While you should leave voicemail messages, you do not want to leave one on every call attempt because there are some advantages to hanging up with no message:

  • It takes time to leave voicemail messages, and that can be saved by hanging up.
  • You can make more calls overall with the time you saved.
  • You can call the prospect back sooner if you don’t leave a message.

The logic with the third point is that if I leave a voicemail message, I need to wait at least a few days before I call back again. But if I hang up without leaving a voicemail message, I can call back the next day or even the same day as I can assume the prospect does not know I called earlier and I am just trying to call again.

With that, my suggestion is to primarily call without leaving voicemail messages, but at certain intervals change that approach to leave voicemail messages. The logic is that you are using the voicemail box periodically to deliver your sales message, but for the most part, you are calling with no message so that you can move quicker and be able to call the prospect more frequently.

This is a clip from a recent sales training webinar on voicemail strategy. In that training session, we discussed why it is there is a low probability that prospects return calls from salespeople.

If you would like to see the full webinar recording and download the slides, you can do that on this blog post on our website here.