If your sales cadence doesn’t include short message service (SMS) capability, you are already running in the back of the pack. Your sales cadence needs to meet the needs of, and cater to the proclivities of today’s “thumb generation.”
What Is A Sales Cadence?
The phrase “Sales cadence” may sound complicated, but it isn’t. Your sales cadence is the sequence of sales activities you follow with your leads and sales prospects. A typical sales cadence includes a combination of emails, social media posts, calls, and voicemails. You will, of course, customize a sales cadence for your sales team to meet your specific needs. Often you’ll need multiple sales cadences depending on your goal.
Why Your Sales Cadence Is Important
Your sales team knows that following up with prospective clients is the backbone of any marketing strategy. This forms the basis for your sales cadence. Making sure agents adhere to your specific cadence gives your team cohesiveness and continuity. Also, it strengthens your sales process, increases your connection with your clients, and allows your team to close deals faster and more efficiently.
This strategy, in turn, means more sales revenue. An effective sales cadence is a win-win for your team and your customers: your team is happy with their sales numbers, and your customers are satisfied with your service or product.
Traditional Sales Cadence
There are a variety of models for developing a sales cadence but the best model the one that works for you. The sequences of touches your sales reps make in such a cadence model may look like this:
- Primary contact: email the prospect/client
- 2 Days Later: email, then call later
- Day 5: call, then follow with a voicemail if needed
- One week out: email, then follow with a call and voicemail
- Day 10: email, then follow with a call
- Last shot: if no response, move on
This model is one of the most widely used by sales reps. However, there’s an essential element missing here: where’s the SMS component?
Experience tells us that pairing emails and calls is a more practical approach than either alone. You can’t know if a prospect listened to a voicemail, but you can track if the customer opened the email and if there was interaction with the content. Therefore, having this capability in your arsenal gives your sales team more power.
Integrating SMS text messaging into your sales process is even better though. The “thumb generation” loves SMS messaging.
Adding SMS to Your Sales Cadence
Text messaging is rapidly becoming the preferred method of communication in sales. According to Mobile Marketing Watch, SMS text messages enjoy an open rate of 98 percent. That contrasts dramatically with email marketing’s reported 22 percent open rate.
So, which works better for your business? A 98 percent open rate or a 22 percent rate? It’s a no-brainer.
Still looking for specific reasons to incorporate SMS texting into your sales cadence? Consider the following:
- You can improve relationships with your clients and prospects through conversational texting, especially if this is your customer’s preferred method of communication. (Think “thumb generation”)
- It’s easy to follow up phone calls with text messages.
- Individualize your contacts by sending personalized texts that address the prospect’s specific needs.
- Track and organize your customer touchpoints across multiple devices and user functionality.
To repeat: incorporating SMS texting is a no-brainer.
Of course, there are rules that you must follow. For example, the FCC says text messages fall under the same TCPA consumer protections as voice calls. You’ll need prior customer consent before making SMS-oriented contact. Additionally, you can’t overlook the time restrictions. The TCPA says you can only text between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in your recipient’s time zone.
SMS and Software Systems
Never underestimate the power of properly timed text messages. Velocify did a sales optimization study on sales conversion with text messaging. Texting at the right time in the sales cadence, according to the study, increases conversions by upward of 100 percent.
This Velocify study also concluded that an increase in conversion rates of 328 percent is achievable with three or more purposeful texts sent after your team makes contact with a prospect.
You should use your call center software to integrate SMS into your sales cadence. An SMS component should be available through manual texting or by setting up templates for pre-designed texts triggered by disposition status.
Agents can initiate custom event triggers based on sales disposition in most management systems. The only limits are those posed by your team’s imaginations and your software system. (If integrating SMS into your system is a problem, check the simple SMS integration available from Call Tools.)
You’ll want to find out which channel of communication is your client’s or prospect’s preferred method for connecting with you. The “thumb generation” is anyone born after 1985, which is a large portion of the global population. Statistics show there are those who still prefer email or phone call, so don’t leave them out of your sales cadence equation.
The Bottom Line
The performance of your sales team drives the bottom line of our business success. Your sales cadence drives the performance of your sales team. So, integrating promotional and conversational SMS texting with your other outbound call approaches, you can increase your sales conversion rate.
In the grand scheme of things, mobile marketing is in its infancy. It is, however, the current best practice toward achieving sales goals and customer management objectives. Building your business’s mobile SMS database is one of the smartest moves a 21st-century company can make.
Scale your database by integrating SMS texting into your overall marketing strategy. When your SMS texting is up and running, you’re one step closer to that win-win scenario.
