat. Um, so it's the second one. Please describe the first one. That was the link to this webinar we are in right now. So it's the second link, um, will, ah, be very informative. You will know exactly what you need to do. And like Ben said previously, last year it only impacted businesses that send a certain volume of messages. Now if you are a company, you send SMS in the US. You uh, are required to comply with these new uh, requirements. So I highly encourage you to attend. Yeah, I get to see Ben again, so which is a bonus. Who doesn't want more of me? Come on. But the headline statement is ultimately if you do nothing and don't register for Ten DLC, um, your message traffic is going to be more expensive and it's going to be more highly scrutinized and subject to carrier filtering. So we're rolling the dice to see if whether or not that message, which, uh, is going to be running through unverified traffic because they're not under a compliant status, um, you run the risk of those messages not ever getting to your end destination and the cost of the toll of that traffic being more expensive than it should be. So I guarantee you it's in your best interest from your bottom line and from your deliverability from an ROI perspective. Uh, to check out ten DLC. We'll talk more about it next week. Feel free to check out the article. Um, and if you have any questions immediately, feel free to reach out to our support team. We're equipped with those answers already. Awesome. Uh, so, uh, we are almost at a time. Um, so I'm, uh, just going to quickly flip through the slides here. Um, uh, so if you have more features you want us to build, please go to feedback dostheasmessage.com. Almost everything that we present in these webinars came straight from here, from your request. So please do, uh, uh, go there, vote on features that you like and request ones that you want to see. And then, um, you can learn a lot more than we presented today through the YouTube channel because there's a whole bunch of small, under three minute, uh, videos that go through all the features in the app. Um, that's about it for today. Thank you so much for joining. And, uh, we will see you hopefully next week to talk all about NDLC and compliance. Looking forward to it. Again, if you have any questions, if you're not already a sales message customer, check us out. 14 day free trial. We'd love to prove how good we can be for your business. If you already are, I'll see you next week on, uh, that webinar. But if you're have any immediate questions, feel free to reach out to our support team support@salesmester.com, or feel free to chat with us at our help center. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, everyone. Enjoy the rest of the evening. Uh, and we'll see you next week. Sounds good. Bye.
