Should B2B Sales Teams Rely More on Instant Messaging Instead of Cold Calls?

B2B teams today are becoming more attune to hybrid / always-on work environments. This can be a pro in many ways specifically for sales people, it serves to act as an insight into changing target customer behaviors and what better ways they can use to drive impactful communication, without turning off the interest level of those targets.

Messaging apps can actually be a useful medium here to help deepen interactions or nurturing efforts with a potential customer. Apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger commonly feature as some of the most downloaded apps globally. Which goes to show that your prospects are in all probability already using one or all of these and more such platforms in the market.

Brands across the world have already started using WhatsApp’s business features to drive better customer interactions and even customer service cycles. With features that allow potential buyers to immediately click to shop or pay, apps such as these can actually become more crucial in the overall sales mix as well over time.

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Let’s Explore a Few Top of Mind Benefits of Using Messaging Apps to Drive B2B Sales

Improves the Conversational Element of a B2B Cycle

There is a lot that B2B teams can do today to drive deeper customer impact and help their brand/product or service stand out from the noise. A key fundamental can be in identifying platforms or methods of outreach that are conversational and aren’t already crowded by competitors.

An instant messaging experience delivers a more transparent and conversational experience to the end user, if done right. It allows sales people to meet their customers where they are by also allowing them to explore ways to not be too intrusive.

It’s Short and Quick

Sales emails or prospecting emails can become lengthy to read and far too often, they can get lost among your prospects’ pretty crowded inbox. While most marketing and sales teams will try to fix this by delivering impactful messaging or trying to optimize the time of their email delivery to ensure readability, the fact remains that today’s prospect is going to have a crowded inbox and might still miss your email.

Cold calls can sometimes garner a lot of rude behavior from your prospect, especially if you caught them at the wrong time or if they just don’t want to hear from you. While seasoned sales leaders will ensure they only cold call prospects who show some sort of interest or engagement through previous email behavior to alleviate this, the problem can still persists.

Fast forward to messaging channels: this stream allows B2B salespeople to craft a quick/short message that can help drive interest and also be read at the prospect’s convenience.

A short, ‘’Hey there Xxxx, I’m from ABC company and was hoping to get in touch about____’’ is a good example. Ending it with a quick, ‘’if you’d like me not to message again, just let me know,’’ can be a useful way to filter out those from a sales list that shouldn’t be approached through this channel.

Builds a more Personal Connection within a Shorter Time Frame

Once a sales person feels that it’s okay to use messaging as a channel to pursue certain prospects, it is easier to build a personal connection within a short span of time. Sending quick updates, coordinating a next-meeting, sharing thoughtful quotes or value adds that could interest the prospect can all help build a deeper, long-term connection. Moreover, messaging as a medium is easy and as long as a sales person delivers the right content/text without being intrusive, a lot of B2B deals can be chased, nurtured and successfully won through this method.

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Better Use of Resources

A lot of today’s modern day martech/salestech systems allow marketing-sales teams to include messaging as a channel through their integrated platforms while also allowing them to collect relevant data points through this channel. When marketing and sales people thoroughly understand which prospects can be approached using this channel, a more streamlined process can be put in place to drive faster sales cycles through this channel, leading to a more optimized overall process.

It All Starts with Choosing the Right Messaging App

For some prospects, instant business messages can be seen as an effective and authentic communication channel. This is where it is important for marketing/sales teams to align deeply on who they can and cannot talk to using this medium.

Once there is better clarity as to the demographic that can be addressed using instant messaging, it becomes easier to choose an app based on where this demographic is most active.

Setting goals prior to beginning a sales nurture or marketing nurture via messages is crucial in helping to define what kind of message would go out when and why. If a sales person is simply trying to reconnect with an old customer to renew deals, the flow of the text conversation would look very different from a sales person who is trying to get a prospect to get onto a demo call, for instance.

Pre-defined goals will help enrich the type of business messages being used to deliver quicker end results. In today’s digital-first world, it is important for B2B sales teams and marketers to think of other channels that can be used to shorten their marketing/sales cycle and help drive actual ROI.

While everyone on your target list might not be approachable through this channel, the ones that are can be easily driven to close a deal, if everything is done right!