How good are you at voicemails during the sales process?
Most of your customers or leads will have a voice mail system in place to be used in case when they are away from their desk.
Voice mails are hard to do
Typically when speaking into a voice mail system, people:
- Constructing the strangest sentences
- Telling the wrong things or things that not really matter
- Missing to tell the real point
- Being very brief missing essential parts of the reasons for your call
- Speaking too long (over 2 minutes)
- Using the wrong wordings
- Speaking with the wrong intonation
These problems are probably due to the fact that there is no human response from the receiving party at it is a recorder.
Of course you can always use the delete option and re-record until you get bored or more nervous.
The receiver will listen to a voice mail differently than during a normal telephone conversation. This adds on to the difficulty of a voice mail. Also the receiver can replay your (weird sounding) message several times allowing analyzing your strange behavior on the voice mail system. This will not add on to your credibility.
The end result is that the important message that needed to be communicated can:
- Leave the wrong impression
- Be misinterpreted
Both having with the result of creating the wrong response or action.
Still you can use an email as back-up referring to your voice mail just to be sure that the message is communicated.
A voice mail gone wrong in the British comedy TV show “Coupling“:
Voice mails in the sales process
During a sales process, if you need to bring an important message or information to your customer or lead, will you then leave a voicemail? Or try to call back later?
What harms the most?
- Using the voice mail in order to leave the message: that can be misinterpreted or not listened.
- Disconnecting and try to call back a little later?
Calling back later will require more time from you and you can fail to speak your prospect or customer again.
There is a trade off:
- Using the voice mail system: a wrong interpretation will be hard to repair.
- Not bringing the message on time has a certain cost too as a decision can depend on it.
But which one is the costliest?
There are the additional problems of:
- The many voice mails are never returned which stops your conversation.
- The facts changing or events happening after leaving the voice mail.
The best is of course if you could speak the person personally.
An alternative is to send an email, but maybe that’s not suitable for your all-important message.
How effective are you in leaving voice mails?
Did leaving a voice mail ever helped the sales process?
The first few words of a voicemail are equivalent to the headline of an article or the subject line in an email. If you don’t say something that will get my attention and get it fast, I will delete your voicemail because I’ll see it as a waste of time. Consider having a script ready for those moments when you do encounter a voicemail. At least that way, you’ll sound polished and profession.
I surely agree that sales agent should prepare a script rather saying Uhm…Uhm… but not so robotic because some agent tend to read and may sound so robotic. Being professional and have a good tone of voice will really be a big help getting more customer.
I know that there is an option before saving a voice mail is to re run the voice mail for you to check whether it sounded good or not then if not, just make another record.