5 Tips For Leaving An Effective Sales Follow-Up Voicemail

What’s an effective voicemail? It’s one that your customer will actually respond to. What an idea!

The fact is, when we think about follow-up, we think about the telephone.

And when we think about the telephone, we think about leaving a voicemail.

There is a phenomenon called telephobia. It’s a real thing, look it up.

There’s some deep psychology that goes into telephobia.

In fact, some social psychologists believe that our association with the telephone, even very, very early in life, affects how we feel about the telephone all throughout the rest of our life.

Now, some people have no problem making a phone call, they can do it all day long.

But other people, not so much. There’s a legitimate fear.

Either way, what we’re talking about is a comfort addiction.

Many salespeople would rather get a voicemail than have somebody pick up the phone.

Some salespeople even purposely make the call when they know that the customer won’t answer.

Here’s my advice: Don’t be that person.

It’s helpful to understand that there is a hierarchy to communication.

The best and most effective conversation is always face-to-face. Right where I can read you and you can read me and there’s an energy to our body language. Face to face is best.

Second behind that is voice to voice. That is a phone call. And I may not be able to see your face, but I can hear the nuances in your voice, I can hear the energy.

There are things that we can communicate with voice that we can’t communicate anywhere else.

Third after that is voice to face. And here I’m talking about sending a recorded video.

Then we have voice to ears. That’s the voicemail.

After that comes the written communication, text and email.

Now this begs the question, “Should you leave a voicemail at all?”

There are different schools of thought here.

Some believe that you should absolutely leave a voicemail and then follow up with another call immediately.

Others suggest that maybe you try to make the phone call once or twice before you leave a message.

I do think it’s appropriate to leave a voicemail as long as you’re doing it properly, which is what we’re going to talk about next.

Here are 5 tips for leaving an effective sales follow-up voicemail:

  1. Add value. If you can’t add value, don’t make the call in the first place.
  2. Keep it short. The longer the voicemail, the less chance that they will listen to it.
  3. Strong energy. It is critical that we are boosting and maintaining the emotional altitude. Remember that strong energy that you had face to face when you first talked to the customer? You want to bring that same level of energy into the voicemail.
  4. Enunciate. Especially your phone number, how frustrating it is when somebody throws their phone number out really, really quickly and you wouldn’t have time to write it down in the first place, but even if you could, you can’t understand what they’re saying.
  5. Set up the next interaction. Whether that’s a phone call you’re going to make soon, or you’re going to send them information, or there’s an event that’s coming up, whatever it is, you want to make sure that this call sets up the next call.

When it comes to voicemail, like with all your follow-up, always bring your best self, your strongest energy.

You want to leave a voicemail that is so compelling that your customer can’t wait to call you back.

That’s when you’ve got this down correctly.

Until next time, learn more, turn more.


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About the Author: Jeff Shore

Jeff Shore is the Founder and CEO of Shore Consulting, Inc. a company specializing in psychology-based sales training programs. Using these modern, game-changing techniques, Jeff Shore’s clients delivered over 145,000 new homes generating $54 billion in revenue last year.