E20 – How To Use Conversational Text Messaging With Chris Brisson

E20 – How To Use Conversational Text Messaging With Chris Brisson

 

Chris Brisson from Sales Message joines Gary to talk about text messaging for business. They discuss best practices, pitfalls, and A2P 10DLC will impact businesses’ ability to communicate with customers. 

Discover:

• Chris Brisson’s story, How he got started with Salesmsg or Call Loop (01:40)
• Text Messaging for Business to Business (04:01)
• Conversational Text Messaging as part of Marketing Mix (07:05)
  • GIFs and Memes – is it acceptable? (11:47)
• Is text messaging for business legal? (USA setting) (15:01)
• Short codes, Registration process, Filtering (21:53)
• Text messaging will remain a viable option (27:39)
• How to use text messaging to book more demos (30:18)
• Automated or Manual? (34:57)
• How to start, Where to start, and What to Use (36:34)

 

To get in touch with Chris Brisson:

Website: https://www.salesmessage.com/

 

Transcript 

00:00:44 Gary Ruplinger 

Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of Pipelineology. This is Gary Ruplinger and today I am excited to be joined by Chris Brisson, the founder and CEO of Salesmsg (sales message) and Call Loop, Chris, welcome to the show. 

00:01:01 Chris Brisson 

Thank you, Gary. It’s good to see you again. I know it’s been a long time since we chatted. We met and we went back and met in 2008. So, thanks for the invite, I said yes. 

00:01:13 Gary Ruplinger 

I know we are, we’re both a bit older since the last time we actually, so great, great to reconnect with you here. So, I got very excited about this so This is why those ones where I probably know your story but I’m guessing a lot of our listeners don’t know yet, so I guess for anybody who’s not familiar with you yet doesn’t know about Salesmsg or Call Loop can you give a little bit of background about yourself, a little bit about your story. 

00:01:40 Chris Brisson 

Yeah. Real quick story I started sort of young I was 18 and I started selling wheels and tires on the Internet and on eBay and so I sort of just got struck by the entrepreneurial bug very early on made a lot of really awesome mistakes and ended up, you know growing that business got into information marketing and doing all these launches and I think when we met 2008 and I was doing a lot of consulting and helping you know, helping folks launch their products on the Internet and using a lot of different strategy and what came from that was a company called Call Loop. So, Call Loop still exists today and we actually started that in 2009, which seems like forever ago, but that business still runs and that focuses on SMS marketing you, you know multi-channel communications or Omni channel voice text, all built into one platform in about three years ago we started to see a trend, actually about 5 years ago started to see a trend, and on the conversational text messaging side of things, and so we started a company called (Salesmsg) salesmessage.com, which really helps sales folks, business owners, small businesses, large enterprises connect and engage with their customers over SMS, because that is the channel, that’s not owned by Facebook or another big corporation, but you know everybody is texting and so it’s a two way conversational platform you can text from the Web and yeah, so you can integrate SMS into your overall communication mix, so well. 

00:03:21 Gary Ruplinger 

That’s awesome. I know I kind of mentioned this as I was talking to one of my colleagues after we got off one of these interviews, he does a lot of cold, outreach through email, cold calling and we started talking about text messaging and saying, what can we do with it? What you know, can it benefit us? Is this like legal? So, I thought I don’t know the answers to that, but I know the guy who does, so that’s why that’s why I’m excited to kind of have you here so we can talk about text messaging for business to business, what we can do? Some use cases. So, what do you think? What do you want to start? Should we talk about some of the ways you can use it, in B to B? 

00:04:01 Chris Brisson 

Yeah, I think you know the big thing is like why, you know what’s interesting is when we started Call Loop again in 2009-2010, we started out as a police platform, and so that was broadcasting and then quickly we started to get into SMS, and so you know, way back when we were doing text messaging, the first thought I remember I was actually doing a pitch event in Miami and there were three people that were the judges. One was a guy named Craig Walker. Well, Craig is the I think his last name Walker, but he is the founder of what was then Google Voice. He sold Google voice and he was one of the judges. The other judge was Jamie, I can’t think his last name, he was the founder of Ring and at the time he had a company called Unsubscribe Calm and so when I was presenting you call loop and you know text messaging, the immediate thought was well this is spam who wants that in reality of it is. As it wasn’t, and so you know text messaging as a channel year and years ago was seen as I don’t want to do text messaging, it’s intrusive with and so what has happened is that shift more towards, well, everything is SMS right? Well? How do you really truly engage with somebody and the way that you’re going to do that is through text messaging.  

Now there’s a million different channels, but what’s the one that is the most effective, the most efficient and we’ll get you a response and so text messaging it’s a 99/98 percent open rates within 15 minutes. People about 85% of people will reply or see that message. And so, when you compare it to all other channels out there, SMS really is the ultimate communication channel and more importantly is it’s not owned by Facebook or Google and they have a few a million different rules and regulations. And when you can send text messages and you know now there’s all sorts of new regulation coming out which is really a good thing for the industry, but SMS as HTML is the ultimate way to engage and connect with people right where it matters which is which is in their pocket so, you know that’s the big Why, again, it’s the best way to communicate and get in touch with folks so, that’s really the why. And you know there’s so many different ways that businesses can use it we can dive into that, but yeah, I mean that’s the big reason. 

00:06:34 Gary Ruplinger 

Cool, I know we’re I know for us internally, you know, we, I know we feel like we’re barely scratching the surface of it where will use it for appointment reminders if we’ve got a meeting scheduled with somebody you know 2 hours before they get a text message that works pretty well. But I also know that I am probably vastly under using what we can do with text messaging as part of our marketing mix, so. 

00:07:05 Chris Brisson 

Yeah, you know, we coined a concept that I call Text eyes your Business and so you know if you’ve been in marketing for any length of time, you know every business has their own customer journey. And so that customer journey is not unique to certain businesses, but really to every business so you have you know how are you generating traffic, are you generating leads? Are you converting those leads? How are you up selling? How are you getting referrals and how are you getting reviews? And so, all those different stages SMS plays a big part of that and so when you look at the lead generation side well, how can you generate leads from SM, well if you watch TV or listen on radio you can hear people say hey, you know go ahead and text focus factor 255222 now 55222 is what’s called a short code, so there’s different types of text messaging. You have short code messaging, which is really the mass SMS and then you have the conversational text messaging, which is like a local phone number, and now toll-free numbers are starting to make a move towards that which is really on the personalization side of things. And so again, you have all those steps across that customer journey from lead generation. Well, you can have people text in you know, if you follow Gary V, or a lot of these influencers now, they’re all having folks’ text in fact, Grant Cardone is one of our customers and Grant uses SMS as one of their best lead generation devices. So, if you follow him on Instagram, you know saying hey, text me or swipe up. And when they swipe up it opens up the mobile app with the phone number and then a message and the text. And they just click send and then it sends that text message and then from sales message they can respond to that and so for them it’s a way to generate leads to create those conversations. You know one of the big beliefs that we have is, you know, conversations are good for business and so you know as a marketer where marketers want to sort of remove away from conversations and automate as much as possible. But when you can build that team or have those conversations at scale, you’re just going to create more opportunities to, you know, sell your product to upsell folks to get a book a meeting and so on and so forth.  

So, that’s one of the ways you know Cardone uses it, whether you’re driving customers I know for appointment reminders, one of the best appointment reminders I like to send is you know, just like the day of the meeting, like if you and I were going to lunch I would want to confirm with you that hey, I don’t want to show up and drive, you know, 15,20 minutes to go to lunch with you. I want to confirm that we’re actually going to meet so I don’t waste my time because maybe you forgot or whatever it is so the best text that we send we ought to I mean it is you know the day of the event I just sent a text and says, Hey, first name, are we still on for our call it too, right, and it’s just an automated confirmation text and you start that engagement, right? Oh yeah, Yep, we’re still on and so you know, if the challenge of getting people to show for your meetings, send him a text message, right? Automate that text message and that will dramatically increase that that attendance for you, so, so again you’re not sitting there and having an appointment and they don’t show up, you know that’s a big challenge when it comes to any sort of service-based business or appointments or demos, you know, meetings, that sort of thing that that reminder is really the great thing. Now on the other side is you have that automated you know, reminder which I don’t know like to me it’s all about creating that and continuing that conversation over texting and so keeping that Channel open, not just for an automated reminder text message like your meeting is at 2:00 pm, but creating that conversation with them because post meeting maybe you want to send him a text I hate it was awesome meeting you, looking forward to connecting or hey, I just sent you the proposal take a look and so you know, creating an opportunity to keep the channel open is, you know, is the way that that I like to think, and that’s sort of the way that we teach number audience so. 

00:11:29 Gary Ruplinger 

Nice, I know this is a little bit of a tangent, but a bit of a concession to make here is I, I love sending like GIFs and images to people, little memes is that like acceptable with text messaging or is that going to venture into the two unprofessional territory? 

00:11:47 Chris Brisson 

No, I mean look, no. Chances are people are texting their friends, right? They’re texting GIFs they’re sending. You know, if you’re in a WhatsApp group, you’re getting all sorts of different media for messages, right? You’re getting links. You’re getting gifts. You’re getting pictures. You’re getting all of that, and so you know it’s a great way to quickly sort of penetrate that and build that report and build that relationship. You know, I think GIFs and memes are like even when you look at you know, not to get political, but a GIF and a meme, very quickly, you can get someone to nod their head you go Oh yeah, I get it. And so, you know picture is worth 1000 words and so how do you use that to your advantage right? And maybe there is a GIF, maybe there’s a meme to represent the idea of meeting with you or the idea after the meeting and how well it went. And so, you know, I think there’s a great way to use that to continue to engage with that prospect or that customer, you know we use Intercom and I tell the team like guys use GIFs a lot because it really just you know at the end of the day our core value is, you know keep it real and conversational. Right? And so, if we have a very stiff sort of way that we communicate with our customers, we’re texting company and so how we represent that to our customers is through all different types, so using a lot of GIFs, using emojis using, you know just simple text messages that are simple, you know it doesn’t need to be so, well thought out and I think that’s what makes SMS so simple is because it can be simple, you don’t have to be a copywriter, you don’t have to learn how to write a headline to get an open, you don’t have to figure out you know HTML and you know just getting an email delivery with DIM and SPF records and all those things that go with all those other channels that I mean you have to be an expert to really understand that stuff just to get that result, anybody can send a text and get a response, and so you know there are so many so many things that make it so easy and applicable to any anybody in everybody and if you’re looking for the response, the best ways to ask a question. And so, if you want a response, don’t make a statement, but ask a question. And so, you know asking binary questions I can get into some of that strategy behind it, but hopefully that answers your question, Gary. 

00:14:21 Gary Ruplinger 

It does. I appreciate that I’m going to be sending out more gifts now, so now that I have the green light. 

00:14:28 Chris Brisson 

There you go. 

00:14:28 Gary Ruplinger 

So, so perhaps with the disclaimer here that neither of us are lawyers. This is for educational purposes. There’s no legal advice going on here. I know one of the big things I think you touched on it earlier is kind of this feels intrusive to people, so is text messaging legal? I know there are some guidelines at least. Let’s just for the safer with sake of this one, we’ll talk about the USA market since I know every country has their own guidelines. Is text messaging for business legal? 

 

00:15:01 Chris Brisson 

Of course, yeah, it definitely is. Now, does that mean that you can get a list and start texting people and not facing those consequences? Of course, you will face consequences now at the end of the day, the way that the way I look at SMS in the way that it is set up to communicate. Is it always comes down to the consent or at least the opt in.? And so well, how do you generate an opt in? Well, one is you can have people text you and so by having people text you they are essentially opting in into that conversation right, now the other side is you can have a Web Form, so on your Web Form you know, you can have a check box which says you know to communicate over SMS. You know, just have some of that legal language you can have that you can build it in your terms of service. And so, you know SMS is a legal channel to communicate, but you want to make sure that you have it set up the right way, but you can’t engage and communicate with those folks, and so you know for sales message it’s you know it’s compliant, CTIA compliant, you know, there’s TPA, there’s CTA, there’s all these words and terms. But the end of the day, you know when somebody replies, stop or they reply cancel or they may use other colorful language to not want to receive a text message you can manually opt them out, or if they reply stop, they can get off of that list and you’re essentially unsubscribed, so you know a lot of that functionality is built, whether it’s sales, message or any other platform that has to be a part of communicating over SMS. Uhm, there are some new sort of terms and rules coming to SMS as a channel and so when you look at if I can compare email to SMS. So, in the email world you have the, you know the big platforms that really maintain the email infrastructure. So, if Gmail, you have Hotmail, you have Yahoo if all the other ones right now, in order to keep the integrity of that platform of email as a, you know, a trusted platform to communicate well they have all those algorithms that ensure hey we want only real company sending texts. So, not every Russian pill mill can just start sending and you know flooding email inboxes, so they have a lot of that infrastructure built for, you know, spam filtering. You know there’s all this I think authentication called DKIM, SPF Records, and D-Mark and they set all those things up to really keep the integrity of email. Well, traditionally in the SMS world, anyone could buy a number, and anyone can start sending a text message and so the carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon.  

You know they slowly started to build filters that would look for content of your text and then filter it and not deliver it. So, for example, if you were sending again a pill mill text message. Uhm, years ago they wouldn’t filter that and that would get through but it’s so effective that spammers love the channel and so ten DLC or 10-digit long code is a new sort of you know layer on top of SMS that at its core is to keep the integrity of texting as a channel that’s not degraded by marketers right or spammers? And so, there’s new rules that they set up to understand their customer. So, KYC is known in the, you know, the industry is called, know your customer and so in order to start to send text messages across those carriers, the carriers are now requiring the businesses to register their company. So, Gary, if you wanted to send text messages in the upcoming future, you need to register your business. You know, put your name, put your address, put your social profiles and then you get approved by the carriers to then start to send text messages. Then you have a use case. So, what’s your use case? Well, it’s conversational texting, well, maybe it’s alerts maybe it’s notifications, maybe it’s marketing. So, there’s all these different use cases that go along now with, how you can send text messages across the carriers in in the way it’s a good thing for the industry, right? But now there’s a little bit of an extra step that businesses need to create in order to start to send texts across the carrier networks, so it’s still sort of in the works, there are some deadlines like come May 1st, June 1st that you know you have to register your business. So, for using SMS as channel you gotta register your business. You have to register, get approved and then you can start to send SMS. Because they just want to know, hey, who is who is sending text messages? And maybe you’ve heard of shared short codes, which again a shared short code, is its short code that is shared amongst all of its customers? And so, you know, for Call Loop the shared short code is 38470. And we have thousands and thousands of customers that use that short code to send SMS. But what happens is maybe get a bad actor that comes in and they start sending spam texts? Well, the carriers they’re like, oh, we don’t want to kill that short code because there’s so many great businesses that use that to run their business to talk to their customers to send you know, promotions, but there’s that bad actor that’s sending out those, right? Fishing text messages, we’re in a dilemma and so the move is towards hey, we need every brand or every company to have their own unique phone number. So, if they start to send spam text messages, we can kill that brand, we can kill that phone number versus destroying you know all the other thousands of businesses that we’re using that short code in a good way and so it’s a good thing for the industry, but if that gives you a little bit of the landscape of what’s to come for SMS. 

00:21:29 Gary Ruplinger 

So yeah, I know, I know we’re recording this in March of 2021, like you said, there’s some, so I’m assuming that everybody who’s sending text messages not just the platform you’re using, needs to kind of do this registration stuff or as they go forward, I’m assuming this is something they’ll have as part of, like a they’re onboarding as they come on, am I understanding that right? 

00:21:53 Chris Brisson 

Yeah, yeah, exactly and so you know there are just to sort of break it down, so you have a short code, right? Which is really for that mass SMS use case shared short codes are essentially being banned on June 1st and so anyone that is doing mass SMS, they have two options. One, they can move over to their own dedicated short code and those cost 1000 bucks a month that’s just straight from the carrier, the other side is you have a toll-free phone number so 844866 phone number. And those sort of has the same messaging properties as a short code, so you can send mass text messages from it. The one thing about a toll-free is you don’t need to go through this new ten DLC registration. And so, a lot of those businesses that were on Short codes or shared short codes are moving to a toll-free number, right? They can continue send their promotional messages and marketing messages and then you have the other one, which is really a local phone number, so a 561-area code, 305-area code, 212720 the carriers see those numbers has what’s called ATP, so application to peer not to get too technical. But those local numbers need to create a registration they need to register their brand which goes to the carriers that carriers then improve it, from which you can send SMS so the sales message with Call Loop, we have that infrastructure being set up so our customers can register their brand go through that approval process and then essentially get wait-listed to start to send those SMS messages so. 

00:23:40 Gary Ruplinger 

So, is this is really for anybody who’s sending through some type of software, whether it’s any type of platform not like not like my cell phone or something if I’m seeing somebody from that, that’s going to be exactly how it always was, but if I’m using software now to, you know, help facilitate this conversational text messaging, I need to register my company or is just going to start getting blocked by default, is that correct? 

00:24:14 Chris Brisson 

Pretty much so, 

00:24:15 Gary Ruplinger 

1.  

00:24:16 Chris Brisson 

Again, I’m referring you’re exactly right, you know I’m referring anything to a software that’s allowing you to send and receive texts, so you have to go through that registration process for again a local number, its toll-free. You don’t need to do that, but if you’re just using your own phone to text, you don’t need to do any of that right? Because it’s peer to peer SMS like that’s it, yeah, but yeah.  

This is also new, and a lot of the carriers have sort of set these deadlines, that sort of keep getting pushed back but needless to say they’ve been working on this for years and so now the day has come, right? So, all the companies, all the brands need to start to go through this process to again get waitlisted. If they don’t do it by a certain date, well, then, those messages essentially won’t get delivered until they register and then go through that approval process. 

00:25:10 Gary Ruplinger 

So as a result of this, I think you said there are actually some benefits. Do you expect at, for like the companies that take the time to make sure we’re registered that there will be less filtering of their messages that go out? 

00:25:22 Chris Brisson 

Yeah, that’s really at the carrier level. We, you know one, we help them register their company and so they go through that process again. They just fill out a form they tell us the information. We then send that to our platform our vendor, that vendor goes through their process to then get it approved in real time, once that’s approved then they can start to register, use case. So, for example, you know a use case is really a campaign, and the carriers ask for samples, meaning what are the type of messages that you’re going to be sending on this phone number and so, if the sample is going to be, you know, get your free mortgage dollar sign, dollar sign, dollar sign, click here. Chances are they’re not going to approve that, and so you know they don’t want that sort of traffic on the carrier network, and so is it for notifications. Great, what’s the notification? Is it for conversational SMS? What types of conversations you know we’ll go through that and so they just want to understand how that number? Is going to be used and by providing them some samples of like, Hey, here’s what to expect, on this phone number. They’ll go through. They’ll approve that, and that’s it. Now think of all this. This is all automated, right? So, on the back end this is all machines. Can you imagine every single phone number everybody who’s ever had a phone number on any platform on Twilio or Nexmo or this? Or that they’re sll going through this process, so to do that scale. It can’t be manual. So, you know a lot of this comes down to their own engines in the back end to approve it and then once that traffic goes through, I’m sure that the carriers again they have content filtering. So, if you’re, again, the same way, if you’re sending a spam email with you know you pill mill type stuff. They’re not gonna allow that on the SMS network as well, and so content filtering will always be, you know, a thing within the industry and as long as you’re not sending those types of texts then you should be fine. 

00:27:31 Gary Ruplinger 

OK, so changes are coming, but the takeaway is a text messaging is still going to be alive and well. As this goes into effect. 

00:27:39 Chris Brisson 

Oh yeah, yeah, no doubt about that, I mean. It is, uh, I mean, there’s so many great use cases, and in case studies from just our customers saying SMS is the number one revenue channel for us. Whether that’s you know the promotional side where that’s engaging with those customers to drive more demos or leads or meetings, it is the best channel for businesses you know. Again, if you look at sort of comparing it to email, email, open rates are going down and you know all the different channels that are out there SMS is the best one for gauging in driving sales, you know a lot of e-commerce companies are strictly relying on SMS to drive more sales, you know I get text messages all the time now from brands I that I enjoy, if I don’t like it, I can opt out. In fact, you know my own voicemail. Maybe it’s true for you, but I don’t listen to voice mails. I don’t want to listen to voice mails and so you know the best way to get in touch with me is to send me a text message. Don’t call me, I’m not going to pick up because number one on my Apple phone, it automatically silences a call if you’re not my contact list, and so even the carriers are building filters so that hey, we know unwanted phone calls is a problem that Apple built a feature which you can enable so it doesn’t even ring when you get unwanted phone call and so you push towards keeping channels? You know keeping him, keeping him correct and straight, they’re building features, they’re building functionality to help the consumer sort of fight against all the things that are attacking them so. 

00:29:27 Gary Ruplinger 

Yeah, I know for me if I if I see a voice note, a voicemail notification if it’s if it doesn’t get transcribed, it just usually doesn’t even bother. Nope, it doesn’t even get listened to, most of the time I’m pretty terrible about that “Hi, like you, please text me some other way. But yeah, I if we’re not scheduled to talk. I’m not answering for use anyway, so. Yeah, so one thing kind of caught my interest here. You talked about being able to use text messaging to book more demos, how sales teams and that can do that? Do you have any tips or strategies for people you can kind of share on? Maybe some best practices or ways people can use, because I know a lot of our listeners are in the business to business. Well, they depend on demos and meetings to grow. So how can they use text messaging to get more of those. 

00:30:18 Chris Brisson 

Yeah, you know one of the sorts of what I what I mentioned before is well, how do you create a conversation? And the best way to create a conversation is to open a loop. Well, how do you open the Loop, is to ask a question, and so you know, when at the point of somebody maybe going to website filling out a form right or there’s a request for them to text into, opt in, and so if anyone is going through a Webform or setting up a demo. You immediately send an SMS during regular business hours, of course. But engage with them over SMS by first asking a question so, what we do, and a lot of our customers do this is somebody fills out of let’s say a demo request form right? Or even hey you contact us. And immediately we’ll send an SMS to engage with them over SMS and so that would say something like, hey, Gary, thanks for filling out the form. You know, if you’re let’s say you’re in real estate or looking for will say, hey, Gary, thanks for filling out. Are you mostly interested in commercial real estate? Or residential real estate. And so, sort of creating this binary initial question to grace that shoot to engage with them to get them engaged over SMS. And so, you know, I think a mistake that a lot of folks make is they’ll say hey, thanks for filling out the form. Will contact you shortly. Well, what do you mean? And you just contacted me so like, let’s create this contact here because if you’re not going to send your gonna call me chances are I’m not gonna pick up. And so, contact me, that’s the contact. So, engage with them right away over SMS and we have some really great, really great templates.  

One is for an application and so when you look at how do you engage with somebody in real time one by asking a question. But two is, let’s qualify them. You don’t want to have demos and meetings with everybody, because if that were the case, well then, you’d be spending a lot of time with unqualified people. So how do you use SMS as a channel and a tool to qualify? So, for us we have 3 qualifying questions, right? What CRM what country they want to send text messages? And how big their team once? To understand those three things, we can very quickly determine whether sales messages if. It or not, a fit and so through SMS somebody comes through maybe engage with those over SMS first and really fill out a form and we’re not asking those questions options and so those questions that we follow up with are like, hey Gary, thanks for filling this out. Uhm, do you know what CRM do you currently use? Oh, I use HubSpot. How big your team, right? All these sorts of qualifying questions, and there’s a better way to you know, preference that, or you know, not just the street. Ask that question. We have a customer of ours. He sells a 15 look at 5 to $15,000 coaching program training program. And for him he was spending a lot of time on demos on meetings with unqualified people and he was trying to do an SDR type situation meaning a lead came in, they would call them and start to qualify them, and he was spending a lot of time doing that and having somebody do that role full time just didn’t make economic sense. And so, he just said hey, how do I bring that task from us? And so, he created just a series of canned responses to follow up and ask people his qualifying questions. You know, hey, do you have a budget? It’s $5000, right? And just the way that he positioned those questions at the end of people answering that, right? He quickly determined whether to book a meeting or not, or to hop on a call with him immediately and so. As a way of qualifying a customer SMS is a is a great way to do that because you’re going to get those responses in real time you see a lot of that on bots, right? And so even with bots, you can qualify over a bot. So, whether it’s intercom or drift, or you know HubSpot bot and then immediately after they qualify, cool, shoot him a text message, engage in that Channel, give them a call and whatever it is you know. So hopefully that paints a picture on how to do that. 

00:34:46 Gary Ruplinger 

It does. For that is any of that automated or is that kind of a something that’s triggered? Here’s a person go handle that, or does it? 

00:34:57 Chris Brisson 

You can automate it. Most of the time, like we, we don’t have any sort of AI or automation or bots on top of sales message. Users just create a canned message, so they understand. Hey, here’s question one question, two question, three question four and they’re just, you know, template can message click send can message, click send I mean, you can sort of build that automation. But sometimes you don’t want to get found out right like if you know that there’s sort of a bot that is there, and then you say something, and then it doesn’t coordinate with sort of their response, well, then you sort of, you know, the gigs up a little bit, and so there’s a lot of AI technology that you know we can lay around machine, learning sales message is getting there, but right now it’s all from a manual perspective just replying to those folks so. 

00:35:54 Gary Ruplinger 

OK, I mean I think that sometimes the human element really does make a difference. I think in in follow up, especially with in business-to-business world. 

00:36:01 Chris Brisson 

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. 

00:36:04 Gary Ruplinger 

And I think the nice when you have a platform you can set your keyboard and type responses back is a little easier than trying to text from your smart devices. So yeah, cool. Well Chris, I really appreciate you taking the time today on this and I feel like we got a lot of good information for somebody who wants to get more into this. I know your platform Salesmsg. Where should we send them? What’s kind of the best next step for somebody like yeah, I want to, I want to do more of this, what do I do? 

00:36:34 Chris Brisson 

Yeah, yeah. One is you can do it all from your phone, so you don’t need a tool like Salesmsg. If you’re sort of a single, you know entrepreneur, that sort of thing. A salesperson in your own company just start using SMS. You know? Just one comment on starting to use that now is a way that you can use it now. Immediately and get a great result is go back to your past customers or cold leads are people that never converted and just send him a text message and the text message you want to send is hey Gary, are you still interested in fill in the blank. Right, and that’s it, send people or hey Gary, it’s Chris at sales message. Are you still interested in texting for your business? Oh, hey yeah, I am or I’m not or whatever, and so it’s just a great way to engage back with them. And again, you can use your own firm to do that if you want to use another tool like sales message or another one, we can. But our websites salesmessage.com you can go to that site and learn more about our software, our product, but yeah, they can go there and check it out. 

00:37:46 Gary Ruplinger 

Well, great, well I think I think we got a lot of good stuff to work with here. Is there anything else? I guess before I let you go that I should have asked you that I didn’t. 

00:38:00 Chris Brisson 

Be normal, don’t write an email in a text message. It doesn’t work. Trust me. So just be normal like at the end of the day it’s SMS, so the more normal you are, the more effective it will be. The more corporate you sound and don’t treat it like an email, the results won’t even get some results, so that’s it. 

00:38:25 Gary Ruplinger 

Alright, got it be normal in your text messages everybody, please. Chris, thanks so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it and hope you have a great rest of your day and let’s not make it 12 or 13 years before we talk again. 

00:38:40 Chris Brisson 

Yeah, definitely. Thank you, Gary. And thanks everyone. 

00:38:43 Gary Ruplinger 

OK, take care, Chris.