Voice Mail Marketing

By John I. Todor, Ph.D., Author of Addicted Customers (www.AddictedCustomers.com)

Voice Mail Marketing, pioneered by Melinda Hennings, is a terrific example of signaling that you are genuinely interested in a win-win relationship with a prospective customer.

Here’s the gist of her “Voice Mail Magic” strategy. Start with the premise that your first few telephone calls to a prospect are marketing, not sales. For this reason, schedule these calls outside of the prospect’s normal business hours to increase the likelihood you will get voice mail. Voice mail is not intrusive; the prospect can listen to it when he or she has the time. Cold calls that get through are intrusive and often push the prospect into a defensive posture. The first voice mail message should identify you and give a brief explanation of what you have to offer the prospect. Subsequent messages should remain brief but continue to add details of how your offering will benefit the prospect—show that you have done you homework. In each message request a return call but don’t expect one. Persist in leaving messages that help the prospect learn more and more about how you might help them. Space the messages based on the pace of the prospect’s industry. If the time between messages is too long, you will signal that they are not a priority to you and what you have to offer is not timely and important.

This strategy sends a number of clear signals to the prospective customer. You respect their time but are persistent because you genuinely believe you have something of value to offer them. Because each successive call adds to important details, you gain credibility. Because your messages are succinct, progressive and persistent, you are increasingly seen as authentic, that is, as someone who is what they say they are. In today’s world most sales situation start off with distrust or suspicious trust and struggle to get past this point. Henning’s process uses voice mail to move the relationship up the trust scale before selling takes place. It moves the customer from a defensive or adversarial stance to one where they are hopeful that you are what you say you are—because they see what’s in it for them. They can imagine a win-win business relationship. The act of becoming “hopeful” is an important step is the progression of trust and when trust is established, a customer can imagine a win-win business relationship.

Comments

[Beacon IT Support]

Voice mail services can be very helpful to businesses. Also, voice over internet solutions are becoming popular and are another cost effective way to handle phone calls. If you want to compete in today's business world, you need to give your company every advantage possible which means staying up to date on the latest technologies and trends.

[El Segundo Technology Services]

Excellent phone service is just as important as any other kind of customer service. It can change the way a customer sees you company. Having business phones that work properly and is supported by IT people that know what they're doing make phone calling a possible, and dependable way of communication.

[Syntellect]

This was a pretty interesting article. People should consider it, but if you call in the 'off' hours and wake someone up from slumber, they'll never consider your product.

[Dale Wolf]

Another service that does this quite well is called BoxPilot. We have used them in several campaigns.

And if you want an on-premise solution that you can use very cost effectively, you might want to check out SalesBlade, a new technology developed by a firm that formerly provided the same hosted service. www.salesblade.com

[VMail King]

Great article. I find that leaving voicemails does work well, when left effectively.

The problem I found was just not enough time to make the calls so that if would be the right timing as the article says.

The other problem was when I would get time and make the calls, leaving a number of voicemails over and over, it was the same message everytime, this caused the quality of the message to drop off because I was leaving it 30-40 times in a row.

I found this company called Voicelogic, they provide a service called voicemail courier. This company actually delivered my message to all my b2b contacts in one shot. They did it really fast. It would have taken me months to do the amount of calls they did in 2 days. They use some kind system where they use live callers with some technology they developed to bypass business phone systems and deliver the message to the right person. It's a great service.

As an added benefit they also cleaned up my list in the process and provided me with replacement contacts.