When a prospect's voicemail directs you to text, structure your message for reading, not listening. Start with relevance about them, not your name, because they will likely read a transcript. This optimizes the message for the medium they've chosen.
If a prospect says "no" to your permission-based opener but doesn't immediately hang up, use that brief moment to provide context. State a relevant trigger (like hiring) and social proof to pique their curiosity and potentially salvage the call.
Don't hang up immediately after booking a meeting. Invites from new contacts often require manual acceptance to appear on a calendar. To prevent no-shows caused by a missed invite, stay on the line and ask the prospect to confirm they've received and accepted it.
The speaker lost a promising lead by describing his service with vague terms like "strategy" and "enablement." He realized he should have focused on the specific, tangible problems his service solves, like overcoming cultural differences for offshore sales teams calling into America.
The speaker tried to build rapport by referencing team names ("team white and team orange") found in a job post. However, the senior leader he called had no idea what he was talking about, causing the personalization attempt to fall flat and seem out of place.
Stop measuring voicemail success by callbacks. Data suggests leaving a voicemail increases future pickup rates by over 25%. Furthermore, pointing the voicemail to an email you sent can triple the reply rate to that email, making it a powerful tool for multichannel prospecting.
A study of 300 million cold calls found that asking for permission to speak (e.g., "Got a minute for me to share why I'm calling?") is ten times more effective than standard pleasantries. This approach allows the prospect to consciously opt-in to the conversation.