Cody Romness is the co-founder of Allegiate, a fitness company in Los Angeles offering group-based athletic strength training.

While the company specializes in training former college athletes, it also helps less experienced people and newcomers to the world of strength training.

Cody and his team chose HubSpot and Salesmsg as their primary platforms when it comes to sales and marketing software. They also use a software made for the fitness space called Mind-Body. It helps them book classes, sell private training, and process payments.

Nevertheless, Allegiate relies heavily on HubSpot and Salesmsg’s deep integration for sales and marketing to generate leads, close sales, and drive revenue day in and day out.

Visualizing the sales pipeline  

When asked how Allegiate got started with both platforms, Cody explained, “When we started looking for a sales and marketing CRM platform, there was a handful of things we wanted that our current CRM didn't have. For example, the visual pipeline of the sales and pipeline stages that you get with HubSpot is really important.”

“Seeing how many people are in each stage of our pipeline and how long they’ve been in that stage is essential for sales management. Then, there’s the automation that comes from that. If a contact moves from one stage of the pipeline to the next, it triggers a series of automations from that action.”

Cody continued, “On the front end, Hubspot captures contacts through forms and generates everything through one system, simply and easily. There’s a lot of customization we can do to our pipeline and automate based on that.”

“Salesmsg plays a key role in automating our text messaging because managing lots of text interactions is going to be harder than with email. At least in my business. And your rate of connecting with contacts, which is the first step in turning them into customers, is a lot higher with text messaging than with email.”

Another advantage is, “You can automate the text messaging process by writing something like, “Hey, contact firstname, this is Cody from Allegiate. Do you have 5 minutes for a quick call to see if we’re a good fit for you?”

"I know that type of interaction looks simple, but automating it has a big impact when it comes to connecting with leads and getting them into our locations,” explains Cody.

Driving new sales leads

When asked about how they generate new leads, Cody told us, “Our website is a huge driver in terms of new leads. Allegiate is a geographically-located business, so if somebody drives by and then goes to our website, we capture their contact information on the site. They may also click on one of our social media ads.”

“That's the front end of the lead generation side,” he says, “Once leads are in our pipeline, they can purchase an intro offer and become a member.”

“The important thing is that we know exactly where people are at each stage of the pipeline,” explains Cody, “We have outreach and follow-up messages based on specific goals. And up till now, the highest response rates we’ve seen come through text messaging.”

He continued, “For example: You're in our lead generated stage, meaning you purchased, or you gave us your contact information. I’ll put you in a 3-week series with follow-up text messages that try to get you to buy a one-week pass or at least respond back to us.”

“As soon as you answer, that moves you to the connected stage in our pipeline. If you don't respond, we’ll send you four weeks of strategic texts that end with a question to get you to connect and move you into the next stage of the pipeline,” he explains, “Once you're in the next pipeline, our goal is to get you to buy our one-week intro offer.”

“The important thing is that we know exactly where people are at each stage of the pipeline. We have outreach and follow-up messages based on specific goals. And up till now, the highest response rates we’ve seen come through text messaging.”
Cody Romness, Co-Founder of Allegiate

Customer acquisition, simplified

“Every text in our workflow is timed to send you instructions on how to purchase a class or follow up to see if you can find a class that would work for you,” explains Cody, “All texts are triggered based on the goal of having you purchase that pass. If you purchase the pass, it'll take you out of that pipeline and move you into the next one.”

“We’ve leveraged Salesmsg a lot for that aspect of it because it's the thing that people reply to you in a clean, simple way. We currently use it for customer acquisition and day-to-day communications.”

“We have a front desk and members can call our landline. If there's any customer service stuff that happens, or they have a question, they can shoot us in text. If we're running a promotion on Instagram and people want to text us, we can manage it that way,” adds Cody.

“Another nice thing about Salesmsg that other SMS providers didn’t offer, was the ability to sync with HubSpot and then use a Salesmsg number as a landline. We have one number that people text from the prospecting side, and when they become customers, it's still the same number.”

As Cody puts it, “I know it sounds simple, but the last thing I wanted was for members to build inertia when communicating with one phone number. And after they become customers, they have to switch to another number. That didn't make sense to me, so having one number for as long as they’re members is important. And Salesmsg does a great job with that!”

Why Cody chose Hubspot and Salesmsg over other alternatives

“Prior to Salesmsg, we used Zipwhip,” recalls Cody, “It was solid, except it didn't have the automation features I wanted. Some of the other options didn't sync with HubSpot, so I can leverage HubSpot’s power with my marketing and sales automations. Once I found out that Salesmsg and HubSpot played together nicely, I was like, okay, that's exactly what I need! And that's how I made my decision.”

“Because we’re a small operation, we run lean. Not having a technical background, I didn’t want layers of complexity unless they were going to make a massive difference. Salesmsg, connected to HubSpot, does all the things we need to do in a simple, easy-to-execute way.”

“Also, Salesmsg’s support is awesome! Any questions I have, they get right back to me. In the beginning, I know I hit him with a million questions, but Dave was awesome handling them.”

“Because we’re a small operation, we run lean. Not having a technical background, I didn’t want layers of complexity unless they were going to make a massive difference. Salesmsg, connected to HubSpot, does all the things we need to do in a simple, easy-to-execute way.”
Cody Romness, Co-Founder of Allegiate

Favorite, most-used features

When asked about his favorite Salesmsg features, Cody said, “The canned responses feature is really solid. I'll use it to write the first reply, then our front desk can just hop in there and use my reply with other prospects.”

“The message scheduling feature is also helpful,” he says, “We have classes starting at 5:30 am, and I don't think it's right to get a text from a gym that early in the morning. So, we schedule those messages to go out at a reasonable time.”

Both canned responses and message scheduling are specific to Salesmsg. Having everything on the app and getting notifications directly to my phone is also nice,” says Cody, “Plus, being able to manage the sales process from the desktop site or from the mobile app is really important to us.”

“Lastly, are Hubspot workflows. Salesmsg lets me copy and paste messages across different numbers and manage communications in a simple, yet powerful way,” he says with a smile.

Making more sales, faster

“When it comes to tracking metrics, the first thing that comes to mind are the high reply and open rates with text messaging. If all we had was email to move our pipeline, we wouldn’t be growing as fast,” says Cody.

“We’d be much slower, and it would increase the time needed to close new members. Furthermore, the overall user experience wouldn’t be as good. Our emails would be hitting spam filters, and we'd be losing business.”

As Cody put’s it, “The money we spend on Salesmsg buys us more speed to close new customers. It also buys me the freedom to focus on other things. Once I've written a text, I can automate it and don't have to write it again.”

“I see the money we spend on Salesmsg as investing directly into our sales system and it's a huge piece of our sales process and business,” he adds.

“The money we spend on Salesmsg buys us more speed to close new customers. It also buys me the freedom to focus on other things. Once I've written a text, I can automate it and don't have to write it again.”
Cody Romness, Co-Founder of Allegiate

Getting a steady flow of reviews on autopilot

“Another thing that's been really successful is using Salesmsg to get reviews,” says Cody, “When members reach their 50th visit, Salesmsg sends them an automated message saying, “Hey, congrats on your 50th visit! If you’d like to leave us a review on Google maps, it will help future members.”

"That text message has been huge in generating reviews to our Google maps page. Those reviews compound and help us rank better in the search engines. It's an automated process that builds reviews without us having to think about it.”

We hope you enjoyed this case study about Cody Romness and Allegiate. Feel free to share it with your friends and colleagues. And if you’re not already using Salesmsg to make more sales, go ahead and try it out for 14 days free.

‍

This case study was written and published in collaboration with StoryOps.