Tag: Voicemail

Calling Businesses by Telephone and Leaving Voice Messages

In High Probability Prospecting, we teach students to identify themselves first (with their name and company), say what the call is about, and then ask the prospect if that is something they want. That’s what we do when the call is answered by a real person, preferably a decision-maker.

When we find ourselves talking to an answering machine, we have to decide whether to leave a message, or just hang up and move on to the next prospect in our list. Jacques Werth, the founder of High Probability Selling, recommended never leaving a message.

Paul Bunn and I believe that this is not always the best strategy in today’s world. We are trying out other options, and paying attention to results.

And here are some results that I recently encountered. The context is sort of the reverse of prospecting. I was not looking for someone I could sell to. I was representing a buyer who wanted me to find a company capable of producing a specialized product for them. So I made a lot of telephone calls.

Extremely few companies answered the phone with a live person. Most connected me directly to an answering system, with an option of leaving a message in a general voice mailbox. When I did get a live person and explained the purpose of my call, they forwarded me to a number that was also answered by voicemail. This is today’s telephone world, even when you are a potential buyer.

In every case, I left a voice message. I started with my name (Carl Ingalls) and my company name (Embossing Technologies), and then explained briefly what I was looking for. Surprisingly, I got very few callbacks, even after I had left several messages with the same companies.

And then I found out why.

I was sounding just like any other spammer who wanted to sell them something they didn’t want. My name didn’t mean anything at all to them. My company name suggested that I was trying to sell them some product or service related to embossing. And they didn’t listen any further.

If I had started with a clear statement of what my call was about, establishing relevance for the other person, I probably would have had better results.

In the past, we believed that the recipient of a telephone call wanted to know first who is calling, and second what the call is about. That was probably true way back in the old days.

We now believe that the “what” question is more important to the person picking up the phone. The “who” question is secondary.

Although my recent experience was in making phone calls about buying and not about selling, we believe that it is worth testing this idea in outbound telephone prospecting.

We will keep you informed.

People Use the Phone Differently Today – Leaving Voicemail

People are less likely to pick up the phone today, and especially if the call is from someone they don’t know or is from a number they don’t recognize.  You are more likely to get voicemail or some other automated system, even when calling a business.

At one time, it was not practical to leave voice messages when doing High Probability Prospecting.  Salespeople who were telephone prospecting in those days got better results when they just moved on to the next number in their list.  The odds of getting a live person on the phone were much higher then.

Today, we do recommend leaving a very brief voice message.  Just your name, your company, the subject of your call, and your phone number.  As short as possible, with much less detail than a prospecting offer that you would deliver live.  The usual mistake is to say too much.

One of the consequences of leaving messages is that you may begin to receive a greater number of inbound prospecting calls (where a prospect calls you).  The skills required for handling these conversations are very different from doing outbound prospecting.  It takes a special kind of listening.  But that’s a topic for a different blog post.

Note:  Jacques Werth had written an article titled Top 6 Pitfalls of Voice Mail Messages (which appears in a list of articles on the main HPS website).  In that article, he argued against leaving voicemail.