My Biggest Sales Enemy

Even as I start typing this, I am boiling with anger and frustration thinking about my number one enemy when I am cold calling. It's not my nerves. It's not my knowledge. It's not even stress. It's the fact that I am constantly leaving voicemails!

There are several ways I use to approach this, all of which boil down to a combination of skill, luck, and persistence. I will list them below.

Calling again later: Sometimes I simply will not leave a voicemail, but will instead hang up and call again later. No, I will not be calling every hour. Instead, I call every other day, at a different time. By doing this, I can work around any schedule. However, I find that I get ignored because they recognize my number as the "number that keeps calling without leaving a voicemail". In the end, I barely get any results with this, so I never do this anymore. I always leave a voicemail!

Leaving a well thought-out voicemail: Leaving a voicemail is necessary in order to get sales. If you don't leave voicemails, your bottom line iss probably going to suffer. Don't do what I did when I first started in sales. Don't say "Hey, this is X from Y. Call me to see if you can use our services". Always make sure to include something of VALUE to your prospect. For example "Hey Tim, this is X from Y. We just helped a client in your industry save days of time and hundreds of dollars by switching to our new product. They are very happy with it and I think we can help you achieve similar results. Call me at 999-999-9999". See the difference?

Breakup voicemail Sometimes even the most well thought-out and relevant voicemails still do not result in a returned call. Sometimes people are just busy. Other times they go straight to the trash. Maybe they meant to return your call and they forgot to. I find that I get pretty good results by leaving them a voicemail acknowledging that they are busy. I mention that I do not want to waste any of our time, so they should contact me if they are indeed not interested.

If they are interested, they contact me and express their interest and then we can go from there to see if my product is a viable solution to their problems. Now, if they are NOT interested, they usually contact me to tell me just that. However, this now gives me an opportunity that simply leaving a voicemail does not afford me: the opportunity to share a dialogue with the prospect. I can turn their "no" into a "maybe", which can't happen if I simply leave message after message.

What are your thoughts? What kind of voicemail tactics do my fellow salespeople use? What do you find most effective? Please comment!