Let’s take this hypothetical situation. You are cold calling clients. Let say you are cold calling a car dealership. You are leaving a message with the decision maker for window cleaning. Like the General Manager or the Parts Manager or whatever.
What elements should you talk about in your voice message? Years you’ve been around. Your reliability, quality, your flexibility in giving a quote? your excellent communication?
What should you say in the 1 minute you have to leave a message that the decision maker will want to return (if he wants a quote). What might impress him or her?
Or if you want to say something general about leaving voicemail message on cold calls please say that too.
I know Chris does a lot of coldcalling, maybe he could share something too?
Don’t leave a voicemail on the cold-call. Send a letter instead, and follow it up with a voicemail if you can’t get the guy/gal on the phone.
Unless you have an “in”, like “[I]Joe, over at Goodman’s BMW asked me to give you a shout because he thought you would appreciate a free estimate…[/I]”
[SIZE=“1”]Man, I’m dumb for helping a local competitor…[/SIZE]
Nobody, and I mean nobody is going to call a solicitor back. Nobody great in sales leaves messages.
The letter is better, however you are still trying to get them to care and they can easily pitch it if it bores them. Get them on the phone or forget it.
This is another example of no magic pill. This is how commercial has to go. These car dealerships want sales, not salesman calling them. How many different types of services contact the average car lot a week? 5, 10, 50?
I agree I don’t think I would leave a message either… Well maybe… If I was offering them a free sample of window cleaning. We have gotten a lot of clients that way. I’m not sure if you’d want to be running around town dolling out free window cleanings though.
I agree, send a letter and followup with a phone call. If you leave a message, leave your name, number and ask for an appointment to see them. Don’t mention your company, or window cleaning or anything in your message except ask for an appointment.
Many times when you show up for your appointment you will discover they simply canned your letter and did not even look at it. If they did read your letter and they call you for your appointment, they are interested and you have a shot.
So far I only had one person return my message, to say no thanks. And no one else did. Leaving messages is pretty useless and wastes your time, time better spent to call more people and get a yes or two.
If I were going to leave a voice mail like this, I would simply ask for a few minutes of there time, or ask when a good time to come talk in person would be. I wouldn’t try to get a yes or no answer over the phone.
Dozens of phone calls a day and no results? I would say it’s time to switch it up some. I would cut it down to 2 cold calls a day and spend 2 hours a day selling in person. Make a goal of how many business cards you want to distribute to decision makers a day.
I’ve been getting some results. What I meant was that when I leave a voicemail no one calls me back. So leaving a voicemail message is pretty fruitless.
I agree. This is very similar to what I do. I did it twice today and in two hours both had called back to find out what I was about. After spending about thrity seconds telling them what I had to offer, they both scheduled appointments. A three story hotel and a large private school. Maybe it was luck. maybe not. I’d rather have luck on my side sometimes.:rolleyes:
I agree with what has been said. Keep calling until they pick up. You can leave a message, but they won’t call back (unless you caught them at the one moment in their lives they were thinking about window cleaning)!
This year I have been focusing my business away from smaller res work jobs and targeting larger commercial work. Every person I called last month was not interested. I called about 30 places in 2 days. Not one bite. I then decided I was going to treat this like a did res work. I drove to the places and just walked in. The places I am targeting are good 20 mins from each other. I was able to hit up 4 per day. My goal was 5 but I don’t see that happening as at the end of the day no one wants to talk to you. I hit the road for home around 330. So far I have averaged 1 job per two days of driving around. $1000 + job. So for me, I am not calling anymore. I have yet to see how well my average will do as I still have about 300 places I need to hit up so my average can end up going down the drain.
