Adam Torres and Mohamed Elbadwihi discuss WhatsApp for businesses
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify / Stitcher / RSS
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
WhatsApp is one of the most popular communication apps on the planet. In this episode, Adam Torres and Mohamed Elbadwihi, Co-founder & COO at Rasayel, explore WhatsApp applications for businesses and how they are using Rasayel to achieve their sales goals.
Watch Full Interview:
About Mohamed Elbadwihi
Mohamed has a background in digital enterprise strategy and software engineering. When he’s not staring at his computer screen, he can be found staring at the night sky somewhere in Alberta, Canada, where he moved a year ago. He enjoys reading, and writing about the things he reads.
About Rasayel
They are a crew of passionate, diverse and hardworking dreamers. They think from first principles and don’t shy away from hard work – if it needs to get done, they get it done. they’ve created an environment where everyone can share their ideas, be heard, and learn from each other. They’re out there to make our dreams come true – one brush stroke, one line of code, one article, one conversation at a time!
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Mohamed El Badwihi and he’s co founder over at and COO over at Rasael.
Mohamed, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Adam. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you. All right, Mohammed. So I’m excited to talk about WhatsApp today and get into what you’re doing over at Rassail and really how sales teams are using this platform that you’ve developed to to get to get results for their teams and for their organization.
So excited to get into that. But before we do, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our Mission Matters Minute. All right, Mohammed. So Mohammed at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives and experts. That’s what we do.
Mohammed, what mission matters to you? Thanks so much, Adam. The sales mission is to empower sales teams to succeed with WhatsApp and specifically B2B software companies that sell to SMEs. In the majority of the world today, in LATAM, in parts of Africa, in Asia, India. Middle East and so on. B to B software is sold over.
What’s up? In fact, pretty much everything is sold over. What’s up? This is also happening in Europe, and the wave is beginning to hit the United States. The rest is at the forefront of that wave, and that’s our mission. Love bringing mission based individuals on the line to share, you know, why they do what they do, how they’re doing it, and really what we can all learn so that we can all grow together.
So great, great to have you on. And I guess just to just to dive right in. Like, like, how’d you get your co founder? How’d you come up with this business? Like, like, what was the idea? Yeah, well I’ll give you a bit of a background. I was born in Egypt and I lived in Southeast Asia for most of my life.
Now in those countries in, in a large majority of the world, really WhatsApp rules, if you don’t exist on WhatsApp as a business, you don’t exist as a company. Period. So I got interested in this when my co founder, you just mentioned his name is dark. I’ve known for 15 years now since university. He came to me with this idea with this opportunity.
He said, Hey, he was working in intercom at the time, and he said, I’m noticing that people The way businesses talk to their customers is changing. People no longer want to talk to you on the phone, on your website, on email. They want to use WhatsApp. They want to use other social messaging apps. I have no idea if this is going to work out, but I’ve, I’ve got a good hunch and I want you with me on this.
And so we need a shot. He had started for a couple of months on his own. But he was right. And the data. Backed him up, and it’s true there. There is no single channel in the world today that has this kind of usage, this kind of penetration and this kind of growth there. There are close to 3 billion active users on WhatsApp.
And businesses want to be where their customers are. And customers more and more are driving the, the conversation. Really? They’re deciding where they want to talk to businesses. They’ll text you on WhatsApp. And if you’re not there, you’re just, you’re just not there. Yeah. Yeah. So that was how we got started.
And I, I see that like in, in the U S there’s so many, and that, that may be new news for many people that watch this in the U S as well, because they don’t, they may not have used WhatsApp. That much in their, in their business life, in their personal, maybe my, many people may be having, don’t even know what’s that business is.
So I find it interesting, but I just happen to have a lot of friends internationally that use it all the time. So for me, it’s a part of my day to day life and, but I’ve never really considered the next level of that, which is how do I incorporate into the business? Cause like for example, how does, how does it work for mission matters?
How does it work for what we do? So as you kind of dug through and you’re going through and you’re looking at how you can add value to the business community, like what were some of the things that were missing that you were able to then help with for businesses specifically and how they can run on WhatsApp?
Yep. Well, let me give you a little bit of why. What’s up is useful for individuals on the consumer on the receiving side. It’s clean. It’s very clean. There’s almost zero spam on what’s up. And then I’ll also try and tie it with what that means to businesses. That also means a high open rate. If I get a message on what’s up, it’s because I either opted in to receive it or something I care about.
And if it’s not, I can easily block it. Highly regulated businesses that misuse WhatsApp are immediately banned meta and often permanently, and that’s why it’s so much better than SMS. SMS is free for all world, right? There’s no such thing as a business getting banned. You don’t hear that, and they’ll just buy a new number in an instant, and that’s it.
WhatsApp is much more regulated than that, and if you’re a WhatsApp user, you’ll notice that the flow of messages coming to you is very, very clean. And now that you say that, by the way, I can attest to that. I never noticed that you’re right. I get a bunch of spam like SMS messages from everything, including government that are running for office.
And then and then I didn’t like, I didn’t sign up for all this. What are you talking about? Like, and I’m like, how did they, what’s going on here? Probably because of my area code. Right. So somehow they bought some lists and I, every single buddy’s got, right. So, but you’re right. My WhatsApp is clean.
Like I don’t get that. And on that point, actually, I’ll, I’ll tell you a story, but I won’t mention who there is a person running for office in the U S at the moment who Used WhatsApp and decided to use WhatsApp for that same purpose to treat it as SMS. But like I said, WhatsApp is heavily regulated.
So within about a period of one month of them trying to overcome those regulations, they got banned permanently. So, so there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to use it. No, that’s great. So, so continue. So, okay. So it’s clean. So I got it from that standpoint. I understand that there’s less SMS.
So, so what else? So what else? So it’s super personal and familiar to you as a WhatsApp user there. People who use WhatsApp, use it every single day. They talk to their family, talk to their friends. They use it to order groceries. They use it to get updates on their flight. And pretty much every other Business transactions.
So for businesses, it’s a no brainer for them to exist on platforms like this. Now, why would a business want to use, say, a platform like your sale instead of just the normal WhatsApp app? Now, Businesses usually start that way. They’ll get on the WhatsApp app, they’ll talk to their customers. But at some point, your messaging volume increases, your team grows, you can no longer manage the conversations, the manage the leads, manager deals.
And then you suddenly realize that everything is stuck in one place on your phone. What a lot of people don’t know is that WhatsApp actually comes in multiple flavors. There’s a normal WhatsApp, WhatsApp. There’s also what’s that business app, which is for micro businesses from a small business owner.
I’ll just use that. And then there’s what’s that business platform. What’s a business platform is what larger or medium sized companies use. And there’s no official app from meta for that. And so they partner with companies like a sale like us to provide. The tools and the interface and the platform for them.
So the way the user say it is for a couple of reasons. One is to manage their conversation volume and to collaborate with their team in one place. So imagine one shared inbox where all of your WhatsApp conversations come in getting 100 conversations 200 a day. They come into one place. They’re routed to the right people.
That’s one. Two, to integrate with CRMs, if you run a sales team, you know how important a CRM is. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And everything else that goes into that, yes. Exactly. So getting that data, getting that visibility, whether you’re a salesperson or a sales manager or a rev ops manager or whoever you are, you want that data, because that exists today with email, right, and phone calls, all of these tools exists, not so much for WhatsApp.
And so you need integrations. So that’s what resale does and automation when you’re getting a thousand messages every single day or a thousand conversations on what’s up, you want to some way to qualify those messages to automate responses to help your customers to help your sales team. And so building a chat bot is one of the ways that people use resale today to build, for example, a lead qualification chat bot over what’s up.
That will qualify your leads first and then direct them to the right person. You know, this person belongs to Adam, this person goes to Sarah and so on. So, that’s in a nutshell some of the things that people can do with it. There’s of course a lot more but I don’t want to make this too technical.
Where, where do you think this can go in, in the U. S.? Like, like the adoption and everything else. Like, where do you think this can go in the U. S. for, for WhatsApp and adoption overall? Yeah, that’s a, that’s a good question. And like I was saying earlier in A large part of the world, this is everywhere and it’s no brainer for people, but you’re right in the United States, in North America, in Canada, where I’m based now, people don’t really use WhatsApp for business yet.
Not as much and not in sort of the ubiquitous way that we see everywhere else. However, this, this is slowly changing and it’s for various reasons. I’ll, I’ll mention something in that. The last investor or the shareholder earnings call for meta Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that what’s up? Adoption is increasing in the United States and called 2024 the year of what’s up in the U.
S. A. So And we kind of were feeling this over the past year or so, and we were seeing data that points to this, that more and more people are adopting it. But we were not sure because we’re not really in their seat. We don’t know what’s happening. Of course. Yeah. And so there’s a, there’s a shift slowly towards more and more adoption of WhatsApp.
About half of the United States use WhatsApp every single day. About 80 percent use it weekly. These are staggering numbers, business adoption, not as much yet, but you’ll see whatsapp being used for business among communities that are used to whatsapp. So, for example hispanic communities in the United States or businesses that serve that have teams in the U.
S. That sell to Latin America to you know, Asia to other parts of the world that use WhatsApp are adopting it WhatsApp. And so this is happening and it’s happening also very aggressively with the younger generation. More and more of them are just jumping on WhatsApp. It’s so much easier and it doesn’t matter whether you’re on Android or iPhone.
There’s no more. Blue, blue bubble, green bubble, war, everything in the file. Can you not send a file? Exactly. Video. Oh, it’s such a pain. Yeah. It’s such a pain. And so what’s up just takes care of all of that. But for the third reason is that we never thought about that. It’s inviting us the app. It’s when the Apple and Android users of the world unite, that’s called what’s app.
Precisely. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. I agree. I agree. I agree. And that’s, it’s so true. It’s such a, such a little thing, but it’s so true. Yeah. And finally, of course, Meta is aggressively marketing WhatsApp as a better alternative to iMessage and SMS. This is something that they really, really want because they know that the U S is a massive, massive market.
Yeah. And so that’s, that’s happening in the United States and we already see businesses beginning to adopt it in the U S if WhatsApp becomes, and like I mentioned, there’s, Two point about a year ago was 2. 8 billion daily active users. This is not accounts that exist. These are people actively using it every single day.
That’s almost half the planet. Yeah. That number is not going to stop. And so if. If that’s happening and it’s a wave that’s hitting hitting the entire world. It’s there’s only a matter of time before businesses everywhere also jump on that. The United States included. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And I want to go a little bit.
I want to kind of circle back to the. To the product itself. And like, so you, you have all these users and I know in, in any product, you know, it never starts where it’s going to end. Right. We’re always wanting to reiterate. We always want to make it better. So like, how is customer feedback shape this side of the product and, or the product, how we want to word that?
Like, how, how has that happened? Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s really interesting. Adam, and then. This is something that has been important to us from day one. When we started our sale, we had started our sale after running another business in the space of business messaging called Octopods. And through Octopods, we also worked with WhatsApp long before WhatsApp released WhatsApp business platform.
And We learned from customers and octopus was a small integration for an existing platform. I won’t talk about it too much, but it was an integration rather than a standalone platform. Like I say, Liz, we worked with thousands of customers that were relentless about the feedback they gave us. Hey guys, this is great, but hey guys, this is what a blessing.
You don’t always get, not getting feedback is the hardest thing sometimes. Go ahead. That’s right. Yeah. And so, so through that, we developed the, I guess the opinion that we needed to start, let’s say in a standalone product and to start it from the ground up and to realize and to understand that.
Customer feedback is important from day one. So from the very beginning, from our very first customers, we worked very closely with them in shaping what Resail will look like in understanding their workflows deeply in understanding what works and what doesn’t for them. We don’t build for six months in the dark and then release to customers.
We get people on board early on from day one. Yeah, the research to development to beta testing, and it could be that we release something. We usually release a simpler version of a feature, so instead of building a version 1. 0, we’ll build a version 0. 1, and then release that to customers, and they’ll hammer us with feedback and essays on why this is bad.
They’ll provide wording here, Bahamut, not hammer, they’ll provide. Yeah, precisely. So they’re, they’ve been so kind to to offer us those insights. And it also tells us that they care about this problem and they care about what we’re building, which is so, so important to us and. And so we’ve been doing that from the very beginning.
Some of them, you know, we jumped on calls with them every week, or they’re part of our slack group. They talk to us, they’re more than happy to share their, their thoughts and insights. And we learn from that a lot to the point where we can launch something and then end up scrapping it or redoing it entirely because it just didn’t work for customers.
Now there’s one specific. Particular customer that gives us the harshest feedback and that’s ourselves because we are a b2b software company We are a company that sells on whatsapp. We use the sale to sell the sale So our customers talk to us on whatsapp So as soon as we launch something that doesn’t work for our sales team Our sales team is quick to let us know our own team Is very, very, and we feel it, too.
If it’s broken, it’s broken. We’re just not able to use it, right? Yeah. And I think that’s an advantage, or I guess a privilege that we’ve had in that we use it, I say every single day and any little part of it that doesn’t work is felt and it’s felt deeply and it hurts, but it means that we have something that we can fix or change or work on.
Yeah. Can you give it for those that have never envisioned until watching maybe this, this episode and they’re like, okay, I played around with WhatsApp, but like, I don’t get it. Like, how is this going to work for my business? Maybe. Can you give some examples of how you’ve seen businesses use Ross? Yes. Yes.
Of course. There, there are a variety of ways. Of course. Like I mentioned one of the things that people want to do with WhatsApp that they could not do on their normal WhatsApp is to integrate with their CRM or to automate or to build chatbots. But I’ll give you maybe a picture of maybe I’ll do it this way.
A customer journey. How do people actually get to you? There are a few ways and their touch points. Think of it like I see WhatsApp as where email was say 10 or 15 years ago when it was still sort of coming out. People were learning how to use it. Yeah. Now, I’ll give you an example of our website.
People look for something or and then come across our website when as they’re browsing the landing page. There’s a chat with us on WhatsApp button. So that’s the first entry point. People will say, Okay, I’ve got WhatsApp. I’m going to chat with you on WhatsApp. They click on the WhatsApp button. If they’re browsing on their mobile phone, it immediately opens the WhatsApp app.
So that’s the first touch point. It’s very quick. It immediately opens the WhatsApp app. They send us a message. All right, that’s one way. Now I’ll take you through the whole thing, and then I’ll talk about a different way. They receive it. They send us a message. Now it can go one of two ways. If we have data on this customer, we can immediately link them to the right place because we know who they are.
We’ve already got that within the sale as discussed. This is an existing customer, or this is a partner, or this is so and so. If we don’t, the way we and the data for that real quick just so that people that are newer to WhatsApp, maybe in the United States, you it’s, it’s not easy to get a WhatsApp like account.
You have to have an a phone number. You have to sign up. It’s not like a, you just sign up quickly and like a a Gmail address. It’s like, it’s hard to get and verify and to keep and maintain a WhatsApp. It has to be a, there has to be a real person around that. So even just that phone number connecting to the CRM and otherwise, like that’s a big deal.
Like, you know who that person is and they’re, and it’s going to be on a personal device typically. So it’s going to be direct. Communication with the customer. Go ahead. I just wanted to give that distinction for people. That’s correct. It’s gonna be direct communication with the customer. You’re right.
It’s gonna be very likely or most likely a real person. Yeah. And on the business side as well. This is important. Me as a business. And that’s why People are more willing to trust me as a business is that businesses require approval from meta to be on what’s up. And so there is a verification process that happens to say, okay, you, and then meta watches your messaging quality.
If you start getting spammy, your quality rating drops, you’ll be blocked from messaging, you’ll get banned and so on. So that’s also another point on, on that trust relationship. So they sent us that message. Let’s say it’s a brand new person. I don’t know who they are. I’ve just got their phone number. And by the way, it’s, it’s still very private.
And I know there are concerns about privacy and WhatsApp. All that we get as a business from when you send us a message is your phone number and your nickname, nothing else. Meta does not connect it to your Facebook, does not give us that information. They don’t do that because they know as soon as they do that, people are going to leave WhatsApp.
They don’t want to have anything to do with it. So it’s super private. We only get your number and we get your nickname. Yeah. Then the way we have it set up on the sale, if you message us on the sale is a chat bot will talk to you. It’ll say, Hey, what can I help you with? What do you want? Do you want to talk to sales?
Are you curious about our sale? Are you reporting a bug? Are you an existing customer? Are you a partner and so on? And then you pick one of those options. And here’s, here’s an interesting thing about what’s up for business is that people don’t have to type. They get buttons that they can choose on what’s that’s another advantage.
Yeah. So they can click on those buttons. Submit whatever information you ask of them. And as part of the chat bot could be an AI, but if they’re just asking some questions that the AI can answer, it’ll answer them. If not, it’ll say, sorry, I can’t help you. I’m going to direct you to the right person.
It’ll direct them to the right person. So let’s say it directs them to me, Mohammed. I have Rassail installed on my phone. I’ll get a ping. It will say, Hey, you’ve got a new conversation. I can immediately open that up. I start talking to the customer and I’ve got the full WhatsApp messaging experience.
I’ve got post chats. I’ve got media. I’ve got photos, videos, everything I have there on my phone and also on the Rassail web app, but I’ve also got now all the other tools that I’m using. To communicate with this person or to manage this lead or which is my CRM integration. So if that phone number exists in my CRM, it’s going to automatically match it and I’ll see who that is.
If it doesn’t, it’ll create one in the CRM and it will log all of our chats and so on. And so that’s how it starts, but you can imagine the rest of the conversation and how it goes. Now, It’s also not limited to me. I can tag my teammate in that conversation with Adam privately and say, Hey, I need help with this customer.
And my teammate will come. So it’s also very collaborative. Yeah, and what becomes interesting here too, is if you think about the trust with the customer. Like for them to like, most people aren’t because they feel differently when they, when they’re interacting on WhatsApp. So that’s usually a lot, especially a lot of them are going to be doing a lot of their, their, their living within that ecosystem, but it’s different than email.
Like they’re going to have a different conversation. They’re going to have the, it’s because it’s different. They may have just been talking to their, you know, their wife, their husband, their kid, somebody else messaging. And then now you’re in that same feed. So if your business is in that same feed, so to speak as their day to day life and what they’re doing, then the They have for your brand, in my opinion, just becomes that much closer.
It’s like, Oh, I’m talking to mission matters right after on the same app, in the same place, responding to an inquiry that they just talked to their wife or their kid, picking up their kid from soccer practice or whatever else. So now you become part of their lives. So it’s, it’s different than just, I want, I want people to understand like the, the complexity of this.
Like, it’s so much different than just like an email or something else like that. Yeah. Organization like the psychology behind it’s different. That’s true. That’s so true, Adam, and it’s so personal and so intimate. And obviously you, as a business, you also want to be mindful of that, that this is a personal space that you’re talking to customers on and no spamming, right?
Like not doing that anyway, but that’s why it would be so quick to get rid of a business that didn’t. Right. Exactly. Yep. And, and this is also why and this maybe leads me to the second point of how people can people use this is through what’s called campaigns. If a customer, so one way is the customer will come to your website or find you somewhere else or scanning QR code or something like that, and they’ll message you.
The other way is you send a campaign. It’s kind of like a marketing campaign. And obviously you want to be mindful of. Who you’re talking to. Have you interacted with them before? Have they gone to your website or something like that? Or maybe this is just going to be something that is a potential fit for them.
And Meta also is very strict about limiting the reach of these campaigns. But let’s say you run a campaign on a particular list of phone numbers that you’ve gathered by them coming to your website or signing up for something, or you interacted with them somewhere. That gets delivered on their phone and the campaign could be a video with a message with some buttons.
Obviously best practices to allow them to opt out immediately. But that’s the other way they interact with that campaign on their phone. So you are the one initiating the conversation. It could also be a personal campaign. So let’s say I’m a salesperson. I’m reaching out to a few accounts. This is my choice of how I want to reach out to.
The person’s on WhatsApp. Hey, my name is Mohammed. I’m from a sale. You know, I want to chat with you about, so it’s kind of like how you do it on LinkedIn say, so that’s the other way. And the, the thing about WhatsApp because of this trust and because of this nature of how personal it is, the open rates are insane.
Yeah. And rates are like 90 plus percent. Obviously again, you want to be mindful of the fact that this is a personal space for people. So no spam and. Best practice is to allow them to opt out immediately if they think this is not a fit for them. But that’s a huge advantage over email and SMS, where the open rates can sometimes be sub 1 percent for messaging.
So that’s the other way that people can go. Initiate or interact with businesses on WhatsApp. Well, Muhammad, I have to say, you know, this is, you’ve got me excited about WhatsApp again, and that hasn’t happened in a while. So it’s been great having you on the show. I guess I’ll just ask, I mean, what’s next?
What’s next for you? What’s next for Rafael? Quite a lot, to be honest, but I’ll maybe just share a little bit. Like I mentioned, B2B software companies, and this segment of businesses has such a high bar. For product quality. And that’s something that we are proud of in in the sale and for this segment in particular, we’re inventing the way that they sell online, that they sell their software online and specifically to SMEs, because this is.
A segment that we see has not been served very well in this space, and especially in the emerging markets for what’s up like Europe and the United States. There is no method today, no manual and no one that’s focused on this and risk. So we’re saying is building that method and we’ll have a book launched on it soon.
We’ve got also a lot planned on the product side. More CRM integrations, more specific workflow features sales automation and things like that, that we have so people can find out more about that perhaps later when I share some links. And yeah, I think I’ll stop there. There’s also some stuff on AI and how it works with WhatsApp.
That come on, man. This is good. This is good. Well, well, hey, I know one thing for certain there’s people watching that are going to want to follow up. And I, and hey, when this book comes out, you got to let me know. Don’t be a stranger. All right. I got one. Yeah, yeah, I’ll do it. Yeah, we, we are going to try our best to this year, next year, whenever somebody says, I like to put, I like to put them on the hook on that one.
I’m like, now it’s in everybody. First time I’m mentioning it publicly. So I want to commit also Oh, I like your work. I like your work better. You’d like to commit versus I’m putting you on the hook for that. Putting myself on the line. Yes. How do P how do people follow up? How do they connect? How do they continue the conversation?
You mentioned AI, you mentioned other things, other developments. I’m sure there’s others that are going to want to follow up and connect. How do they do that? Sure. We are most active on LinkedIn and on our website, our blog. So we’ve got our LinkedIn, the sale, the sale. Like I suppose we’ll share links or yeah.
And we’ll, and we’ll put, and we’ll put all, we’ll put all that in the show notes for sure. Yep. And then myself, Muhammad Al Badwihi, on LinkedIn as well. Our website is rasael. io. We have a learning center called at learn. rasael. io. That’s where all of our blog posts are. So I think those are the best ways people can find us and follow us.
Perfect. And for everybody watching what we’ll put all those links in the show notes, as I mentioned, so that you can just click on them and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters, this is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new entrepreneurs, new thought leaders, new visionaries, and we don’t want you to miss a thing.
So definitely hit that subscribe button so that you get the notifications and you can tune in. And Muhammad again, thank you so much for coming on. There’s been a lot of fun. Thank you so much, Adam. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you so much fun and so much laughter. I appreciate it