SMS for B2B Success: Modern Marketing Strategies for Revenue Growth

Podcast Guest: Amanda McGuckin Hager Host: Kerry Curran Title: SMS for B2B Success: Modern Marketing Strategies for Revenue Growth Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.356) So welcome Amanda, please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and expertise. Amanda McGuckin Hager (00:06.798) Yes, my name is Amanda McGuckin-Hager. I am the CMO of TrueDialogue. I've been a B2B demand gen marketer for 20 to 25 years now, working all through the stack, storage, and networking applications. So yeah, thank you for having me. Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:26.05) Excellent. We're very happy to have you here and talk about one of my favorite topics, is B2B marketing and sales, and just opportunities for shortening that sales cycle and improving the close rate. So you've been in the B2B demand gen space for a while, and I know it's changed from my perspective. So tell me more about what kind of what you've seen in that evolution over the past number of years. Amanda McGuckin Hager (00:53.902) Yeah, well, I remember being very early in my career and Eloqua had launched and we were doing workflows and steps and stages and here we are 20 years later and that is still, we're still doing that. We're still doing these bulk workflows and sequences and automation. Things have gotten a lot better in that aspect. Though email is still proving a challenge, right? I think on average we're seeing a 20 % open rate and a 4 % click-through rate, the inbox is crowded. So some of these bulk sequences the engagement levels are a little bit lower. I think what we're seeing now is the evolution into adding SMS as a step in those sequences. SMS has a much higher rate, right, 95 to 98 % open rate, depending on where you get the stat, 90-second average response time. We know that when companies are sending text messages, it's landing in their recipients' phones and it is getting the attention that they want. So that is an exciting evolution. Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:09.854) Yeah, definitely. we were talking about earlier, we've seen it in our own experiences receiving messages, text messages from companies that we're partnering with or purchased from. I believe it's definitely becoming more and more relevant, both from the marketing perspective, but also I think from the kind of user audience perspective, we're responding to them more accepting it as part of our buying cycle. So it's exciting to see it become more of a stronger communication channel for B2B companies. So talk about some of the effective strategies and activations that you've seen from that perspective for the messaging. Amanda McGuckin Hager (03:02.252) Yeah. Well, we talked about how marketing is using SMS. We know that B2C companies have adopted it a long time ago. We're all receiving those now, right? But B2B companies are now looking to that same tactic to execute in their workflows. At the same time, sales, and B2B sales teams are also looking to adopt that strategy. So Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:07.223) Mm-hmm. Amanda McGuckin Hager (03:28.014) We've been hearing from the market from revenue intelligence tools that sit on top of pipelines and Salesforce, for example. We've been hearing from sales teams that use HubSpot or Salesforce or even Dynamics that they're in these longer sales cycles, these higher deal prices, right? We're talking five, six, seven deals, deal size numbers. We're seeing sales teams develop such a relationship with their prospects and their buying teams that they have moved it from email to their personal text, which is fantastic. It shows there's an intimacy there. It shows that the relationship is building and engaged. There are a few dilemmas with that, and one of them is that it doesn't update the CRM … Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:07.906) Mm-hmm. Amanda McGuckin Hager (04:26.156) … Unless the rep manually goes and says, I've been texting with my prospect, the rest of the company cannot tell what's going on with that deal. So the opportunity there is to be able to capture this engagement, this intimate engagement on taxed in the CRM system so that the rest of the company can see it, the reporting can see it, the revenue intelligence tools can see it, and everyone has a better understanding of the likelihood of that deal to close. Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:55.266) Hmm. Amanda McGuckin Hager (04:55.694) At the same time, we're seeing sales teams use it for field visits. I'm going to be in your neighborhood. I'll be in the city. You know, I'm having steak dinner at this restaurant. Please join me. So yeah, I think that's exciting. We are accustomed to, in the B2B world, accustomed to emails. And we are becoming more accustomed to text messaging. Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:22.324) Mm-hmm. No, I see that. And you made some really good points about just how companies can use the messaging tools. think some of the

Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast · Kerry Curran, Amanda McGuckin Hager