Conversations are good for business | Chris Brisson

[Chris] (0:00 - 0:13)

And a typical marketer would take that same approach. Like, hey, we've always done it like this on email. Let's apply that same methodology on texting.

Like, that's the wrong way to look at it. Because, hey, this is my personal space. Don't mess it up.

[VO] (0:14 - 0:22)

♪ Are you ready for this? Are you ready?

[Dillon] (0:22 - 0:32)

♪ What's up, lifers? And welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day.

I got my man, Rob, with us. Rob, you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:33 - 0:33)

Bonjour.

[Dillon] (0:34 - 0:39)

Of course. And we have Chris with us. Chris, can you say hi, please?

[Chris] (0:39 - 0:40)

What's going on?

[Dillon] (0:40 - 0:45)

And I'm your host. My name is Dillon Young. Chris, thank you so much for being here.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Chris] (0:45 - 0:52)

Yep, I'm Chris Brisson, founder and CEO of SalesMessage.com, conversational texting calling platform.

[Dillon] (0:53 - 1:28)

Right on. So, Chris, you'll notice I just avoid trying to pronounce your last name altogether. It is my greatest and deepest fear.

I think about it at night, about pronouncing people's names incorrectly. I find it very offensive, so I just try to avoid it entirely. So I might just call you sir or mister from now on to avoid it altogether.

But Chris, thank you so much for being here. You know what we do here? We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success, SaaS, business in general?

You want to just talk about life? I mean, it's up to you, but tell us, what is on your mind?

[Chris] (1:28 - 4:24)

Yeah, I mean, look, I see the world through one text message at a time. And so, not to sound cheesy, but. Sounds great.

You know, what's on our mind is it's AI. You know, I think there is so much that's happening with AI. One, it's really hard to keep up.

And two is, what do you do? Like, what do you do with all the stuff and the tech that's coming out? And so, for us, the way that we've got a customer success team, and at the end of the day, customer success is experience.

How do we create a really awesome experience for that handoff, for that initial engagement? And so, we're a messaging platform, text messaging. And so, text is sort of the best way to get in front of somebody, to engage with somebody, to open up that dialogue, to create that conversation.

And you have regular text message, but you have the ability to do GIFs and images and video and audio. And so, recently, I went through an experience and we got handed off to their customer success team. And all of a sudden, I get a text, and it's a GIF of the rep.

Hey, it's so-and-so. And in the text message, hey Chris, how's it going? I'm Susie over at so-and-so.

And it was just like, that's cool. And so, when you can find yourself going, I like that, that's really cool. You start to lift this relationship and this trust with the company.

And so, there are these points of opportunity to create these experiences and these little, like, I like them, I like the way that they work. That's a cool company. And so, when you can think of, well, what parts of your business in this journey, this customer success journey, where you can get people nodding their head going, I really like that, oh my gosh, that's so cool.

And so, that's just one way to sort of create that initial engagement, that handoff, especially when it comes to customer success, right? A little wave, a little gif of video and audio, a voice memo. So, that's what's on our mind.

And then, how do you use AI to do it at scale? So, there's a lot of really cool tech coming out, some of the stuff we're building too, which is, if you've got a larger team, how do you take voice and turn voice into scaling out to all these companies, or contacts for that matter? So, voice memo, right?

Take that for example. So, a new lead comes in, or customer success conversation comes in. How do you use AI voice?

So, for example, Dillon taking your voice, cloning your voice, and now we can turn your voice into text-to-speech to send out an AI memo. Hey Chris, awesome, really looking forward to meeting you. And now I can do that at scale.

So, these are the really cool ways that you can take this one-to-many and apply it to all parts of the business. So, that's what's on my mind. I think about it all day, and it's just some of the cool ways that we're applying AI to texting and messaging.

[Dillon] (4:25 - 4:51)

I've been having a bit of an AI revelation myself lately, and so I feel like I've talked about this a decent amount in a couple of different mediums, and so I'm actually, I would rather defer to Rob first in here. I also, full disclosure, have heard of Sales Message before, and so I want to give Rob the floor with an opportunity to ask questions, clarifications he might have about Sales Message, or about the topic of AI specifically.

[Rob] (4:52 - 6:42)

Well, I think it's cool, because I think what I love about this topic is we're looking at a very specific use case, and that specific use case starts with where we are today, which is an observation around the efficacy of text messaging and text messaging with customers. I feel like that's always been an interesting one for me. There's a huge opportunity there.

My last job I found, we had triple the open rates, text message versus email. Not a major surprise. People don't really like unread texts, but people don't care nearly as much about unread emails, so we're sort of taking that foundational understanding, along with also there's a little risk that comes with that.

My best clients, even best past, Dillon always gives me shit for this, that even my best past clients from 10 years ago, I still text with them, because I just like them as people. My best client relationships have been built in large part via text messaging, and voice notes too, things like that. Not these formalized meetings, not these big structured QBRs, but it's a very familial, personal relationship.

Obviously there's risks that come with that, and I think that's where I started to think about AI, but even before I get to AI, I think about the risk of, there's always this risk of being a little too familiar. And to be honest, if any vendor that I work with right now started texting me, I would say, get out of my phone. This is a sacred space for me.

This is for my life, my personal life. So I do think there are elements that have to be there to say, okay, this is the right time. This is the right strategy for our business, our relationship.

And then I think that how precious that relationship is really gets magnified when you start to layer in AI, because you can't send AI voice notes to someone you've never sent voice notes before, presumably. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just riffing here, I haven't done this, but I don't know, I'm curious to learn.

[Chris] (6:42 - 9:08)

Yeah, I'm going to the extreme, right? Like how do you use all this school stuff, right? But there is, yeah, to your point too, is like at the end of the day, it is about building that relationship.

And so the relationship is in that pocket. And so some businesses, you don't need to implement it in that particular way, right? Or maybe this type of organization where it's high B2C volume, hey, promotional texting is where it's at, right?

For customer support and getting feedback, let's make sure we're sending an NPS score and those automated messages. And so there's points of that to where, hey, let automation take over that, right? And that is an automated message and people know that.

But then when it comes to like the personal side of it, I don't want to use my own phone, right? And so how do we do that for a company, for an organization? And there are certain ways to engage and manage to where you're not tainting that relationship.

You're allowing your team to create that same relationship over SMS that you have, Rob, with your customers, but do it within the organization, you know? So like there are all these extreme ways that you can use it it's not gonna apply to every business, right? So like a voice memo, but you talk about like the compliance side.

So you can't just like take a list and a text message and expect it to work. So the whole world of messaging has gotten way more white in a sense. The carriers are like, no, you're not gonna do that anymore, right?

So every business now has to get approved, right? Compliance is the term, but people think, oh my God, compliance, it's legal. So now you just get approved to send A2P or business text messages.

And then where within your business are you gonna apply it? Hey, you know what? We have a web form, we're capturing a phone number, we're not doing anything with it.

Maybe we're calling, maybe we're not. Now you can use SMS to engage right away and create that conversation, right? So there's all these ways to add messaging across the entire life cycle and do it in a ethical way, not in a spammy mass blast, right?

And a typical marketer would take that same approach like, hey, we've always done it like this on email, let's apply that same methodology on texting. That's the wrong way to look at it because, hey, this is my personal space, don't mess it up.

-: 10:22

Well, so Chris, I wanna get to this, but before I do, I think it's important for you to understand that Rob's first job ever at a SaaS company, he lived in his customer's basement. So his idea of familiarity with customers is a little bit different than most of us, but it's interesting that even Rob, as weird as he is, recognizes the stakes of all of it, right? How this enters somebody's personal space, at least the way we understand it today.

Like I think texts are quickly exiting that space because of all the promotional stuff we get, how flippantly we give out our cell phone number because it is also so easy to block those phone numbers. Like I do that all the time. I'll go give out my phone number so I can get a discount and then I block that phone number so they can't text me anymore after I got the discount.

But so the tech is cool, but I think the art of how you determine who is, what is fertile ground for using the tools at our disposal and how you determine that, I think is equally as interesting. And I'd be interested to hear, Chris, with the time we have left, how you guys are educating your customers on reading the room, so to speak. Yeah, good question.

[Chris] (: 10:23

So we have a framework, right? We haven't really publicized this, writing a book. What do you know, right?

That's Rob's favorite word, by the way. There you go, Rob, you're gonna love this. You got philosophy, methodology, technology.

So the philosophy, if you study any Simon Sinek, start with why, right? So we believe conversations are good for business. So like Dillon, you fill that out, right?

You got the coupon, cool, but it delivered the mechanism, which is you took advantage of it, right? So the philosophy, we believe conversations are good for business, whether it's a lead, whether it's an existing customer, past customer, client, whatever it is. The best way to do that is over SMS, not WhatsApp or Facebook or email or call or whatever.

It's through messaging, through texting. The way in which that we help businesses create more conversations, which conversations equals more growth, more sales, more revenue, right? Is through a framework we call textizer business.

So what that means is you can add text messaging across the entire life cycle. You can use it to generate leads. You can use it to, when somebody calls a number, to create a missed call automation, to take that conversation to SMS. You can use it to qualify, to capture data, to push to HubSpot or Salesforce, to book a meeting, right?

Using AI on Calendly, on HubSpot meetings, on whatever it is. You can use it to remind them of that. You can use it to rebook it, reschedule it.

If they cancel it, sort of win it back and ultimately get them to show up. And then you can use it to drive promotional text messages, again, if you choose, right? To drive revenue, coupons, those sort of things.

You can use it to get reviews, right? We've all gotten the review text message, right? Lead review on Google.

You can also use it to get feedback like an NPS score and then the whole cycle begins. So when you look at any business, that's the framework. Every business has leads and customers and all that stuff.

So where can you add these tiny text messages today? So like the first thing that we always say is, what's the primary need right now? Hey, we've got a lead conversion problem.

Awesome. Add text messaging there, make it compliant, add this little disclaimer in your web form and automate an SMS to engage with them to shorten that cycle. Because the cycle of an SDR calling and emailing going back and forth may take days versus an SMS may take minutes or hours.

So that's the way that we think about it. And then ultimately you have technology, which is, hey, we built a platform. It has the features that you can apply across this whole life cycle to textize your business.

[Dillon] (: 12:54

I love it. It's cool. And I personally take the most value from that framework because I think that that's something you can apply to all different types of work, not specifically to sales message, though I think you have thought about it a lot and I love the thought process.

That is our time, Chris. I would love for you to come back maybe in a couple of months and talk a little bit more about sales message, specifically the journey you're on and what that looks like. And if we could tie it back into customer success and specifically the ways in which they can use it, I would love that even more.

But for now we do have to say goodbye. I will do that. I appreciate you guys.

[VO] (: 13:36

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all general inquiries, please reach out via email to hello at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

To learn more about advertising on The Daily Standup and the Lifetime Value Media Network, please reach out via email to advertising at lifetimevaluemedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.