Handling those pesky Gatekeepers, or Gatekeepers can be your friend (Part 3 of 3)
What is the best way to handle Gatekeepers? Part Three of Three
Building better voicemails.
In the last two Blogs we talked about Gatekeepers. Today we’re going to talk about a related but totally different topic – leaving effective voicemails.
The need for handling Gatekeepers has dropped over the past five years. Unless you’re calling very high, there don’t seem to be very many of them any more. Voicemail has replaced them in most environments. So leaving effective voicemails is critical to your success. So here are some basic rules:
- First of all, I believe you should almost always leave one. Why?
- Some will get returned, so why not leverage your time and not have to place that call again?
- With the advent of Caller ID, you really don’t think you can call seven times today and it not be noticed, do you?
- I believe in the cumulative effect of calling. Advertisers say until a prospect has heard or seen your name seven times, they won’t recognize it. So leave a message.
- Leverage your time – if you’re going to go through the steps of determining who to call, where you are in the cycle (what is your history with this name), recording the results (a total of two to three minutes) why not spend another fifteen to twenty seconds and leave a voicemail?
- There are two approaches to voicemails – the curiosity approach or the ‘cumulative curiosity’ approach:
- The cumulative approach is simply to leave a message that piques the suspect’s curiosity so that they call back. This could be anything from just leaving a name and phone number and asking for a return call to mentioning the name of a competitor you’ve done business with.
The higher you call, the more responsible people are for knowing what their competitors are doing.
- The cumulative curiosity approach is one that still leaves a bit unsaid, but builds on a story each time. If you make four attempts in each cycle before recycling the suspect for some period of time, then try the following:
1. The first three times, leave three different messages regarding what you’ve done for others to help them in some benefit oriented manner. (Not what you can do for this suspect.)
2. The fourth time, leave a ‘Move-on’ message telling them that you’ll not be calling them back again for a while as you don’t want to be a pest. However, if they’ve been busy and meaning to call you back… (I get more return calls off of this message than any other.)
- Lastly, repeat your phone number s-l-o-w-l-e-y, and repeat your name again. Sometime we get nervous and say our phone number too rapidly forcing the suspect to replay it multiple times to get it. Repeat it because people access their voicemail from cell phones sometimes and a number could easily be dropped.
If you’d like some examples of what I mean, give us a call at 817 224-9900.
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