December 2022 Product Show & Tell part 2

cool I will share the presentation and then we can get started cool so uh welcome everyone to the monthly product show and tell it's the time of the month where we just do a quick recap of the things that we released last month and we announced either in the newsletter or on the app or on the social media platforms and then yeah we just go through the features take questions and take feedback most importantly and then we send the recording towards the end of the webinar so pretty straightforward so we got a pretty pretty exciting agenda for today some really amazing features one is email to SMS Ben is going to go talk about that in depth and then the ability to send and receive audio messages easier inbox navigation navigation and then a security feature namely to factor Authentication so before we get too deep into the conversation myself I'm tawheed altoidi I am a product marketing manager here at sales message and I got uh Ben with me here so yeah hey everybody my name is Ben Francis um if we haven't had the chance to uh to meet yet uh I head up the customer success and support teams here at sales message um so how do best best utilize sales message to achieve uh your uh your team's goals that's what uh that's what myself and my team is here for I've got some really exciting stuff to cover uh some stuff that we've uh We've fielded uh requests from uh from our customers throughout the year and we are really excited to uh to put a bow on some of these features pun intended um to uh to deliver them uh in the holiday season so I think you're really gonna like them cool all right so without further Ado um first feature on the list is email to SMS so in short that's the ability to reply to your messages from your email inbox but I'm gonna pause it there and pass it over to you Ben to kind of go through it and then give us a quick demo absolutely so the the impetus for this feature uh was really we have we have customers that are Beyond just using uh texting for their their sales or marketing uh type of function although this works for both of those as well but uh there's this request primarily stemmed from customers that are operating mostly in the post sales space where I have say like a customer support team or some sort of post-sale team that is more configured to to run uh customer engagements through kind of like a ticket or like an inbox type of format where uh having a bunch of people in sales message may not always make sense although we absolutely support that as an option to have multiple people in a single inbox sometimes it's just easier to be able to send out those those text conversations that you're Fielding uh to a specific inbox um so we we spun up uh the feature to be able to take those those uh email or those SMS engagements and push them out directly via email so I'll show you what this looks like um on the HubSpot ecosystem which is where we we feel the majority of their requests is I really want to have my team using HubSpot as our record of Truth our daily driver platform uh to be able to manage those conversations and have everyone in a specific HubSpot inbox so I'll show you what that looks like from end to end on our side but there is no limitation to only use this within HubSpot we can point these uh these texts that you're Fielding on a specific inbox or set of inbox inboxes to whatever end destination you want so if you want to push those to a a distribution list or something like that you absolutely have the ability to do that as needed so let's let's dive in and show you what it looks like so I'll go ahead and share my screen here tal can you see it all right Ken awesome awesome so in here I will go ahead and I'm going to show you how we set this up so under the settings side if we go to organization settings here you now have a tab called email to SMS this is where we will map what inbox or set of inboxes from sales message need to point to a specific email address you'll see in our specific case we're pointing these to a HubSpot email you can point this to your Gmail or whatever distribution list you want but if we want to get these if the goal is to get these into a into a HubSpot inbox we're going to grab that inbox ID directly from directly from HubSpot so if I were to if I were to confirm I'm a HubSpot customer I'm using this I'm going to go to the inbox here I'm going to go to the inbox settings and I'm just going to grab this email address right here that's all I need and then We're Off to the Races so I'm going to plug that in directly into the email address field here and I'm going to say all right what inbox or set of inboxes do I want to map to to point to that destination so in our case I'm pointing my my specific sales message number to my HubSpot inbox so let's test this out let's show you what it looks like so I'm going to I'm going to send a text directly to my HubSpot or to my sales message inbox from my personal phone here it is this is a test on the webinar then in just a second we're going to see look there it is so now we triggered that and sent that to my specific inbox directly within HubSpot so you can see you know which which phone number your sales message number has received a message from which contact you'll see here what did the message say see we have a couple different options in here so I can bounce directly to the conversation in sales message to reply directly from there using all of our can templates send media assets all of the good stuff that you're used to with sales message I can just bounce directly to that conversation I can manage my notification preferences directly from here or I can just reply directly from here so when I hit send here what this is then going to do this is going to pass this along to sales message and deliver a response directly so sales message pick that up directly from HubSpot I'm going to wait just a second message delivered and there it is on my phone just like that so I reply to an email send an outbound message on that same phone number that my customer is interacting with me on so whether I you know if I'm on the go and it's easier for me to respond via email or if I need to point this to a specific HubSpot inbox and make sure I can manage my workflow that way super simple to get that done yeah so here's the beauty within the uh if you if you don't mind going back to the HubSpot um yeah absolutely so as apps for user you have you have the ability to assign a task at a comment if you click on those three dots there's a lot of options for you there uh top um you know top yeah you're absolutely right so if I want to move this to another inbox if I want to transfer something say this is you know hey this hit my sales team actually needs to go to my my customer support team or it needs to be escalated to a different person I can move those things along directly from here I can also you know tag I can mention I can use hubspot's full Suite of functionality if I wanted to use a workflow where if I get an email from this specific inbox to then create a task or assign a deal or you know the options are seemingly endless for how you can trigger different things to happen based on receiving an inbound text yeah exactly so uh that that's uh that's I I think that's a very cool feature I personally like yeah it really serves to be a like a force multiplier um you know for the for those those teams that are more configured to set up like a like an inbox or a ticket type of a type of functionality um we see it we see it happen a lot on the post sales side but this can be used uh for any any scenario where I really need a one-to-many type of approach uh to managing the inbound conversation flow exactly you can have many numbers and one inbox one email address and that email address is used as a shared inbox absolutely cool so next on the list is yet another way to engage your customers and that is with uh with audio messages so uh pass it back to you Ben to to show us what that looks like yeah absolutely let me just tee this up tee this up on my side here I'm just going to go back to my inbox and let me show you what it looks like so share my screen so just like we're used to with sending all kinds of media assets Via SMS we absolutely have the ability to to send videos and as one would expect audio as well being able to uh you know to ensure that if it if it if we're going to drive the most engagement via an audio based call to action or hey we want to do like a verbal reminder about something we absolutely have the ability to to send that directly so in here under the media library section this this houses all of the all of the media Assets in my account you know gifs pngs uh jpegs PDFs all the above directly from in here so I can grab any of those at any time but now I have the ability to grab an audio file directly from here and use that and send that along so if I wanted to upload like an mp4 or something like that be able to uh to send that along I can attach that as a file you'll see it's playable directly from here I hit send and that sends off as an MMS directly so just one more tool in your toolkit to be able to interact with your customers uh using like a mixed media type of format rather than just texting or pictures you can now have video audio so you have the full gamut of resources at your fingertips to be able to to drive the most engagement with your customers yeah and then you can take it further if you click on those three dots in the message window yeah absolutely you can actually record the audio like on the go yeah totally so just like you have the you have the ability to if I wanted to record a video directly from here uh and auto upload that to my media library you can see right here I'm in the process of doing that I can do the same thing on the audio side so I I hit that little three dots record audio I hit start recording directly from here it's going to capture my audio directly I'm going to go ahead and stop recording and now that that auto uploads as an asset directly to my media library to use later on and there it is you're playable directly from here I can hit done it attaches I hit send on this message and I'm off to the races so in just a second I'll get that on my phone playable as a native audio file cool and uh and then that audio file guess what it was also sent to HubSpot right so absolutely through that integration and I just got it uh cool stuff okay so moving along here and swiftly next is more of a the lighter feature especially for our customers who have a long list of inboxes uh navigation was I wouldn't say easy for inboxes before but I think it got a whole lot easier so uh why don't we why don't you walk us through what we have been yeah so actually let's just pause right here before we uh jump back to the demo um sorry so yeah so the the I always like to set the stage for for the why why did we build this um and the the short answer is is really to help our help our teams manage who we're talking to and on what number are we talking to them on um for a lot of our customers we have multiple numbers that either represent different agents or different business units or regions or locations or maybe some combination of all of the above um and sometimes knowing who we're talking to on what inbox becomes a little a little challenging as the volume of inboxes and numbers we're interacting with our customers on continues to increase and so taking the uh you know taking the logic and grouping functionality from what we're used to on like an email inbox taking that same methodology and and allowing our customers able to categorize and group inboxes together so if I have a regional sales team that has a series of reps uh in it you know in that in that region each with our own number I can group all of those inboxes together and see a top-down visibility of all of those numbers and the conversations those those uh reps are having from one top-down View and so this allows us the ability to cluster numbers together but also be able to Star and prioritize those those inboxes that we want to pay the most attention to um so this allows you to really customize what is most valuable to your team so in this demo environment here so you see I've got all of these different phone numbers in here each with you know you know a series of unread messages things like that but I also have these buckets here you know so like my sales my sales team my marketing team my support team and those have a couple different inboxes within them so if I wanted to you know I I'm part of the executive leadership team at an organization I really just want to get a a top-down view of how well each of my business units that are interacting with customers via texting are doing I have the ability to do that and and do some quality assurance you know for each of them so if I want to see how's my support team doing I pop in here support I can see okay cool this is my Dallas number this is my support inbox you can see these little great tags here that associate that conversation to the inbox that is facilitating that conversation so allowing you to Cluster them together be able to sort between them and see who's working with whom at any given time and being able to prioritize which ones you need to have fixed up at the top of your view so if you're a rep who has access to multiple inboxes but you have one as your primary or maybe a couple and then you have visibility for some others you can make sure to have those be at the top of your list and be able to to customize those groupings so let's show how we do that Beyond just toggling between them so if I go to inboxes here you'll see an option for group inboxes and this is where I can say which cluster of of sales message inboxes do I want to see from one top-down view so you see here my support one my marketing one my main sales and you see I've got supports at Dallas office you know in my marketing one I've got Jonah Pearl and Joel for example and so I can create another group directly from here testing on webinar for example I can add a description if I want and then I can say which which numbers or inboxes do I specifically care about I can just grab as many as I need access to and cluster conversations on all of those inboxes in one view directly from here I create group inbox and there it is and so now when I go back to my inboxes tab I have an option for testing on webinar which shows me all conversations on all those numbers that I've added together so as we're looking to optimize you know what is the what is the daily usage of sales message especially for someone who has access to multiple multiple numbers and multiple conversations we're really trying to refine what are those features that help us be more efficient being able to bounce speak between conversations easier and give us the ability to work a little bit faster and a little bit smarter and so if there are any uh any ways that we can refine on this process without stealing Taos Thunder at the very end we would love to to hear how we can iterate on this and what what are those features that is going to help your team or your agents work just a little bit faster via text we're really excited about this but would love your feedback on how well your team uses this in the in the real world yeah one one last thing there to show Ben is the ability it's very small but you can now if you have a long list of your boxes you can actually search you don't have to keep scrolling because it doesn't order by uh alphabetically so it will show up um the inboxes with unread messages first absolutely I think uh it's only uh it's only right to to round it up with compliance and security as the most entertaining topic uh but nonetheless very important so we added the ability to um to use two-factor authentication um as a secondary layer of security for logging in into the sales message app and this pretty pretty sophisticated feature there's uh quite quite a lot of flexibility in how it's set up and uh yeah so then you can you can Orchestra yeah so just again setting the context for for the why we work with clients across a variety of verticals um you know some that are in the recruiting and higher ed space some that are in uh mortgage Finance um and uh you know the list goes on and on and on um we are industry agnostic here at sales message because texting as a channel works for everyone both uh pre-sale during the sales process and even post sale um and we want to be we want to be the platform to facilitate conversations with your customers throughout their life cycle in order to facilitate those conversations the most in the most effective way we need to ensure that the right people have access to those conversations and those industries that are a bit more sensitive uh on the compliance side you know especially in the Mortgage and Finance space um or even in the healthcare space with uh with access to Phi or pii we want to ensure that we have those those layers of security to access to the conversations at any given time and so throughout 2023 we'll be making some some sizable Investments on on the data security encryption side our first step towards that uh towards that journey is is the launch of two-factor authentication so you have the ability to uh you know to to enable this in two different ways um so you can find this feature under the organization settings under security here um so by by toggling this on you're requiring two-step authentication you know for the team um this you know you have the ability to every user has the ability to um you know will require this this functionality so if we set on the organization itself every user will be required to uh to follow through with that two-factor authentication or I can set it up on the individual member base itself so in here if I want to go to Alexander for example under permissions and here um actually I believe it might be in a different spot apologies guys this is a brand new feature I'm still a personal settings it'll be under personal settings yes my apologies um so security tab here so we can either set this up um at the organization level where all users are required um to uh to input a two-factor authentication code or I can set this up for each individual user um so and I can I can uh Define what my preference is so if I want to use an email based code versus an SMS type based code I can toggle those on or off at the individual user level as needed so especially if you want to scope this down to only people that have access to the billing tab or access to the analytics tab or things like that only people that have that those admin level permissions to ensure that we have two-factor authentication for that uh that corner of sales message you can absolutely scope that yeah so and then yeah so uh the authenticator app you can use any app of your chose of your that you choose whether it's Google Authenticator Outlook any other um authenticator app it's very easy to set up with the QR code and a few things to mention here if you go back to the members tab uh then yeah once you do that you'll be able to see the status of who of your team members have enabled two-factor authentication uh you know just more of a kind of a compliance bird's eye view all in one place and then uh we also although um it's kind of a compliance feature we did not want to make it too too um too cumbersome so on login the users can have the ability to choose between the whatever method they want so let's say they don't have their phone on them they can do email or vice versa and then they also have the ability to set a like a checkbox where it says like remember me so that way um next time they log in they won't be asked about it for like a few days we have rules set up in the background to ensure that um it's uh they're compliant but at the same time the feature is not is not too um too pushy yeah absolutely and we we want to add additional security protocol um to to ensure that we're restricting access when appropriate but we also uh we don't want to set unnecessary gates for your team to have to go through on a regular basis it's going to impede your team's ability to to be able to interact with your customers via text which is the whole point um so like we do have a like a default session duration if your team has questions on exactly how long that is feel free to just chat with us uh we're happy to happy to share that information as needed um but yeah you can absolutely set up a like a remember me protocol to ensure that we're not requiring two-factor authentication every single time we log in gotcha and then the last thing there Ben is if uh if the uh if the admin turns on um to voucher authentication for everybody the user is required to have at least one of the three enabled whether it's email SMS or authenticator they can have all three if they choose to but at minimum they need one so cool uh so I am going to flip back to the slides here uh to round it up and just go through some q a just give me a moment here and there we go all right so uh are you able to see my screen then I am yes perfect yeah so one of the questions is regarding email to SMS let's say you have an ongoing conversation it's just not it's not one message are these responses managed in one thread or it is each incoming message and email on its own it's a great question so our team kind of deliberated what was the right approach here um and the the threading side you know takes takes a little bit of time but in short answer no it doesn't create a threaded view yet but we would love your feedback on does that make sense or is it is that more uh more intrusive to your team's workflow um we haven't found a clear resonance from from our customer base if if it's ideal to have a threaded view like like more of an email based conversation we've gotten some initial feedback from customers that in some cases potentially responses get missed or customers don't get answered um and so rather than delaying this feature we would love your team's feedback on how it how it's embedded into your workflow with a non-threaded view um and yeah if we want to uh we want to use those data-driven decisions based on real-time you know real feedback from customers um so to answer the question directly no not yet um but we would love your feedback on if that would be the most beneficial way to push those those uh text conversations to an email inbox exactly uh one uh one also one other thing that we forgot to mention about um uh email to SMS is you can map one inbox to multiple emails right so uh let's say you um you want an inbox to just be cc'd you know like just to see what's going on you have the ability to do that sorry so in terms of requesting features uh this whole webinar was about new features but I'm sure there is yet another awesome feature around the corner that you need uh to uh you know even enjoy sales message more so don't hold that feedback please head over to feedback.salesmasters.com you'll see everything uh in the open what's what's planned what's in progress what's complete and then you can make a feature or integration requests over there just uh to give you an example email to SMS was one of the kind of higher up uh features that were requested here and then um a week ago it was marked as complete so uh please do let us know but you want us to build next yeah so so dovetailing off of that for just a second um so we have some amazing features on our roadmap for 2023 even you know q1 Q2 um but our team as we're looking to prioritize what we want to build um we actively reprioritize based on what our customers vote on what they tell us to build um so something that that isn't that's in development right now is our own version of of automation our workflows being able to build those build those text sequence for you know send a message set a delay send a follow-up message or these if then branches things like that being able to take your your text conversation to the next level by being able to automate those engagements when appropriate and that has I think it's I checked this morning 68 of the 68 different different accounts have uh have asked for that and we're building that right now as we see the the trends um and you know certain features uh you know start to start to uh to tick up on this on this board which you have access to directly from your sales message account you can comment if you can upvote you can create new requests if they don't already exist on our board um and as we start to uh to see those see those Trend we start to swap places for what we prioritize in what order uh based on those rankings so please please interact with us tell us what you need we want to build what you're going to use the most and what your team is going to get the most value out of so I can't relay how important your feedback is to us enough I'm sure you've received a year you likely received our roadmap survey a couple weeks ago we reviewed that it actually made some product decisions based on that feedback so thank you if you've responded to that if you haven't please check your email um but if at any time whether you are just uh you know just a user of sales message and you just have access to Center received conversations or your uh the the account owner and you're the the one overseeing the texting engagement for your business we want to hear feedback from from all sides so please feel free to let us know and one last thing selfishly I would love more time with you guys to be able to dig in on not only what uh what the features within sales message can do as as the context for this specific webinar uh but in 2023 uh we're changing gears a little bit and and doubling up the amount of content that we're going to be pushing out to our customers and so um if you want a little bit more time with with myself and the customer success team here at sales message we're actually going to be uh be going through a once a month series um on not just how to use sales message but how to use it for a specific purpose say you're looking to uh to get some tips and tricks on the on the most effective call to actions in SMS or say you're looking for the best ways to build workflows in HubSpot uh that embed SMS as one of your touch points with your customers or say you're a little confused about the compliance or what is opt-in uh opt-in compliance look like uh we we're going to use those sessions to Deep dive into the best practice but also the practical application of what it looks like end to end for a specific purpose so stay tuned you know keep an eye out for your email those uh those invites will be coming out soon especially for January and February sessions I would love to get as much feedback And precede questions or use cases to ensure that those are the most valuable for our customers so let us know how we can support you with practical application for SMS as we're as we're not only iterating on the product but iterating on how SMS can be used to drive value for your business uh awesome thank you so much Ben and uh I'm personally looking forward to these webinars um yeah so that's that's we're at time here thank you for attending uh and for those who are not able to register and did not make the webinar we'll send out the recording if you're a new sales message give it a try it's free and add a new channel to your customer engagement stack and see the result starting day one thank you so much everyone I have a great holiday season and we will see you in the new year take care everybody