By: Eva Keller
Most sales teams treat text messaging as a channel for confirming dentist appointments and telling a spouse they’re running late. They send hundreds of texts a day in their personal lives and almost none for work. Then they wonder why their emails go unanswered, and their calls get flagged as spam.
By the end of this article, you’ll understand why texting outperforms email and phone for B2B sales and recruiting, when in the sales cycle it actually works, what the compliance rules really require, and the single mistake that kills most texting programs before they produce a result.
The case for texting starts with how quickly people actually look at their phones. According to Andrew Davis, SVP of Marketing and Sales at TextUs, a business texting platform built for B2B sales and recruiting teams, read rates for text messages sit at the top of any business communication channel, and most messages are seen within minutes of arrival. Compare that to the fate of an average sales email, which competes with a hundred others in an inbox and often lands in a spam folder, or a cold call, which now arrives on most phones stamped “potential spam.” A text does none of that. It shows up on the person’s home screen, addressed to them, and it gets read.
Where Business Texting Fits, And Where It Doesn’t
The most common mistake teams make is treating texting like a top-of-funnel blasting tool. It isn’t one. Andrew is direct about this: mass outreach to a cold list of twenty thousand contacts is not what texting is for, and doing it invites opt-outs and compliance trouble.
The channel earns its value after the first conversation. A discovery call, a demo, a cold call that actually connected. Any of those is the moment to open a text thread. “Great talking today. Sent you an email with everything; let me know if you have questions.” It takes ten seconds, and it converts a one-time conversation into an open line. Now, when you need to reschedule, clarify a contract term, or answer a pricing question, you have a channel with a high likelihood of a fast response instead of another email sinking into the pile.
For recruiting teams, the logic is the same, applied to candidates who ghost email but reply to a text within minutes. The decision rule is to use texting to accelerate relationships that already exist, not to manufacture ones that don’t.
Speed Is The Lever Most Teams Underrate
Response time is where texting compounds. Andrew calls speed-to-lead one of the most underrated levers in sales, and he argues it matters more now than ever because buyer attention spans keep shrinking under a constant stream of notifications.
The effect is most dramatic in time-sensitive industries. In insurance, where a prospect requesting a life or auto quote is often shopping several providers at once, widely cited lead-response research has found that reaching the prospect inside the first minute makes conversion substantially more likely than a slower follow-up. Texting is the only channel that reliably operates at that speed. Email waits for the next inbox check. A call can go unanswered. A text is on the screen in seconds.
The takeaway for any team is to measure how fast you respond to an inbound signal, and to treat that number as a revenue metric rather than an operational one.
The Compliance Rules Are Real, But They’re Not A Maze
The single biggest reason teams avoid business texting is a misconception: that every message requires clearing some special legal hurdle. It doesn’t.
There are two main pieces. The first is registration through The Campaign Registry (TCR), which classifies the kind of messages a business sends. The second is 10DLC, short for “10-digit long code,” the standard business phone number that carriers tie to that registration. Consent sits alongside both. In the United States, email is an opt-out channel and texting is an opt-in one, but opting in is more flexible than most people assume. A checkbox on a form is one way. Opt-out language included in a first message is another. A keyword opt-in, where someone texts a word to a number and triggers an automated response, is a third.
The practical rules are simple. Don’t spam cold lists. Do open a texting channel with customers and prospects you already have a relationship with. And choose a provider whose platform monitors compliance for you; some now flag risky message wording before you hit send. As Andrew puts it, once you’re set up, the ongoing work is just being a good texter.
The Mistake That Actually Kills Texting Programs
Here’s the part teams get wrong even after they’ve worked through everything above. In Andrew’s experience, the leading reason a texting program fails is not deliverability, compliance, or results. It’s internal adoption.
A powerful platform that reps won’t use produces nothing. Andrew’s advice is to choose tooling for ease of use above almost everything else, favoring a product that logs to your CRM, works from a mobile app or a Chrome extension, and can be picked up quickly by a team that may be spread across the country. If adoption is hard, the channel dies quietly regardless of how well it performs in a pilot.
What To Do With This
For B2B teams still leaning entirely on email and phone, the evidence points to an uncomfortable conclusion. They’re optimizing the channels buyers increasingly ignore while sitting out the one buyers actually read. Texting won’t replace a multi-threaded approach, and Andrew recommends using phone, email, and LinkedIn together. But if a team could pick only one channel to reach a prospect after the first conversation, the text case is strong.
Start narrow. Turn on texting for post-conversation follow-up with existing prospects and customers. Register properly, keep the messages direct, log everything to your CRM, and measure response time as a revenue number. Then watch what happens to the deals that used to stall.
