SalesLoft and Twilio integrate through the SalesLoft API, Webhooks, and the Twilio Messages API to add SMS as a cadence step alongside email and phone tasks, giving sales reps a text message touchpoint for prospects who are more responsive to SMS than email. This integration is used by sales development teams and account executives running SalesLoft for multi-step outbound sequences who want to reach prospects on their mobile phones via SMS without switching out of their primary sales engagement platform. The connection uses SalesLoft webhooks on cadence step events to trigger Twilio SMS and the SalesLoft Activity API to log SMS sends as visible activities on the person record.
What You Need Before You Start
Generate a SalesLoft OAuth 2.0 application by navigating to your SalesLoft admin settings under API and OAuth, creating a new application, and completing the authorization code flow with your middleware's redirect URI to obtain an access token and refresh token, noting that SalesLoft access tokens expire after 30 days. Your SalesLoft API base URL is https://api.salesloft.com/v2/ and all requests require the Authorization header set to Bearer {accessToken}. From Twilio, collect your Account SID, Auth Token, and an SMS-capable phone number registered under an A2P 10DLC campaign. Ensure your SalesLoft person records have the mobile_phone attribute populated, as SalesLoft stores both phone and mobile_phone as separate fields on person records and SMS should target the mobile_phone field specifically.
Step-by-Step Integration Guide
Configure a SalesLoft webhook by navigating to Settings, then Webhooks in SalesLoft admin, adding a new webhook subscribing to the cadence_membership.created event and pointing the URL to your middleware, which fires when a person is added to a cadence at the step where you intend to trigger SMS. In your middleware, receive the SalesLoft webhook POST and extract the personId from the relationships.person.data.id field, then fetch the full person record by calling GET https://api.salesloft.com/v2/people/{personId} with the Bearer token, reading the mobile_phone attribute from the response data. Normalize the mobile_phone value to E.164 and dispatch the Twilio SMS by calling POST https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/{AccountSid}/Messages.json with Basic authentication and a Body personalized with the person's first_name and last_name attributes and the cadence step context. Log the SMS activity in SalesLoft by calling POST https://api.salesloft.com/v2/activities/calls with a JSON body adapted for an SMS note (SalesLoft does not have a native SMS activity type, so use the notes endpoint POST https://api.salesloft.com/v2/notes with the person ID as the associated record and note body set to the SMS message text) to create a visible activity on the person's timeline that the sales rep can reference.
Common Issues and How to Fix Them
SalesLoft webhooks for cadence events do not include person contact details in the payload, only the person ID and cadence ID, requiring your middleware to make a secondary API call to fetch the mobile phone, adding latency between the cadence step trigger and the SMS dispatch. Cache frequently accessed person records in your middleware with a 1-hour TTL keyed by person ID to avoid redundant API calls for people who appear multiple times in the same day's cadence executions. SalesLoft access tokens have a 30-day expiry which is longer than most platforms, but they still expire and your middleware must handle the 401 response by refreshing via POST https://accounts.salesloft.com/oauth/token with grant_type=refresh_token and the stored refresh token. Implement proactive token expiry checking by storing the token issue timestamp alongside the token and scheduling a refresh 7 days before expiry to ensure the token is always valid when cadence webhooks fire. The SalesLoft mobile_phone field is populated inconsistently across person records because SDRs often import prospects from CSV files that include only an office phone without a mobile, leaving mobile_phone null for a large portion of the cadence audience. Add a SalesLoft conditional cadence step before the SMS step that checks whether mobile_phone is populated and routes only prospects with a mobile phone to the SMS webhook step, branching the remainder to an additional email step instead.
How to Get More from This Integration
Build a rep-facing SMS composer by creating a SalesLoft App Sidebar Extension that displays a Send SMS panel when the rep views a person record, allowing the rep to type and send a Twilio SMS to the person's mobile_phone directly within SalesLoft, with the sent message automatically logged as a SalesLoft note on the person timeline. Create automated inbound SMS routing by configuring your Twilio inbound number webhook to match the From phone to a SalesLoft person using GET https://api.salesloft.com/v2/people?mobile_phone={phone}, and if a match is found, log the inbound reply as a SalesLoft note and update the person's SalesLoft stage to Responded to trigger the appropriate next cadence step or sales rep alert. Add a cadence success trigger for SMS replies by detecting reply keywords such as yes, interested, or book in inbound Twilio SMS from cadence prospects and calling POST https://api.salesloft.com/v2/cadence_memberships/{membershipId}/complete to mark the prospect as a cadence success, advancing them out of the automated sequence and into a human-handled sales conversation. Track SMS step performance across cadences by querying the SalesLoft Reporting API for cadence step completion rates, comparing SMS step completion and reply rates to email step open rates in the same cadences, and using the data to optimize SMS placement and timing within your highest-performing cadence templates.
Conclusion
SalesLoft and Twilio together give your sales team a fully logged SMS touchpoint inside the cadence platform they already use, increasing prospect response rates without adding complexity to the rep's workflow. Reach out to Telphi Consulting to design and build this integration for your SalesLoft team.
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