Sales teams are a vital part of most businesses. They’re directly responsible for driving revenue through an often tedious sales process. Because each sale is unique, salespeople need the right tools to customize each deal without sacrificing time. Business texting fits seamlessly into most sales workflows and can enhance the sales experience for salespeople and customers alike. To get the ideas flowing, here are five ways to improve your sales teams with business texting.
Common challenges sales teams face
As industries become saturated with products, services, and information overload, the customer buying journey has changed drastically. To adapt to the changes, sales teams have to take a more consultative approach to their pitch, strategically investing time and energy into more fruitful leads. While personalization is necessary to meet prospects where they are, it creates a challenge for salespeople to balance speed and efficiency when handling multiple opportunities simultaneously.
Here are some common challenges salespeople face when interacting with prospective customers:
- Unresponsive leads
- Slow response times
- Wasting time on unqualified or bad leads
- No-show appointments for demos or calls
- Inability to speak with key decision-makers
- Ill-timed pitches to prospects (not ready to buy or repurchase)
A business texting platform, like Textline, can help sales teams strike the perfect balance between speed, efficiency, and personalization to solve these problems. Texting as a whole is about brisk conversations. Texts have a high open and response rate and a quick response time compared to other communication channels like phone or email.
5 ways to use business texting to improve your sales teams
Let’s dig into the specifics of how sales teams can use business texting to solve common sales problems.
1. Respond to leads faster
Prospects look at multiple companies when considering a solution, so sales teams can stand out amongst their competitors by being the first to respond to a lead. Research shows that companies that reach out to a new lead within an hour are seven times likelier to have a sincere conversation with decision-makers than those who respond even 60 minutes later.
Instead of spending 15 to 30 minutes on the phone with one lead, salespeople can scale their speed by responding to multiple prospects simultaneously through text messaging. Some Textline customers prefer to automate the process by using Textline’s Automation feature to generate a message to any new lead that comes in. Sales teams can book appointments over text, too, and later use it to send appointment reminders to reduce no-shows.
2. Qualify leads faster
Talking to unqualified leads is a massive waste for sales teams, considering the average sales cycle can last anywhere from three to nine months. Time spent on unqualified leads takes the attention away from higher-quality leads, who can slip through the cracks if not prioritized. The earlier sales teams can qualify a lead, the easier it is for them to decide where to invest their efforts.
Business texting is an effective way to qualify leads in less time because texting has a high response rate of 45 percent, compared to other channels like email at six percent. Salespeople can also juggle more conversations through text than phone calls because they aren’t glued to their phones for hours trying to figure out if a lead is worth the investment.
3. Reduce no-shows
Frequent appointment no-shows can drive-up sales costs, like the cost per acquisition, or CPA, by hundreds of dollars. Sales representatives can text their prospects appointment reminders to keep demos or calls on the calendar in a low-touch manner. A gentle reminder text can decrease the chances of no-shows occurring, as one of the common reasons they occur is forgetfulness.
4. Close deals quicker
When the time comes to close a deal, sales reps can speed up the process by using texting’s back-and-forth nature to nail out any details during the negotiation stage. From there, they can text links to documents to ask for e-signatures, guide prospects to a payment page, or send payment reminders. Texts have a 98 percent open rate, and links in texts have an eight times higher click-through rate than other marketing channels, ensuring that buyers will see the messages and know what action to take.
5. Stay in touch for reselling opportunities
Customer retention is a top revenue-driver and is considerably cheaper than customer acquisition efforts. According to Temkin Group, loyal customers are five times likelier to repurchase and seven times likelier to try a new offering. Texting keeps customers in close contact, so salespeople don’t have to sweat about missing out on a resell opportunity due to poor timing. Salespeople can proactively reach out to customers to anticipate their needs to increase resell or upsell opportunities to drive the lifetime value, or LTV, of a customer.
The bottom line: Business texting drives sales results
Whether salespeople want to use it in certain parts of their sales funnel or throughout the entire process, business SMS is a helpful sales team tool. Text is quick, conversational, and keeps communication open between sales teams and customers for future opportunities.
