SMS: Friend or Foe?

Recently, an executive at a direct selling company expressed concern about sending distributors and customers messages through SMS. It was his belief that communicating with his audience in this way was too intrusive and that good old-fashioned email was the least of all evils when it came to communication channels. I can certainly understand the sentiment, consumers do exhibit more sensitivity to unsolicited SMS messages and the government also works to protect this channel through regulations like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

However, I believe it’s a sucker’s choice to either go all in or all out with SMS messaging. The truth of the matter is that, when done right, no channel is more effective for audience engagement than the same channel that people use to interact with their closest friends and family. In North America, that channel is overwhelmingly SMS (although a strong argument could be made for social media channels like TikTok and Instagram for teens and Gen-Z).

The reason why SMS is so effective is that it is the most frictionless of channels – I’m already engaging with my closest circle of associates through SMS, so if you can effectively reach me there, you will get my attention. The carriers confirm this phenomenon by saying that 98% of SMS messages are read and a whopping 90% are read within the first 3 minutes of receipt^[1].

Most consumers are happy to receive automated messages if they see and feel the value. A clear example of this is using SMS as a means for multi-factor authentication – you want to access your bank account online? Your bank may send you a code via SMS to make sure it’s really you. We really have no issue with use cases like that.

What consumers do have issues with, however, are unsolicited text messages that are salesy and overly marketing heavy. We work hard to protect the sanctity of our preferred channel, the last thing we want is to muddy it up with tons of unwanted messages like…well, like what email has become.

So as a direct selling executive, how do you strike the balance of leveraging a messaging channel that is the most effective without burning bridges or relationships by abusing it?

I work with a mobile messaging expert who helped me understand this dynamic very well a few years ago. He explained to me that any incoming message we get via SMS is an interruption, even if it is coming from our best friend. And how true that is, an incoming message is unexpected and an interruption. The key is to make sure that the interruption is a welcome and valued interruption. I want my friends and family to text me. These interruptions enhance my life. And the modality of SMS is such where I can reply on my own time and on my own terms, increasing its convenience.

So how do you ensure that your messages are welcomed and valued? Here are a few tips:

• Understand the law. We live in an increasingly regulated world and SMS is no exception. There are government regulations like the aforementioned TCPA that you need to be aware of (violations can be as much as $1,500 per message!) as well as regulations that the carriers (T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, etc) The carriers recently implemented a protocol for automated messages through long codes (10-digit phone numbers) called A2P 10DLC. These protocols require companies to register their campaigns in advance and adhere to terms of service. Compliance to these regulations requires companies to employ more sophisticated technology platforms.

• Make it easy for users to opt in and opt out. Users should have 100% in control of your SMS relationship. This puts the onus on you to ensure the messaging experience they have feels valuable.

• Move beyond marketing. Yes, you want to use this channel to promote your products and services but that relationship is too one-sided. Consider implementing benefits and services into SMS such as allowing customers to use SMS for customer service or to access coaching and educational tips and tutorials.

• Implement personalized communication preferences. Taking a cue from email subscriptions, you can give your distributors and customers choices about what types of messages they receive as well as frequency of such messages. The more control they feel, the more likely they’ll hang around.

• Create a Return on Investment calculation. For all its virtues, SMS is expensive. And A2P 10DLC policy modifications also came with even more price increases. You should think through an ROI calculation to ensure the money you are putting in is at the very least paying for itself. Can you use SMS to increase customer loyalty? To help distributors be more effective? To increase sales? To decrease contact center costs? Ultimately, like with any tool, you need to justify its usage.

If you think about it, the relationships you value the most in your life, whether with people or with businesses, you are quick to offer your mobile number to be communicated with. If you’re distributors and customers value you in such a way, they will surely give you a shot at proving that you can use SMS to help them and in turn, help you.

^[1] https://www.twilio.com/learn/call-and-text-marketing/best-practices-text-sms-marketing

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Vince Han
Mobile Messaging Best Practices for Direct Sellers

Direct selling companies rely on being able to effectively communicate with their field. This is simple when a company is starting out with just a handful of early leaders; company founders can easily spend time developing and nurturing relationships with their first distributors.

Then the company grows to the point where the founders can no longer personally keep up with everyone in their field. When this happens, maintaining effective communications transitions from personal, one-on-one communication to mass communications.

The modes of mass communications have ranged from email to social media posts, but in recent years, companies are finding that the most effective communication channels are popular messaging mediums like SMS, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.

Mobile messaging channels are effective because they are the same channels where distributors are communicating with their first level contacts–friends, family, and work colleagues. These messages take priority over all the other influx of messages that inundate people today. And people work to fiercely protect the sanctity of this primary messaging channel by guarding against unwanted, unsolicited, spam-type messages.

If direct selling companies look to utilize mobile messaging (and they should), they need to be adept at creating messaging that consistently feels valuable to the user. They should keep in mind that any incoming message that comes to your phone is going to be an interruption. Some of these interruptions are welcome (like a message from a loved one or a friend) while others will feel unwelcome (like an unsolicited marketing message).

The following is a best practices list that direct selling companies should consider when using mobile messaging.



Set user expectations and keep that promise

Whether you use an automation tool or have staff handle messages manually, it’s important to establish a set of expectations that users can consistently rely on.

For example, let people know how frequently to expect messages. Something like, “We will rarely message you more than once a week and it’ll always be something important enough that you’ll want to stay updated.”

You can also give people an idea of the types of messages you’ll send. Uncertainty is one of the main reasons people get nervous about messaging. If they’re worried that the messages will just be marketing or guilt-tripping to work harder, people are less likely to engage. On the other hand, if you can establish trust quickly and send truly helpful messages, people will get excited to see each new message.

Choose the right channel for the right audience member

Depending on where someone is in the world and what demographic they belong to, their primary messaging channel preference might vary. A partial list of primary messaging channels includes SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Viber, LINE, Kakao, WeChat, VK, and Telegram.

It’s important to gather feedback from your field when selecting channels. Where are they already messaging friends and family and trying to connect? Ideally, your messages should be in that same platform. You want them to feel like your messages are deeply integrated into their work and existing network. The farther they have to go to hear from you–even if it’s just into another app–the less they’ll pay attention to your messages.

Understand your users (where are they, what is their schedule)

Depending on your core user demographic, the types of messages and when you want to send them are very important. For example, maybe your core audience has full-time day jobs and focus on their direct sales business on nights and weekends. In that instance, getting your messages onto their screens at the right time can make a big difference in how they respond. If possible, consider letting your field set their own schedule to receive your messages to increase the chances of your message getting to them at the right time and place.

Write in a consistent voice

The compelling reason why messaging is so effective is that it’s conversational. In fact, in product terms, this is called conversational user interface because it isn’t like traditional software that requires logins, menus and search bars. Chatting with a trusted source is the most frictionless way to convey information.

So make sure that you message in a consistent voice over time. If you don’t, the experience could feel jolting. If you think about it, people work hard to portray themselves authentically when messaging their friends and it should be no different when receiving a message from a business. A consistent “look and feel” to your messages naturally develops trust and helps reinforce your brand identity with your field. The relationship they have with your messages should mirror the relationship you want them to have with your brand–whether that means being professional, straight-forward and efficient, or fun, surprising, and energetic, or anything else.

Offer interactivity

While you probably don’t have the time to message everyone individually, creating a messaging group can be a great way to help everyone feel a part of the community and get individual interaction without adding to your corporate team. You can create a group with several members, then simply start a discussion and let the group talk amongst themselves. This allows your field to naturally nurture each other and helps scale up your existing resources.

The best discussion questions are open-ended and require nuanced responses. For example, instead of asking, “Did the onboarding materials provided by corporate help?” you can ask, “What was the most helpful resource for you when you were first starting out? Why was that resource more helpful than the others?”

Another way to scale up your corporate resources to grow with your field is to build a chatbot. A good chatbot can provide step-by-step mentoring and answer a large number of the most common questions your field asks.

With a good chatbot in place, your existing team can spend less time answering the same question over and over and more time dealing with the most important work of developing your field.

Personalization

The more personalized a message feels, the more people are going to pay attention to it. Personalization can be a key factor in making a message feel helpful instead of annoying.

Thankfully, many messaging platforms offer ways to personalize messages at scale. Adding in a name to a message is now fairly standard and straightforward, but you can also find ways to personalize beyond the name, including messaging preferences like time of day and frequency, or allowing users to “follow” certain topics and not others so that the messages you are sending out are most likely going to the audience that wants and needs it the most. Additionally, full chatbot solutions can offer more complex personalization based on time with the company, rank, recent account activity, and so much more.



Get smart about what technology to use

As your business grows, you’ll quickly find that manually keeping up with communicating with thousands of people isn’t scalable or doable. This is where marketing automation tools really come into place. Marketing automation tools for email are quite mature but the bad news is that email has quickly fallen out of favor for many users.

Marketing automation tools for mobile messaging are also now widely available although can require sophistication in putting them together correctly and can be costly. This is why businesses should have a solid ROI (return on investment) calculation in place as they implement them.

Key components to effectively using marketing automation include having workflows to keep your contact database clean and adhering to all consumer protection laws and regulations around text messaging.

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The competency you develop in effectively messaging to your field will also translate into interacting with your customers. It is estimated that 85% of all customer interactions will be handled via conversational interfaces this year and a 2017 Nielsen study showed that 53% of people are more likely to choose a business that they can contact via chat.

Direct selling companies that invest now in both the technology platforms and internal messaging competencies and best practices will find themselves a step ahead in this increasingly digital age.

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Vince Han
21st Century Customer Expectations – Can Direct Selling Companies Deliver? 

Can you remember life before Google? 

It’s amazing how entrenched Google (and search in general) is in our day-to-day lives. The ability to ask the Internet any question and get an immediate response is something we can easily take for granted, but it’s the kind of thing that was pure science fiction not too long ago. 

In the United States, approximately 25% of the population was born after Google was founded. These Americans haven’t known a life without instant access to answers via the Internet. And these digital natives are the key audience for any business looking to thrive in today’s economy.



The direct selling industry finds itself at a crossroad – it is an industry founded in the middle of the last century and has proven itself as a vehicle for millions of entrepreneurs, but after multiple consecutive years of declining growth coupled with increasing regulatory pressures, it is in need of major upgrades if not a complete rebirth. 

And there is no better way to reshape the direct selling industry than meeting the expectations of the 21st-century customer. Direct sellers must focus on attracting and keeping distributors as their primary customer as well as on pleasing the end consumers of their products and services. 

So what does a 21st-century distributor expect? 

Immediacy

Yes, Google has trained us to expect immediacy in all aspects of life. We can cringe all we want at this culture of instant gratification, but the expectation is not going away anytime soon. And what do we want immediately? 

• Answers to our questions 
• Problems solved 
• Products shipped 
• To get paid 

 
Seamless Interconnectivity

I recently ordered Apple’s new credit card, the Apple Card. I applied for and obtained the card using the native Wallet app on my iPhone. Moments later, I purchased a new Apple product from my laptop, and immediately the Apple Card appeared as the default preferred payment method. 

Once you experience this type of seamless interconnectivity from one device to another or from one website to a different app, you expect it everywhere you go digitally. 

Basic interconnectivity started with federated identification (e.g. using your Facebook login for Spotify, newsletter subscriptions, Etsy profile, etc.) while more integrated systems rely on advanced APIs (e.g. I can track the delivery status of my Amazon order on the UPS website). 

But there are still major limitations that frustrate users. For example, if I don’t know how to use an app on my iPhone, I should be able to ask Siri for help; but, Siri can’t tell what I’m looking at because the app is managed by a non-Apple company. So, while there is still work to be done to streamline our digital experiences, today’s users expect a high level of integration.

Access to Social Media Audiences

Social media has democratized access to the world—I can create content and have people from all around the planet view it. Social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram give creators access to a seemingly limitless audience. That ease of publishing has been the catalyst of literally billions of hours invested in content creation.

What isn’t democratized, however, is content creation talent. Take a look at most large public high schools in the United States. Instagram and TikTok adoption is ubiquitous but only a small percentage of content creators find broad success. Some are just more naturally talented in creating compelling content—and it is these individuals that are a ripe new market for direct selling companies. 

These influencers would love nothing more than to be paid to continue creating content that their audience craves. Direct selling companies that figure out how to leverage influencer talent and audience are going to be steps ahead. 



Privacy and Online Security

If immediacy plus interconnectivity is the ying for the 21st-century customer, privacy plus online security is the yang. The technological trade-off with an open digital experience is more exposure and risk to personal privacy and security. The more services and servers that know about and host my data, the more at risk I am of being the victim of hacks, security breaches, and identity theft.

While IT executives might complain of trying to service the double standard of openness and security, it remains the expectation from today’s customer. Yes, you must help me have a seamless, integrated experience and keep my data private and secure. 

For direct selling companies looking to thrive in today’s fast-changing environment, they will have to make an honest assessment of where they stack up against these 21st-century expectations. Questions they should be asking themselves:

• Who on our executive team is equipped to help transform our UX (user experience)?
• How do our vendor partners stack up against these expectations? Do we believe that our partners have the people and vision to deliver the user experiences we need?
• How ready and willing are our existing top field leaders to go through the changes needed to attract and keep a new generation of sellers and customers?
• Do we have the organizational discipline to plan for, budget for, and execute the changes we need to make?

 
And if any direct selling company does not sense the urgency to transform themselves, they may sadly find themselves like retail companies (e.g. Toys R Us, Blockbuster, Radio Shack to name a few)  that also underestimated the need to cater to online audiences. And those that make today’s digital consumer a real priority can look forward to being a part of the next generation of direct selling companies.

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Vince Han is the founder and CEO of MobileCoach and a frequent speaker at conferences such as Training Conference, DevLearn,  FocusOn, Online Learning,  ATDTK and others. He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Vince is an industry thought-leader for learning and learning technology with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and chatbot technology. Vince has founded several successful technology companies and resides in Utah.

Guest Post by Vince Han
How Technology Will Disrupt Direct Selling – Are You Ready?

There is a quote attributed to Henry Ford that goes, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” This quote highlights the fact that when it comes to innovation, incumbents and established entities are blind to what’s coming until it’s too late. During the advent of the automobile, surely there were horse breeders and wagon makers who scoffed at its first iterations, but given ample time, innovation will disrupt even the most powerful and established companies.

In recent years, direct selling pundits and executives have bemoaned gig-economy services like Uber and Airbnb and their meteoric growth rates, saying that they have, snatched away time and revenue from what should have been direct selling’s target audience. Also to be bemoaned? The precision and friction-free online shopping experience that Amazon has created.



Looking at these services, it’s fair for a direct selling executive to be asking, “Shouldn’t these innovations have started with us?” But there’s another question that executive should be asking: “What else are we missing?”

Admittedly, forecasting trends and being bold enough to invest in them is much easier said than done. Rather than beating ourselves up, it’s useful to understand some basic human psychological biases that make embracing innovation so hard:

• Confirmation bias – We subconsciously seek out data that represents “proof” to confirm our current strategy, even if our current strategy is wrong. “I’ve asked all my neighbors and they all tell me that they would never give up their horse for an automobile.”
• Sunk cost loss aversion – We spend so much money and time with our existing initiatives that the prospect to throw that all away seems to defy logic. “We just invested a year’s worth of profits designing our new carriage line to accommodate four horses, there is no way we’d throw that away.”
• Greed – reed’s crowning attribute is to rob the future for the present. “We have a ton of interest in our new four horse carriage line now, let’s bank it and worry about the future later.”
• Herd mentality – We instinctively conform to group think, or the behavior of the herd which gives us a false sense of security. “Not one of our real competitors are looking at that automobile idea so it’s not likely that we are all wrong!”

So, in our defense, the fact that we are human makes it more likely that we are blind to important trends and innovation and we often view “innovators” as people with heads in the clouds and not based in reality. However, it certainly feels like we are at an inflection point in the direct selling business with more millennials being drawn to the idea of freedom of employment and more technology that interconnects us to a point where finding and selling to customers is not as hard as it used to be.

So what trends are on the horizon that direct sellers should be watching carefully (if not leading the charge)?

• Frictionless user experiences – One of the hardest things to do is to make things simple, which is why the companies who figure this out truly are innovators. This means that there cannot be any sacred cows preserved in the design process of the experience you design for your customers. Each click or swipe that you require a distributor or customer to do has so much more cost than you think. The best emerging services in the world are so frictionless that any friction in your flow will make the  experience feel clumsy in comparison.
• Multi-sensory user experiences – The value of augmented reality and virtual reality still feel elusive to you? These technologies are just getting started and while the initial use cases that dominate their headlines seem more centered around gaming, the potential is tremendous. Imagine party planning hosts constructing elaborate virtual or augmented reality parties or creating real-life simulation trainings for your distributors. Imagine being able to hold meaningful conversations “face to face” with someone across the globe with simultaneous translation?
• Artificial intelligence and chatbots – Hollywood has done us all a disservice by portraying the ideal of a computerized AI and chatbots being able to converse with humans at an emotional level, like a friend. Therefore, many people don’t believe chatbots have value until Siri can actually replace a real friend (she is far from being able to do that). Quietly, there are arising many value-filled use cases for chatbots and AI, including step-by-step onboarding experiences, informational assistants, front-line customer service, and more.
• Robust API and IoT ecosystems – If direct selling companies do not have robust, extensible APIs with their databases, they will inevitably fall behind. The more context you have, the better chance you have to deliver the right content to a customer. Context requires “things” to talk with each other from the physical things in your environment (hence “Internet of Things” or IoT) but more importantly, systems. Making contextual data available at your distributors’ fingertips is a powerful innovation. Most companies have some semblance of a dashboard today, but imagine a dynamic dashboard that updates you on the most up-to-date, actionable data no matter where you are.
• Software that works – This one is admittedly a bit tongue in cheek but developing software that works the way it’s supposed to can be hard stuff. One could argue that the companies that just deliver software that works are innovative in their own right! This represents companies who are disciplined, smart and restrain themselves from the dreaded biases listed above.

There are undoubtedly other important buckets of innovations not on this list. After all, the very definition of an innovation is developing something that didn’t exist before. So what now? You are committed to embracing the appropriate levels of innovation and disruption, where do you go from here so you aren’t stuck “trying to breed a faster horse”?

It’s critical that direct selling companies hire, retain and empower technology executives that understand  the complexities of implementing innovative technologies but are first and foremost champions of the user experience. Less experienced technology executives will let fear of bugs and scope creep direct their biases. More experienced technologists will be a champion of frictionless experiences and user delight.

Direct selling executive teams need to surround themselves with a diverse group of thinkers and doers, deliberately examining and challenging current assumptions as well as the data that is informing those assumptions. Healthy debate and counter-debate is a great antidote to the biases of herd mentality or loss aversion. These teams should also develop a culture of trial and error. Constant tinkering done with purpose and an infrastructure of measuring ROI will do wonders to keeping open minds and staying ahead of the competition.

Which direct selling companies will be the multi-billion dollar companies of tomorrow? I’m betting on the innovators.

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Guest Post by Vince Han
What Direct Sellers Can Learn from the Corporate Training Industry

The success of any direct selling organization is determined by how knowledgeable, skilled and motivated their field distributors are. Thus training has always been a major pillar of a direct seller’s sales and marketing strategy.

Similarly, large corporations (or any size corporation for that matter) are only successful as far as their people are able to carry them. All major corporations have a team dedicated to training and developing their people. These teams are often called L&D (Learning and Development) or Talent Management teams.

Of course, direct sellers differ because their sales organizations are not employees that report to an office and a manager,subject to promotions or firings based an annual performance review. No, direct sellers have a decidedly unique challenge in influencing and shaping the development of its army of entrepreneurs. That said, there is much that direct sellers can learn from the structured, methodical way that corporations train and develop their staff.

Here are the top lessons that direct sellers can learn from corporate training best practices:

• Enable learning technology 

Corporations have turned to learning technologies such as Learning Management Systems, chatbots, e-learning courses, e-learning libraries and alike to empower employees to be able to constantly learn and develop. These tools also allow the organization to manage and measure all the learning that takes place. Direct sellers can take advantage of the plethora of learning technologies that have been developed in the past decade to power the development of their field.

• Hire instructional designers

Believe or not, there is an army of specialists whose expertise is designing training to be most effective for a learning audience. Direct sellers can tap into this talent pool to update their training materials to meet today’s ever changing digital workforce.

• Establish a training ROI sensibility and measurement infrastructure

In an always data-driven environment, corporations are insisting that every investment have an ROI associated with it. Why should training be any different? Smart organizations can tie training initiatives to business outcomes, thereby manage their investments strategically and wisely. Direct sellers should be able to ask themselves, “If we teach a certain skill, how can we measure its outcome?”

• Identify skills gaps

A key element in many corporation’s training strategy is to start with assessments to determine skills gaps. Whether a “360” assessment or some kind of personality guide assessment, helping people recognize their strengths and gaps is an important prerequisite to getting their buy-in with whatever training they need.

• Espouse a career-building philosophy

Today’s workforce is accustomed to the idea that they are highly likely to switch jobs a number of times throughout their career. In fact, a recent PwC study^[1]showed that millennials most valued the opportunity to learn and grow when asked about what is most important to them in the workplace–rating it even higher than salary. Employers that help “up skill” their workforce do risk that they will be investing in their people only to benefit a future employer,but they risk even more by not training them. There is an purported exchange between executives of a major corporation that went like this:

CFO: “What happens if we train our people and they leave?”

CEO: “What happens if we don’t and they stay?”

Corporations cannot afford to ignore building the skill sets and careers of the people they most depend on.

• Make required training accessible and engaging

“Performance support” is a training buzzword that has really taken root among training professionals in recent years. The term refers to providing resources for an employee to help them do their job (e.g. imagine a job aid such as a picture of a pizza to help someone at a pizza store know what toppings to put on each type of pizza). In complex job functions like sales, providing resources at a learner’s fingertips delivers huge value to the learning curve of that person. Direct selling companies need to deliver training resources right at the fingertips of their field and that training should be easy to navigate and intellectually engaging.

• Understand the role of the manager

Corporations understand that training is only as effective as what lessons end up being applied on the job. Gone should be the days when someone attends a training and takes copious notes, only to forget everything learned a week later. Training is exponentially more effective when one’s manager gets personally involved in the training process. For example, what if your manager approached you and said, “Vince, I’m sending you to a training to learn how to work pivot tables in a spreadsheet. This is a vitally important skill that our team doesn’t have.When you get back, you’ll teach it to the rest of us.” In this scenario, how much more likely is Vince to pay attention and really focus on learning the training? A lot more. Similarly, if a new distributor’s sponsor or leader took express interest in the training path of their new team member, that training would be that much more meaningful and effective.

Direct selling companies can benefit tremendously by implementing these ideas and best practices garnered from the corporate training industry and, as they do so, they will not only see a more successful sales field but also a more loyal one.

^1] https://www.pwc.de/de/prozessoptimierung/assets/millennials-at-work-2011.pdf

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