One area where there may not be a clear right and wrong way of doing things is leaving a voicemail when cold calling. Do you leave messages? Do you simply hang up and call back another time? What do you say when you do leave a message? These are questions that you need to have answers for because dealing with voicemail messages is an increasing part of the sales process if your job involves picking up the phone and cold calling.

What you do and how you respond always changes, given the situation. It is helpful to have some logic for what you do which creates more effectiveness in your efforts, as well as more consistency in your results.

 

Key Assumptions for Leaving a Voicemail

It is helpful to have some assumptions identified to put some logic and strategy into play.

1. Prospects get a lot of voicemail messages
If you’re calling a true decision maker, they likely get a tremendous amount of sales calls, which can lead to a large number of voicemail messages each week. This assumption is safe for a couple of simple reasons.

If they’re a decision maker, that means they’re the key person to which everybody is trying to get to. This is the same reason you’re calling her, right? Also, decision-makers typically have very busy schedules, which results in them not being at their desks much, which, in turn, leads to a lot of unanswered calls and messages.

2. Prospects do not listen to every message
It is safe to assume that they do not listen to every message if the prospects we’re trying to reach are extremely busy and receive large amounts of messages. You must assume that prospects are pretty aggressive with how they listen to and delete messages due to the large volume.

3. Prospects do not listen to messages in their entirety
We can be safe in assuming there is a strong possibility that they’ll delete or end the message before reaching the end of it if the message drags on when a prospect has not deleted a message immediately and decides to listen to it.

4. Prospects rarely return messages
When you’re leaving a voicemail during prospecting, it is most likely that the prospect isn’t going to return your message. This is because of a few distinct reasons.

First, remember the decision makers are very busy, correct? Even when interested in what you have to offer them, they’ll probably be too busy to call you back, forget to call back if they sincerely want to, or may simply wait for you to call them back.

In addition, think about all of the other salespeople who are leaving a voicemail for the same prospect, which creates an environment where there’s a lot of noise, making it difficult for your message to get through.

 

What to do When Leaving a Voicemail

With all that said, you might be more confused than you have been before with what to do. Keeping in mind that it is difficult to get our message through and not likely to get a callback, we should still utilize leaving voicemails as one of our tools to communicate with.

Having a very short message that is very powerful by communicating the value that you offer and the pain that you resolve are keys to success. The message shouldn’t be focused on triggering a call back when leaving a voicemail. It should be more focused on educating the prospect on why they should speak with you.

SalesScripter provides a sales script tool that helps sales pros with leaving a voicemail.