if you are a making a sales call or have never spoken to that person ever before. The information that you should leave in a voicemail is as follows:
- Your Name
- Your Company
- Purpose of the Call <—this is VERY important
- Your Phone Number <—slowly and twice
- If you left a LONG message, then repeat your name as well with step 4.
Why should you do these things? Because that will increase your chances of getting a call back. There is this one call and voicemail that I keep getting. We’ll call him Joe from ACompany. Joe from ACompany leave me a voicemail about 2-3 times a week. His voicemail sounds like this, “Hi, this is Joe from ACompany, please give me a call back at xxx-xxx-xxxx.” Ok, so what is wrong with Joe’s message?
Joe doesn’t state a purpose. Why is he calling? What is this regarding? Are you selling something? Is it something important? What is it? His messages are the same every single time and I never call him back. I never call him back because I have no idea who he is or what he wants. Maybe he’s a salesman and thinks that if he doesn’t have his sales pitch on the phone, I might be curious enough to call him back. Sorry Joe, doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes Joe calls the line that goes through the receptionist. Today I asked her to tell Joe to stop calling. Do you know what Joe’s reaction was? He was a)shocked and then b)mad. He was upset that I told him to stop calling because he said that I had never even talked to him before. The receptionist told him that she was no longer going to pass his calls through and that she had to honor my request. To this, Joe said, that he wanted to talk to the bossman. But you know what the bossman is going to do, he is going to hear Joe’s message and forward it straight to me to take care of because it is probably in-line with what my position is and to that I am still not calling him back.
So please, when you leave a voicemail, be clear and purposeful, which will be better for everyone.