We all know mastering your cold calling game is essential for sales success. But what a lot of reps don’t come prepared for is voicemail. And that’s a real problem since 4 out of 5 cold calls end in a no pickup.
So, ready to beef up your voicemails with these templates? Great, then let’s jump in.
1. The Foundation
The Foundation Template.
This is the template that each of the other voicemail templates are built on top of. And it goes like this:
Hello, this is [your name] from, [company name].
I’m calling because, [reason for calling]. This benefits you for, [benefits].
I will follow up with an email right now and I look forward to speaking with you shortly.
Have a great day. Goodbye.
It’s simple. And it’s effective.
Now let’s take a look at what using this template looks like in the real world.
Real World Example
So this is a word-for-word example of what I say when selling our Selling Made Simple Academy to the VP of Sales:
Hi this is Will Barron, calling from Salesman.org.
I’m calling because we’ve just improved your competitor’s revenue by 24% with 4 weeks of training and we can do the same for you.
I will follow up with an email right now and I look forward to speaking with you shortly.
So let’s break down this template so we can understand what we’re really trying to do here.
First off, you can see that I’m not doing anything weird or manipulative. The old-school way of selling would be something like this:
“I’m calling as I have something incredibly exciting to share and I need you to call back right now before you lose access to it…”
I’ve even heard old-school sales trainers tell reps to start sharing a benefit and then purposefully hang up halfway through the sentence so it sounds like they’ve been cut off.
Both of these tactics are gross and obviously manipulative.
Imagine using a tactic like this with a surgeon, which is who I used to sell to when I worked in medical device sales. They’d think you were an idiot at worst and at best, it would severely devalue you as an industry expert in their eyes.
Why It’s Effective
Let’s look at this template again and see why it works:
Hello, this is [your name] from, [company name].
I’m calling because, [reason for calling]. This benefits you for, [benefits].
I will follow up with an email right now and I look forward to speaking with you shortly.
Have a great day. Goodbye.
The main thing that we are trying to communicate is that we are an expert calling upon someone that we can help. We’re also getting them used to our voice and preempting the fact that we are going to continuously follow up with them until they give us a response.
That is all we are really asking for from a voicemail.
Unless you’re halfway through the deal and you have something specific to talk about, most of the time your prospects won’t reply directly to your voicemail.
And that’s why we always follow up with an email that builds on the trust and rapport our voicemail just created.
Now what’s great about this template is that you can tweak it for a variety of situations. And that brings us to template number two…
2. The Referral
As you might’ve guessed, this is the template you can use to increase response rates by pointing to a referral.
So for example, every time I provided a high level of service to my surgical customers, I would ask them if they thought any of their colleagues could also benefit from the same value.
Often, they would provide a referral which I would then use voicemail, calls and email to follow up on.
So let’s look at how we can use this basic voicemail template specifically for referrals.
Hi, [prospect name], my name is, [your name], and I’m calling from, [company].
[Referrers name], suggested I should book a meeting with you and gave me your details because we have, [benefits to original prospect], for them and they think we can do the same for you.
I will send you an email right now with a little detail on how, [referrers name], thinks we can help you and it will be great to speak with you this week.
Why It Works
So in this voicemail we’ve leveraged a number of the principles of influence. Let’s break them down.
The voicemail includes:
- Social proof from including our referrer’s name and recommendation.
- We’ve been polite and likable, setting the foundation for rapport building.
- And we’ve also started to build a little bit of authority because we have solved the problem that our prospect is facing for somebody else.
That’s not bad for a quick voicemail, right?
So now let’s look at a voicemail template for when you have “no show events”.
3. The Follow Up
Prospects don’t always show up to product demos, scheduled meetings, and other sales events. This is all a part of doing business and truth be told, it’s nothing to be worried about.
But we do need to relentlessly follow up on no-shows so we can either get a “no” from them and remove them from our pipeline or we can get another meeting booked in our calendar so we can progress the sale forward.
Therefore, if somebody no-shows, don’t follow-up by email. Instead, call them immediately. Be assertive here. They may have a very valid reason for not showing. But they’ve wasted your time, your company’s time, and your resources. Not acceptable for high-value dealmakers like you.
If you call the individual and they don’t answer, leave a voicemail using the following template:
Hi [prospects name]. I’m calling regarding our [meeting/call/demo] that we had booked for [time/date] which is today.
I want to make sure you’re not having any connection issues and as my schedule is now booked up, I want to see if I can squeeze you into another timeslot that fits.
I will call you again in an hour to get this wrapped up.
Why It Works
Here you can see that we’re not letting the prospect off the hook by saying that we will email them to rearrange another meeting or by framing the conversation that “maybe it was our fault, and we got the date wrong”.
If you go into the sales process being unassertive like this, your prospects will walk all over you and treat you like an amateur.
Again, think of the principles of influence that we have tapped into with this “no-show” voicemail template.
- We have shown authority
- We have scarcity because we are saying our schedule is nearly full
- We have assertiveness as we are saying that we’ll follow-up in an hour on the phone rather than being passive and asking them to get back to us with another timeslot.
Now before we go, I want to leave you with a…
Bonus Tip
Make sure that the tonality of your voice does not go up at the end of each of your sentences. When you go up at the end of each sentence, it sounds a little something like this…
When you go up at the end of your sentences makes you sound uncertain about what you’re asking from the prospect.
Additionally, I don’t have a particularly powerful or deep voice. But when I stand up straight, have good posture, and I talk a little slower, my voice projects a lot more authority.
So try doing that when you’re leaving voicemails too.
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