Introducing Voicemail Drop: A kick-ass productivity hack for busy sales reps
Sales reps spend 15% of their time in leaving voicemails – RingLead.
For an outbound sales team, voicemail is an integral part of everyday routine. And sales calls mostly go to voicemail, which means reps have to spend a significant portion of their day recording a message for their prospects. A solution to this is to use automated voicemail drops, using which reps can free up a significant portion of their day and maximize their productivity while doing telephone outreach.
What is voicemail drop?
Voicemail drop enables you to leave pre-recorded messages into someone’s voicemail inbox, instead of speaking it out every time you reach their voicemail box. It can be handy for sales teams, who may want to drop messages to their prospects instead of calling them directly. This way, sales teams can focus on what they want to do – talking to prospects.
Who can benefit from this feature?
For a sales team, outbound calling is unarguably, a critical part of their selling process. Sales reps make hundreds of calls in a day, out of which a significant share goes to voicemail. Repeatedly leaving the same message can be time-taking and tiring. This feature helps the sales rep leave a pre-recorded message, drop off, and move on to the next call, thus saving their time. So with voicemail drop, you not only improve your calling efficiency but also boost your prospecting.
Benefits of using voicemail drop
It’s effective, and it works!
While it is easy to ignore a ringing phone or a text message, people are less likely to delete a voicemail without listening to it first.
It makes life easier for sales reps.
As mentioned above, leaving a voicemail ensures that you’re at least heard. Outbound calling is a part of everyday life for sales reps. Leaving a voicemail message increases the chances of getting a callback rather than a phone call or targeted messaging.
It saves time.
Instead of individually calling dozens of prospects, waiting for the call to connect, listening to the voicemail greeting, and leaving your message, you can record a single personalized message for a segment of your prospects and blast it out with one click automated voicemail drop. Some voicemail services also allow you to save messages to your library, so it saves you the time of recording the message multiple times.
It helps you give a smooth customer experience.
You can drop your voicemail message, and customers can get back to you at their convenience. This way, you can avoid interrupting prospects at their home/work. They can listen to it in their free time, and revert at their chosen time. This helps you give your prospects/customers a smooth experience.
How can voicemail drop help you with prospecting
Outbound calling is a critical part of the selling process for outbound sales teams. As a sales rep, you will have to make hundreds of calls in a day, out of which a significant share goes to voicemail.
A rep spends up to 25 hours per month on leaving voicemail messages alone. For a team of 5 reps, that equates to 125 hours/month. This is where you can make use of voicemail automation to take those hours back. As a salesperson, you can use voicemail drop to leave pre-recorded voicemails with just one click.
But prospects come with different requirements, and a single pre-recorded voicemail message may not be suitable to be sent out to everyone. The key here is to treat a voicemail drop like an email prospecting template: personalization and relevance are of utmost importance.
Adding a voicemail template to your prospecting strategy is similar to blasting out targeted emails using prospecting templates. The cardinal rules stay the same: what goes in for email prospecting, goes in for voicemail dropping.
Here’s how you can improve your calling efficiency and boost your prospecting with voicemail drop.
Segment your prospects
Just like you’d segment your prospects for cold calling, do the same for voicemail drops. You obviously can’t personalize it at an individual level, but you can segment your prospect base and personalize a message for each segment. Do your research; it’s similar to how you’d segment prospects for email.
You can segment prospects based on:
- Demographics – location, number of employees, age, gender
- Job title – Marketing director, sales manager, C-suite
- Attendees at any recent event or conference
- Behavior – previous interaction history, place of interaction, type of product sought
- Past customers or leads that have become dormant
- Your product niche within your market
Sales reps can identify these segments and target your prospects with focussed voicemails to help improve conversion rates.
Personalize the messaging
The first impression is the best. As cliche as it may sound, you only have one chance to make that impression when it comes to wooing your prospects.
With voicemail drop, you have the luxury to get it right. You can create, practice, record, delete, and repeat until you get just that right tone and messaging to ensure that you’ll be able to get a callback. While this is not possible with a live interaction or leaving a message in real-time, you have the opportunity to do it right with voicemails via a pre-recorded message.
Keep it short and crisp
The optimal voicemail message is between 18 to 30 seconds.
Keep your message short. A good voicemail should be like a cliffhanger in a movie – it should get your prospect to call you back. Expert recommendation for an ideal voicemail length is about 30 seconds or less.
You should not treat voicemail messages as your sales pitch. Your motive should be to get a response; it should not be to make a sale.
Every second beyond the 30-second mark decreases your chances of getting a callback – InsideSales.
So aim for the sweet spot of 14-29 seconds. Keep these points in mind while recording voicemail messages for your prospects:
- Your opening statement should remind your prospect of how you heard about them
- Make your positioning statement – What problem does your offering solve for the prospect?
- Leave your name and callback number at the beginning and end of your voicemail (Because most people won’t listen to the whole message)
You shouldn’t give out too much info that the prospect may not even need to call you back. The key is to design your message so that it captures your prospects’ attention within the short time you have.
Test templates
With less than 30 seconds to gain your prospects’ attention, you can save yourself time by using templates. Just like email templates, voicemail recording templates will help you follow a structure, and you can do A/B testing to see which gives you a better response rate. Whatever the template you may choose, you have to ensure to keep your message short, concise, and crisp.
An ideal voicemail template must include:
- Your name
- Reason for calling
- A benefit for calling back
- Your contact information
- Repeat yourself
Here’s a kickass voicemail template that you can use to win prospects.
Monitor, tweak, and improve
Track and monitor how each of your templates performs; which ones are getting you the most callbacks vs. which ones are getting crushed. Perform A/B testing to optimize your messages for the 30-second constraint.
Is it better to open with your name and affiliation, or the problem that you’re trying to solve? Should you leave your contact at the beginning or the end? Test and find out which works out the best for your business. The voicemail drop services listed below will help you manage and monitor the performance of your messaging.
Voicemail drop services
There are multiple voicemail services that will help you drop automated voicemails into your prospects’ inbox. You can monitor and tweak your templates to achieve the maximum response rate using these services. Some of these services also help you deliver voicemails directly to your prospects’ inbox without waiting for their phones to ring. Freshdesk Contact Center (formerly Freshcaller) is one such cloud-based voicemail messaging service that will help you drop pre-recorded voicemails into your prospect’s inbox.
Voicemail drop with Freshdesk Contact Center (formerly Freshcaller)
The use of voicemail is not only for prospecting. As a business, you cannot afford to miss incoming calls. Using voicemail messaging services, you can give your callers the option to leave you a voicemail message and call them back later.
Freshdesk Contact Center is a cloud-based voicemail solution that you can use to quickly route your callers to voicemail when your agents are offline/unavailable. Using Freshdesk Contact Center, you can:
Design voicemail greetings
Customize your voicemail greetings, assign greeting messages to different teams, tell your callers what to mention in their voicemail messages, and, most importantly, make them feel that you’re there to listen to them, even when you’re not online.
Route calls to voicemail
Give your callers the option of leaving you a voicemail message, and call them back. Similarly, you can also use voicemail routing to capture calls you receive outside business hours.
Improve your prospecting
Instead of recording a voicemail message for every prospect that your sales teams call, you can use pre-recorded voicemail messages. Help your team automate this process by using the voicemail drop feature. This way, your sales reps can focus on talking to prospects and engaging with them more effectively.
Closing thoughts
80% of calls go to voicemail, and 90% of first-time voicemails are never returned.
Having automated voicemail drops helps you ensure that you can drop a message and move on to the next call straight away. Voicemail drop, along with cold email, is a sure-shot way for any sales team to gain prospects, regardless of industry or niche. It saves you time, it’s affordable, and helps in giving a smooth and flawless customer experience.
Illustration by Nikhil Kanda
About Freshdesk Contact Center (formerly Freshcaller)
Freshdesk Contact Center is a modern-day reimagining of our everyday virtual phone system for customer support, sales, IT, and Remote Work. With Freshdesk Contact Center’s cloud-based architecture, it brings together the best of legacy features like IVR and advanced capabilities like Smart Escalations, Call Routing, Custom Call Center Analytics to help you set up a state-of-the-art business call center. Freshdesk Contact Center (formerly Freshcaller) offers phone numbers in 90+ countries, requires zero phone hardware, and is extremely easy to use.
If you want to find out more about what we do, check out our website.
