Leaving professional voicemail messages is an important skill to learn, especially in the telemarketing industry. Regardless of whether you’re a politician working off voter lists or you’re just trying to sell insurance, these tips are proven to work, over and over again. You may even find that some of them are entirely new to you – or that you have been using two or three of them unconsciously already. Whatever your case may be, we suggest implementing these tips into your process of creating voicemail messages to ensure professionalism.
Why Is It Important to Leave a Professional Voicemail?
When you are cold calling, it’s always imperative to know how to use a professional voicemail. Part of the goal of making the call is to make the initial contact, which is likely the first impression the person of business will have with the company. Having a professional voicemail is a huge part of why cold calling works, so let's take a look at how to create one.
5 Steps on How to Leave a Professional Voicemail Message
You want your first, second, third and all future voicemails to an individual or business to be professional every single time. By creating professional voicemails you are building the customer’s trust in the company and producing satisfied customers.
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Outline What You Need to Convey
There is nothing worse than someone rambling on and on in a voicemail message, especially if they never really get across what they are trying to say. That just means that you will never ever get a call back from that person. Instead, prepare a short script that you are going to use for the voicemail – writing it down really helps.
When you get a voicemail from someone you don’t know, what makes you keep listening to it after you hit play? If you’re like many people, it’s the introduction that will compel you to keep listening to the remainder of the message. If the introduction is poor, you’ll probably hang up without listening any longer.
With the greeting being so connected to someone's decision to keep listening to a voicemail, it’s vital to pay extra attention to your introduction as you prepare your script. Think about the voicemail greetings you’ve gotten in the past that have motivated you to listen to a message in its entirety. What do those examples have in common? Once you identify the elements that make your work voicemail greeting successful, incorporate them into your voicemail script.
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Introduce Yourself and Make a Connection to the Recipient
Remember, the point of cold calling is to establish relationships with your prospects that will lead to new sales in the short-term and repeat sales down the line. You want these relationships to exist between you and your leads, not between your employer and your clientele base.
Adding personal touches, mentioning topics of interest, or showing concern for the customer’s needs, will all contribute to a healthy customer-business relationship. Don’t be shy to remind them of your name or share personal interests/talking points that the customer might also share. It may take some time to determine appropriate and safe middle ground with customers, but once a sales agent finds it, they can build upon the relationship. Examples of this may be a shared love for a baseball team or a shared interest in art. Using tips like these will help build strong connections to the customer, which will lead to higher sales and better customer satisfaction.
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State Why You Are Calling
There is nothing we humans love more than a bit of mystery, and mystery is a great way to pique someone’s interest. Always leave your name, of course, but if you do not refer to your company then that person will have to call you back just to find out exactly what you are offering them! This is a great way for you to appear more like a person than a faceless corporation.
While it’s important for you to be forthcoming with the name of your employer, it’s even more critical for your prospects to remember why you are calling. Prospects want to know what's in it for them. Be sure to give them something of interest or benefit to them so they continue listening to your voicemail and call back.
Pro Tip: If you’re unsure about the potential benefits of not always leaving your company’s name in your voicemails, conduct an experiment. Divide your leads list in half and include the name of your employer in 50 percent of your voicemail greetings while leaving it out of your other messages. After a set period, see which list produced the highest number of return calls and sales or follow-up appointments.
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Keep It Brief
You should never leave a voicemail that is more than fifteen seconds long. That may not seem like a lot of time, but if you time yourself reading your prepared message, you could be surprised! Anything longer than fifteen seconds is going to lose the interest of your listener.
Just like an introduction will influence a person’s decision to continue listening to your voicemail, the content of your message will also sway someone’s decision to listen to your entire message. With 15 seconds being the maximum desired length of a voicemail, you must ensure your professional voicemail greeting is clear, concise, and loaded with the information necessary to motivate someone to call you back.
After your introduction, your message should provide a quick breakdown of the information you want the listener to have. While your greeting should inspire your prospects to keep listening, the content of the rest of your message should be geared toward getting your leads to return your calls instead of deleting your voicemails.
As you time yourself reciting your scripted message, listen to what you’re saying carefully. If your work voicemail greeting includes unnecessary information, remove it from your voicemail. If your message doesn’t contain data that will motivate your prospects to reach out to you, incorporate the relevant information into your voicemails.
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Conclude the Message
When you’re leaving a message for a top executive, it’s essential to repeat your phone number, your name, and the purpose of your call at the end of your voicemail. Repeating this key information will prevent you from wasting your prospects’ time by forcing them to listen to your message from the beginning again to get this information.
When you make it easy for people to access the information they need to contact you and remind them of why they should call you at the end of your voicemail greetings, it increases the chances they’ll call you back. If you make prospects work to find your contact information or discover why you left them a message, it may frustrate them and prevent them from contacting you or listening to any voicemails you leave for them in the future.
Here are 6 follow-up strategies you can apply to your next call!
