The 8 Most Powerful Sales Voicemail Strategies

Voicemails are common sales tools found within a company’s operations to ensure that leads turn into actual opportunities. Contrary to what most say, voicemails are thriving tools used by most sales teams, and its benefits, once exploited, will prove beneficial to the sales process. It is one thing to use voicemails in your sales process, but it’s another to optimize its potential. On the surface, the usage of voicemails might seem like a piece of cake, but some, if not most, members of the sales force tend to misuse it, thus losing its effectiveness. Here are common voicemail usage problems:

First, the error might lie within your sales reps. At times, reps, when unprepared, might end up blurting out pitches that clients wouldn’t even bother listening to. Often, reps who commit this mistake find themselves pondering on why they don’t receive return calls from clients. A remedy for this would be to create standard sales pitch for all your reps. Ensure that their spiels are uttered in a natural tone, or else, it might come off as robotic and insincere. Obviously rehearsed voicemail scripts easily turn off clients, and would defeat the purpose of even having one.

Second, reps tend to overlook one important aspect of sending voicemails: stating a clear objective. A sound reason for why one is sending a certain voicemail is the best foundation for an effective pitch. Voicemails with vague goals are often dismissed by clients who have no time deciphering the message you hope to send across.

Here are objectives for every voicemail you send to your clients listed by IA Magazine:

The Initial Voicemail
The ultimate goal, of course, is to get a call back from your prospects
Next goal would be the desire to advance the sales call. Spark  your client’s interest regarding your product
Ensure that you have locked in the client, and that they would surely take the next call from you.
Veer away from the typical phrases used by most reps
The Follow-Up Voicemail
Now you’ve got the client interested, take it to the next level. Feed your prospect with more information regarding your product
Always be cautious to refine your eagerness to sell your product. This isn’t a powerpoint presentation to the client, it’s a dialogue. Have a conversation, don’t deliver a strict sales pitch.
Another problem that renders voicemails ineffective are the many pauses, filler words, and speech buckles in a sales rep’s spiel. Not only does this turn off the person on the other end of the line, but it also depreciates the value of the company you work for. These mishaps in sales reps’ speech is caused by various factors.

Insufficient product knowledge
Lack of personable skills
Constant self-doubt
Lastly, probably the main reason why prospects never call reps back is because they never even gave their clients a compelling reason to do so. A voicemail that seeks to get a follow-up should be three things: enticing, exciting, and enthusiastic. These three things, when injected in your sales pitches will add color to an, otherwise, dull voicemail.

Sales Voicemail Strategies
1. Nothing More Than 30 Seconds

Salesforce notes that the best voicemail message usually lasts for no longer than 30 seconds. The best way to ensure that you don’t go beyond the time is to practice at home; or even while at the office, with a stopwatch. Keep trimming your spiel until you reach any time below 30 seconds. Within this time limit you’ve set for yourself, you will have to include vital information like: a catchy opening line; and a closing line where you restate your name and your company, with a main line of contact where the client can reach you.

2. Never Mention Previous Unreturned Calls

Tried calling a lead for more than three times? That’s okay. Just don’t mention that when the opportunity for you to introduce yourself comes. Never bring back the ghosts of the past. It’s just a waste of the 30 second limit you’ve set for yourself. And quite honestly, you’re client wouldn’t even bother listening to a voicemail with you just blabbering about how they didn’t return your previous calls.

3. Keep The Volume of Information to a Minimum

Ring.Iq’s tip for sending the best sales voicemail is to entice your prospective client with only bits of information. Lure them in with bits of information, and keep them wanting more and more, pretty much like how film teasers work. This would also work to your benefit, as you would have more to say for the next few follow-up calls you make to them.

4. Pick the Perfect Time to Leave Your Voicemail

As tedious as it may sound, it also helps to study your prospects working cycle—the hours when they’re at their busiest, and their down times. Time your voicemails at the points when they would have the luxury to actually listen and think about your voicemail. Best times to leave your voicemails would either be as soon as they get to the office in the morning; or in the evening at the hours close to the end of their shifts.

5. Inject a Sense of Immediacy

This tip is quite tricky, and requires a touch of humility in the part of the rep. Fabricate timeframes for you and your prospect to work around with. In your fictional timeframe, State a specific time in which you expect a return call from them, or a time when you’d be calling them for a follow-up. Just in case they don’t return your call, you’ll always have the “follow-up time” you’ve set as your excuse to call them again.

6. Always Espouse Confidence

There is no place for nerves when sending voicemails. Always be sure of what you say, and be aware of your tone. The tone of your voice shouldn’t be too confident that it sounds arrogant, and should not be too monotonous that it sounds rehearsed and robotic.

7. Leave One Contact Email

Always make sure that you leave one contact detail, preferably either the mobile number or the e-mail address you use for work. Insert this in the closing line of your initial voicemail to ensure a return call from your prospect.

8. Find a Connection Between Yourself and the Client

Exercise your PR skills and try to personalize your messages with injecting information that assimilate you with your prospect. Don’t force it, but if by any chance you have a certain professional connection with your client  don’t hesitate to include that in your voicemail.

Technology has helped shape voicemails into integral parts of the sales process. Previously, this method of tapping prospects halted at just plain verbal follow-up messages; but now, it has developed into visual voicemail programs. This new form allows your sales staff to automatically send text messages to your potential clients’ mobile phones as the technology transcribes the initial voicemail you leave them.

It is important to take advantage of such advancements to ensure the consistency of the sales process. Combine this progressive approach with the strategies this article has laid out for you, and this will ensure a positive development in your efficiency as a member of the sales force. Keep in mind that all these tips are nothing unless you put it into actual use

https://www.tenfold.com/sales-coaching/8-most-powerful-sales-voicemail-strategies