One of the most common push backs we hear in our workshops on The Formula is that some believe that voicemails are a waste of time. I’ve written on this topic before, but let me take a moment and add another reason to leave them.

There are now six reasons for leaving voicemails as we’ve just come across another one that is worthy of mention. People who do not have physical gatekeepers are using their voicemail to screen their calls.

Unless they recognize the Caller ID, they won’t answer the phone. So if you’re not leaving voicemails, you’re in a Catch-22 situation. They’ll not answer your call because they don’t recognize your Caller ID (see August 13^th Blog for why blocking the ID won’t work either) and they won’t call you back because they don’t know who called.

Reasons to leave a voicemail:

1. Efficiency – Those that do call us back are pre-qualified (at least they are willing to have a conversation)
2. Efficiency – The majority of the time you invest in making a call is up to the moment you would leave a voicemail. Without Klpz, that could be up to about three minutes of your time; with Klpz, about 90 seconds. A voicemail shouldn’t be longer than 15 seconds, so why not invest the additional time?
3. Cold calling is partially a numbers game which means that there are some (less than five percent) of your universe of suspects that are in the market for what we’re selling when we call because they do need us. Therefore, some people will call you back.
4. Marketing pays big money to advertise your brand (your message) and you’ve just reached out to a potential customer and you’re not going to leave a voicemail? You’ve already paid for (in your time to place the call) the majority of your effort, so why wouldn’t you leverage the effort?
5. Advertisers say it takes an average of seven touches just to get someone to remember your name.
6. People use their voicemail to screen calls so if they don’t recognize your caller ID (or if you’ve blocked it), they won’t answer the call anyway…ever.

In summary, start leaving voicemails using the concepts of The Formula. You’ll get more appointments and sales without much of a time or effort increase.