A company has been trying to call me for a few weeks and are regularly leaving messages. They are all like this:

“Hi Tim, this is Roger from ACME Events. Please can you give me a call back on ……”

Now, I don’t know Roger, I don’t know ACME Events yet he expects me to call him back.

WHY?

20 years ago, people would generally return calls but today, frankly, we do not have the time to return calls from people that we do not know unless we have a good reason to call them back.

The problem with this voicemail is that I do not know why I should call him back. What is my motivation to spend time calling someone for something there is a fair chance I do not want.

Leaving a voicemail when cold calling is perfectly reasonable the first time you call. However, I would suggest that it is not worthwhile on subsequent calls. If you call someone often enough, they will know that they have missed your call and if they really want to, they will call back.

So, if you are going to leave a voicemail, what should you say?

In essence, a good voicemail should be similar to a good cold call. You need to make people think differently about what they are doing. We buy something because we want or need to change. To change, we have to learn something new. So, our voicemail should include information that your potential customer is unlikely to know that makes them think differently.

If you can intrigue them sufficiently, then they will want to call you back or at worst, be likely to accept your call when you try again. Just asking them to call back without any reason is unlikely to be successful.

Whenever you contact a customer, you have to make it easy for them to accept your call. You have to tell them why they should accept, what is in it for them, what will they get out of it? They are not going to give up their time for free. Just having something to sell is not a good enough reason.