Salesmsg two-way business texting platform supports 2 million messages monthly with Twilio

Inboxes are overflowing and it seems like nobody answers the phone anymore—so how can a company reliably reach customers and leads? Increasingly, the answer is text messages. Salesmsg (say “sales message”) makes it simple for companies to reach customers via its Twilio-powered SMS solution. The service enables two-way communication via one-to-one or one-to-many text messages, managed intuitively from a desktop dashboard or an individual smartphone.

With ambitious short-term and long-term growth aspirations, the team at Salesmsg needed a highly stable and adaptable communications service behind their platform. Using Twilio, they built a robust, reliable set of features that not only support changing customer needs, but fit seamlessly within existing workflows.

“At the end of the day, because SMS is such an immediate, needy, timely channel, we have to rely on a platform that works,” CEO Chris Brisson said. “And that’s why we rely on Twilio.”

"The easy button"

Salesmsg enables businesses to accomplish everything they’d expect to with a CRM-integrated email system, but with the added immediacy, flexibility, and personalization of SMS. And because the Salesmsg platform integrates with businesses’ existing customer relationship management (CRM) software, customer interaction data is centralized and easily accessed by sales, marketing, and customer support teams.

Developing these deeper, more seamless integrations empowers Salesmsg users to take advantage of texting features without adding more tools—or more complexity—to their sales infrastructure. According to Brisson, businesses “really just want one tool that works well across the board,” for sales, marketing, and customer support teams.

“We want to go as deep as possible into the CRM,” Brisson said. “How do we click ‘the easy button’ for the customer, and just make the magic happen on the backend?”

Part of the answer is built-in functionality: The Salesmsg dashboard makes it easy to set up and execute bulk texting actions. It’s also just as simple to focus on a single customer, with newer features that allow sending capability directly from a contact’s profile. Appointment reminders sent out via text are automatically updated in the CRM.

Thoughtful UI features smooth out some of the difficulties of personalization at scale. For example, pre-scheduled follow-up messages won’t be sent if the customer has responded before the automated follow-up goes out. This status is clearly indicated on the dashboard to prevent out-of-context mis-sends. Salesmsg’s messaging capabilities include full support for rich data, like images, GIFs, and URLs—unlocking greater opportunities for text personalization.

Building a stable foundation

When Brisson and co-founder, CTO, and CPO Sergey Sundukovskiy crafted the roadmap for Salesmsg, they made a point not to sacrifice quality for quantity of features. By building its platform on top of Twilio’s programmable voice and messaging APIs, Salesmsg made stability a core differentiator of its platform.

For Salesmsg users, this stability serves as a “moat around their business,” Sundukovskiy said.

“An ability to build on top of something stable, but also an ability to be reliable to our customers, because all possible things happen—is how we differentiate ourselves,” Sundukovskiy explained.

Salesmsg could have integrated directly with carriers for SMS functionality, but chose Twilio for its adaptability—which is increasingly important as new carrier-imposed regulations on text messaging come into play.

“We realized that we need a native stable platform, that’s not going to be susceptible to all the regulatory changes, and everything else that’s going to occur with the carriers,” Sundukovskiy said.

Salesmsg offers local 10-digit long codes to their customers to capitalize on a personalized, localized feel that drives higher engagement. With the changes to 10-digit long code requirements, including mandatory registration of businesses and their use cases, Salesmsg depends on Twilio’s Trust Hub—a central clearinghouse for regulatory and channel requirements.

The Trust Hub APIs simplify the registration process, allowing Salesmsg to give its customers access to a verified, trusted ecosystem at scale. As a result, Salesmsg sees improved message deliverability and higher engagement from end users.

“We focus heavily on reliability and deliverability,” Brisson said. “If things don’t work as expected, customers come back to us with questions. That’s why we’re excited about the opportunity with 10DLC and improved deliverability. Our priority is to stay ahead of the game and continue to innovate.”

Customer satisfaction leads to growth

Since its founding in 2017, Salesmsg has achieved a nearly negative net churn rate—which Sundukovskiy attributed to the company’s dedication to customer satisfaction. Customers report dramatically increased sales, decreased no-shows, and near-immediate ROI after implementing Salesmsg.

“Our secret is that there is no secret,” Sundukovskiy said. “Despite our relatively modest size, Salemsg found a way to grow quickly year after year. We have done so by partnering well with Twilio and other ecosystem partners, as well as intently listening to our customers.”

Looking into the future, Salesmsg is focused on building functionality, including deeper voice and video capabilities, into its platform.

“Our vision is really to build across the entire life cycle; everything from lead generation, to engagement, to appointments, to conversions, to reviews,” Brisson said.

“Five or six years ago, people saw messaging as spam, and today, it’s become the go-to,” Brisson said. “As a business, you have to have messaging in your overall strategy, and you want a tool that can do it. We can provide that to the customer.”