In week 8 of our 16-week sales training webinar series, we discuss sales voicemail strategies.

Understand the Prospect
The first thing that we discuss is in this sales training video is to try to understand that prospect that you are calling in order to figure out what best to do with their voicemail box. Here are a few things to try to keep in mind when trying understand the prospect.

  • Prospects are often away from their desks
  • Get a lot of voicemails from salespeople
  • Will not listen to many of their messages
  • Prospects do not call salespeople back

6 Reasons Why Prospects Don’t Call Back
One of the key assumptions that we build our sales voicemail strategies around is that prospects do not call salespeople back that leave voicemail messages from cold calls. Here are six reasons why we feel this is a safe assumption to operate with”

  1. The prospect is too busy to return the call.
  2. The prospect is not interested (yet).
  3. The prospect has a certain level of ego.
  4. The prospect assumes the salesperson will call back again.
  5. The prospect intends to call the salesperson back but forgets to.
  6. The prospect does not listen to the message.

3 Benefits to Not Leaving a Voicemail
While you should use a mix a leaving voicemail messages and hanging up with no voicemail, there are a few helpful benefits.

  1. It takes time to leave voicemail messages
  2. That time can be saved to make more dials
  3. You can call the prospect back more often when you don’t leave a message

But even with those benefits, the voicemail box is one way for you to deliver your message and communicate with the prospect so you should sporadically leave sales voicemail messages in your prospecting cadence.

Focus on the Right Goal
If we agree that there is a low probability that the prospect is going to return the call from a cold call voicemail message, we can shift from leaving a message that tries to get the prospect to call back and instead try to focus more on educating the prospect on who we are, why we are calling, and why they should talk to us at some point in the future.

Have the Correct Expectations
One of the ways that operating with the assumption that the prospect is not likely to return your call is that it can help you to have the right expectations after you leave a cold call voicemail message. If you think that prospects should be calling you back, when they do not, you might think that you are doing something wrong and doubt your performance or cold call voicemail message. But the reality is that everything is normal when prospects are not calling you back and this is not reflection on your or your voicemail message.

.If you would like to purchase a copy of the book The SMART Sales System – SELL SMARTER, NOT HARDER, go here.

Listen to “SMART Sales System – Module 8: Voicemail” on Spreaker.