The Importance Of The Voicemail

Leaving voicemails is probably the most dreaded part of doing sales. Voicemails are a lot of effort expended for very little return. When you leave one, you never expect a call back. After all, people ignore the voicemail icon on their phones these days, right?

The issue of effort expended is solved by sales enablement platforms that allow you to leave pre-recorded voicemails, saving your voice and sanity. Once that barrier is removed, there is really no excuse not to leave a voicemail. It’s not advisable to leave a voicemail every single time you call, because that’s borderline harassment, but if you call and never leave a voicemail, the receiving party will assume it couldn’t have been that important, anyway.

I find that the vaguer the better in terms of getting people to return my calls. At most, I’ll say one sentence about the benefit my product will bring them, and hope that’s enough to pique their interest. Often times I will leave nothing but my company and phone number, and get calls back.

There is no guarantee that someone who calls you back is any more likely to convert into a sales opportunity than anyone else. But the more conversations you have, the more chances you have to make the sale, and voicemails are one way to increase the number of discussions you have.

Some salespeople are staunch in their belief that voicemails are pointless, but personal experience tells me this is not the case. The audience matters, too. I’ve found that extremely busy lawyers, for whom every minute of their day is billable, are unlikely to return calls, but those who work in medical offices are more likely. The best way to get lawyers to return calls was to not leave a voicemail, for whatever reason. (Probably just calling back to see if it was a client’s phone call they had missed.)

Next up: organization and cadence.