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Text Messaging in Playbooks

Reaching out to prospects or customers in creative ways and through multiple-channels is key to getting a hold of decision makers. With this update reps can now send ad-hoc text messages through Playbooks.

How to Send and Receive Text Messages

  1. Load a record in Playbooks
  2. Click the SMS button at the bottom of the page
  3. Select the appropriate number to text, write a message and press send. Both sides of the conversation are displayed directly in Playbooks.

When a prospect responds to a text message the rep is instantly notified in Playbooks via the notification feed. By clicking the notification reps can get right back into the text conversation

Enabling Text Messaging
Each rep who is going to be texting needs to have a direct inbound number assigned to them that is text enabled. Administrators can easily tell which direct inbound numbers are text enabled by looking for the text enabled icon next to the direct inbound number

To assign a direct inbound number to a rep:

  1. Click the Teams tab in the Playbooks Manager App
  2. Click on the name of the user
  3. Under “Direct Inbound Number” click “Change”
  4. Select a Direct Inbound Number that has the SMS flag next to it – that number is text enabled.

If there are no available direct inbound numbers, or there are no direct inbound numbers that are text enabled, please contact your account manager to acquire new numbers.

Texting Limitations & Cost
Each rep who will be texting must have a direct inbound number. There is no additional cost to text-enable a direct inbound number. Text messages are included with existing licenses and are sent with no additional charges. Extremely excessive texting will be flagged for review.

Implementation Details:

  • Organizations should consult their legal teams prior to enabling text messaging.
  • Administrators must contact InsideSales.com support to purchase direct inbound numbers or to text-enable existing direct inbound numbers. Users without text enabled direct inbound numbers will not see the option to send text messages.
  • When the first text message is sent to a prospect a task is created in the CRM with the body of the text. Subsequent text messages do not create CRM tasks. This will be improved in future updates.
  • Text messages are only available as ad-hoc steps and are not available in Plays, automatically, or in mass.

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Administrator Sync Log

Playbooks saves a tremendous amount of valuable sales data to the CRM. Every instance of the CRM is completely different, and that sometimes means that permissions or other issues prevent Playbooks activity tasks from successfully being created in the CRM.

For example, if a user calls a record in Playbooks and immediately deletes that record from the CRM, when Playbooks goes to save the task in the CRM the CRM returns an error and the sync cannot proceed.

To help administrators more proactively identify and resolve CRM syncing issues, a new sync log has been released.

There are two parts to the sync log:

  1. The Task Sync Results provides a CSV file containing all tasks created in the last 30 days, and the outcome of the sync. If an error occurs, the error is provided in the output file. Columns include record IDs, activity IDs, and sync attempt data.
  2. The Play Status Sync Results provides a CSV file containing all attempts to update Play information to records within Playbooks.

Implementation Details:

  • Administrator Sync Log must be enabled via permission groups to be accessible to users. By default, on release the standard Administrator and Manager have this permission enabled.

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Salesforce Authentication Improvements

The Playbooks team is constantly looking at ways to improve and simplify the integration with Salesforce. Playbooks can be configured to send and retrieve data from the CRM in a number of different ways – either using end user authentication or access user authentication.

With this update, if an organization is setup to both send and retrieve data using the Access User only then Playbooks will no longer require that the end-user authenticate to the CRM as part of setup. There is no reason for Playbooks to require end-users to authenticate if all CRM syncing is done through a single Access User.

Implementation Details:

  • No implementation required. This only applies to organizations that set the Access user in all syncing options found in the “Salesforce Access User” page in Settings within the Playbooks Manager App.
  • These changes essentially require less Salesforce data access and does not increase the scope of the data that Playbooks requires.
  • This change only applies to customers using Salesforce CRM.

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Emails for Tracking Events

Knowing the exact moment when a customer or prospect engages with an email is a critical component to any deal. Prior to this update, Playbooks only displayed email tracking notifications when a rep was actually logged into Playbooks.

With this update, reps can now optionally receive real-time emails anytime a prospect engages with one of their emails. By giving reps email notifications for tracking events, reps are kept in the loop on tracking events even when they are away from the computer.

Reps can optionally enable this feature by going to Settings in Playbooks, clicking Email, and enabling the setting called “Email Tracking Notifications”.


Implementation Details:

  • Reps can enable or disable this functionality within the settings page of Playbooks. The setting can be found under the email category in settings.
  • By default, this functionality is released OFF, meaning reps do not automatically get tracking events emailed to them.

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User Property Merge Fields

Customizing emails can mean the difference between an ignored email and closing a deal. Previous to this update, Playbooks enabled nearly any field from the CRM objects to be used as merge fields. With this update, fields from the user object from the CRM can be used as merge fields.

For example, you may create an email template that automatically merges in the rep’s first name. IE “Hi this is REP NAME, your sales rep at COMPANY NAME”.


Implementation Details:

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Other Product Updates

  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator steps now appear in the activity feed in Playbooks.
  • Addressed some issues that caused agent legs to be slow to connect.
  • Increased the audio quality on call recordings.
  • SAML Login support has been added to the login screen for Playbooks.