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During a recent webinar on sales voicemails, I presented some of RingDNA’s sales data showing that inside sales reps spend an average of 25 hours a month (about 15 percent of their total sales time) just leaving voicemails. For a team of 50 reps, that’s about 1270 hours per month. But make no mistake—a voicemail should nearly always be left. Aside from the obvious goal of getting call backs, voicemails have the power to humanize your company and trigger other forms of valuable engagement, such as return emails, website visits and content engagement.
If your reps are going to be leaving voicemails, they should be doing everything in their power to maximize call-back rates. Here are 5 quick ways to get more prospects to respond.
According to RingLead’s Donato Diorio, a first-time call will yield an 11 percent call-back rate, a second call will yield a 22 percent call-back rate, while 33 percent of prospects call back after a third message. So if your reps are just leaving a single voicemail they may be missing out on vital sales opportunities.
One of the biggest mistakes sales reps make when leaving voicemails is just “winging it.” Without a script, reps most reps will ramble on too long, sound unprofessional or leave out important information. All of these factors can prevent prospects from wanting to call you back.
To keep voicemails under 30 seconds, limit your script to 90 words or less.
Far too many sales reps take up their entire voicemail trying to pitch product features. This is typically a mistake, since you don’t even know what your prospects really need yet. Save your sales pitch for a true sales call. Instead, focus on results. Hint at what can be accomplished with your product, or outright tell them what kind of ROI or other benefits your product have delivered for other customers.
Your prospects likely receive a lot of voicemails. It’s crucial to not only stand out from the pack, but also to be as relevant as possible. One of the best ways to do this is to provide context for your voicemail. These days, context is even more important than content, and it’s what will really get your prospects to respond. There are a lot of different ways to contextually frame your voicemail. For example, I might say, “I would like to schedule a call to discuss how the benefits outlined in our whitepaper can be easily achieved by your company.”
Salespeople are under a lot of pressure; not only to deliver results, but to be efficient, consistent and work extremely fast. Voicemail automation tools enable reps to slash the time they typically spend leaving voicemails by recording targeted voicemails in advance. Best of all, voicemail automation can still allow for personalization. For example, you can record a greeting specifically for prospects that downloaded a particular eBook. Using voicemail automation is also the only way to make sure that you maximize efficiency and leave the perfect, personalized message every time.
Howard Brown is Founder & CEO of RingDNA. RingDNA’s inside sales solution maximizes sales performance and is 100 percent built for Salesforce customers.
To learn more about turning cold calls into leads, visit our website, or download the free e-book.
