SALES QUESTION:

"How Soon After Leaving a Voicemail Should a Follow-Up Call Be Made?"

Answer:

Well first of all, that depends on what your definition of a "follow-up" call is. To me, a follow-up call is after I've spoken with a prospect and for whatever reason, we weren't able to close on the previous call but the opportunity still exists and a follow-up call needs to be made.

If however, what you are really asking is "after leaving a first time voicemail, when should I try a second (or third, fourth, fifth etc) attempt?" that's a different scenario all together.

Assuming you meant the latter, that will depend on a few factors:

1) The Type of Lead. Is it a true "warm" lead (warm lead means the prospect raised their hand to be contacted. Example: They filled out a proposal request on your website) Or is it a cold call? If it's a warm lead, I will be more agreesive because if they contacted me, most likely they are also contacting my competition looking for a solution as well. And no salesperson likes to hear "Oh, we already found a solution".

2) Opportunity Potential. Example: Let's say you sell to certain verticals and the lead you have is a known vertical that doesn't buy very often... I'm not a big fan of chasing leads with a low % ROI. But making the decision of who and who not to chase will come in part by you truly knowing what constitutes a high probable suspect for you.

In other words, we should never be calling random companies of a list (unless that list was developed using several key prospecting factors - my version of KPI's - that qualified them to at least be probable sales suspects)

Example: I could help individual real estate agents increase their success rate when selling by phone but it's not a huge audience for me. So even if they raise their hand, I won't chase them with multiple calls / voicemails like I would a B2B company that has an inside sales team.

3) How Aggressive You Want to Be. I've found greater success being on the more aggressive side as opposed to the passive side. Example:

• Leave a voicemail in the morning.
• Schedule a "second attempt" in the afternoon.
• Try again the next day.

Tired of Leaving Voicemail Messages and Not Getting Any Callbacks?

How to Improve Your Odds of Having a Successful Call Back

Most sales people have a pipeline full of prospects who said "Call me back after the Holidays". Some meant it. Some gave you the brush off. And we're going to talk about how to avoid the later in our next free webinar on January 7th (UPDATE: You can access the recorded version here)

One of the things in this sales training webinar we will be teaching is how to approach those sales calls in order to have success. Most sales reps strategy is to simply call back and say something to the effective of "You asked me to call you back after the first of the year...is now a good time?" which will then lead to another put off or stall.

There are several things that need to happen to avoid this situation from happening to you and we will go over them in the upcoming webinar however one way you can improve your odds of success when making call backs is by having something new / fresh / exciting / interesting to talk about.

Most people like to talk about themselves or about things that they are interested in and not what we are interested in. (Crazy, I know)

So instead of calling them to talk about whatever it is you sell, stop what you are doing right now and:

1. Compile a list of all your "Call me back after the holidays" prospects;
2. Go to Google Alerts (URL is below) and set up a news alert with:
   1. Your prospects name;
   2. Company name and...
   3. Keyword relevant to what's most important to them that your product solves.

This way if any news hits the web about your prospect, their company or studies / stories / white papers / blogs about their industry between now and the time you will be calling them back, you can take a different approach that will separate yourself from the rest of the sales pack (your competitors) who will also be calling them after the holidays.

I don't care if the news alert said your prospect won youth soccer coach of the year... What kind of warm reception would you get if you did find that out about your prospect and you opened the call back with...

"Congratulations on wining...." do you think you would get the immediate brush off? Certainly not!

Better yet, if you're confident in this prospect potentially being a whale of an account (why would you be chasing them if they weren't? ... I digress) why not send them a trophy congratulating him / her on their personal achievement and have your company name on the trophy as the presenter? How is your prospect going to hire your competitor with the trophy praising his/her achievements given by your company sitting on his desk?

This is just one example of how creative you can get. If you want to be in the top 10% of all sales people in your industry (not just your company) you'll need to do more then just be a "follow-up" drone.

We'll discuss more ideas on how to have follow-up success in the webinar but thought you would want a jump start now on one of the things to do.

Here's the URL to the Google Alerts page: http://www.google.com/alerts