235: Ashleigh Early and James Buckley on Leaving Effective Voicemails

What's poppin' y'all, it's your man James, Say What Sales Buckley, and this is your weekly Make It Happen Mondays episode with your host, well, me, actually. Big shout out to all of our partners, Sales Loft, Proposify, Chili Piper, Gong, Vidyard, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and our newest partner, Breeze. These companies are all great people to work with that truly care about elevating the sales profession, so be sure you're speaking with these teams about how they can help you and your team sell better. There's a great debate about whether or not salespeople should be leaving voicemails. My good friend Ashley Early and I got pretty specific on this episode of Make It Happen Mondays, so let's get into it, y'all.

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Make It Happen Mondays. I am your host, well, James Buckley this time around, sorry to disappoint, but I'm going to be hosting my good friend Ashley Early. We are here to discuss the value, or the not-so-great value, of leaving voice messages. This is a hot topic. Ashley, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to proving you wrong. All right. So, for those of you that don't know, Ashley and I have very conflicting opinions on voice messages. So, let's just get down and dirty with it. Ashley, you believe people should not leave voice messages. I am going to give the microphone to you so that you can state your claim.

Honestly, what it comes down to for me, and this is, we're making big, broad, sweeping statements. Obviously, scenarios matter. Context matters. Use your judgment. Yada, yada. Don't be an idiot. But in my experience, I get more done if I don't leave voicemails, have a higher volume of calls, people rarely call me back. So, I've got a voicemail that I use currently, that a lot of my clients use, that's not your traditional voicemail, that works okay for what we want it to do, which actually is not to get a callback. So, we basically kind of changed up the end goals. Like, we're not even looking for a callback anymore. But what it really comes down to for me is that 20, 30 seconds spent leaving a voicemail, even if you're good and leave it for 10 seconds, you still have to listen to the message and, you know, kind of the, what you talk about and stuff.

It just, I've never really seen the ROI. And most of my experience is with high-level enterprise, highly technical sales. So, I'm calling CISOs, CIOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, like those really technical roles. So, obviously, it's different if you call sales pros. Obviously, it's going to be different if you're calling B2C. Obviously, it's going to be different if you've got a different persona, which is why personas are so important. Shameless plug for the Persona Masterclass. Go take it. But in my experience, with the personas that I've sold to voicemails, were usually a waste of time. And I could get two more war dials in on a prospect somewhere else, which is more likely to get me meetings.

All right. All right. All right. So, a little bit of context here. Ashley is the other sales coach. She hosts podcasts called The Other Side of Sales. They do great conversations about sales and what it is to be in sales today. Big focus on equality and looking at sales from like an overall perspective. Umbrella term, like doesn't matter, color, gender, race, background, other side of sales. Great podcast to listen to. But I'm going to tell you now, I adamantly disagree with what you're saying. I love it. The reason I disagree is because I leave a voicemail every time I get the chance, but I don't really give a lot of context. It's pretty short and sweet. And then I always put my contact information on the back, as we always talk about as a best practice.

And you're right. My phone doesn't ring off the hook with people calling me back. What I do get, though, is a lot of DMs and emails that start with, I've gotten your voicemails or I got your voicemail. I'm reaching out to give you the update or tell you where we're at or thanks for leaving a voicemail for me. Sorry, I haven't called you back yet. I've been busy. And I get a lot of emails and messages that start this way. So I believe that voice message is one of those rarities today that stand out because so many sales reps feel the way that you feel. I do agree with you that persona matters and the person and the industry and the vertical and the department that you're selling into makes a big impact on whether or not somebody calls you back.

I certainly don't expect a CISO to call me back when I leave them a five-second voicemail that is, you know, hey, calling to leave you a message. Give me a call back, right? No, probably not going to happen. And it's going to take probably a lot more touches and a lot more attempts and a lot more different channels to get that person's attention. But the voicemail specifically, I think, transfers nicely when you follow it with an email, when you follow it with a LinkedIn connection request. There's this element, and I've taken a great liking to starting off my emails. If I've left somebody a voice message, I'll start that email off with, just left you a voice message at this number. Totally.

Is it the right number? Right? Oh, I like that. Don't get it. Right? Don't. I love confirmation questions like that. Because it's like, you got it. I know you got it. You know you got it. But you're going to admit to me that you got it. That's it. And it's like, start with these little asks, and then you move up to the bigger ask. It's the progressive ask thing. I love that. I'm going to steal that. Yeah, it's a good one. And I'll tell you, the thing is, is like, you got to be real specific with real, like, particular about how you use it. Because sometimes people have voice messages that are like, hi, you've reached Sally, and I'm not available right now. Leave a message. I don't need to ask her if that's the right number, because I'm calling Sally, and her voice message says, you've reached Sally.

But in other instances, you get that, you have reached 305632, and you're like, oh, my God, this person probably hasn't even set up their voicemail. So, there's a really good chance that they've never even listened to the first voice message that's been left for them. How many friends do you have that will literally say, I don't think I've ever listened to a voice message? I will tell you. So, some of you who are familiar with me know I've had an interesting year in that I moved to Europe, so I actually live in the Netherlands now. I have not set up my Dutch cell phone voicemail yet. I legitimately have not. People text me in Dutch all the time and be like, you didn't set up your voice message?

You didn't set up your voicemail. I'm like, yeah, I keep forgetting. Because it happens once every like three weeks. Someone wants to leave me a voicemail. It's not often. Not many people have that number. Well, there are lots of ways to leave a voice message, too. I mean, we're in a world of technology today where it's not just calling someone and leaving a message. And let's really take a step back here and let's go back in history to when voice message was the dominant way that people consistently left messages for people, got someone to call them back. I remember answering machines. I was going to say a tape answering machines. Did you have the printed? Did you have the printed phone tree?

So, no, I didn't have the printed phone tree. We had printed phone trees. So, I don't even know what that is. Tell me about that. Phone tree. Okay. Phone tree is really simply. Some of you out there will remember it or your parents will remember it. Phone trees were like for Girl Scouts or soccer or something. The coach would call one person. One person calls two other people. And that way, the whole team kind of, it literally just turns into a tree and everyone hears. But it's literally playing telephone with a very specific message like, hey, practice has been pushed back 30 minutes. Yeah. So, I actually do remember that. My mom was a baseball mom. I played baseball when I was a young kid and we had something similar.

I don't think we called it a phone tree. But I do remember the tape answering machines. I remember coming home and my parents being so excited to see who called, right? And like hitting that button and listening to a message together, right? And being like, oh, somebody left us a message. And then it got into this. I remember in the 90s, it got real creative. People started to like find funny ways to set up their voicemails, their greetings on their tape, right? If you're as deeply confused as I am, press one, right? And everybody get a good laugh out of those people that were like messing with their phone that way, messing with their message. Or using their kids. It's like, you've reached the earlies.

Give us a message. You know, with that great little like little kid voice, you get those. Yeah. People get creative. It was really exciting when in like the early aughts, you started to be able to get multiple lines at a house. So, yeah. Like everyone had that one really cool friend who had their own phone number and their own voicemail. And this is really like back in the days when like you couldn't be online and on the phone at the same time. Yep. That's true. I remember my sister had her own line for that reason. My father was big online and he was always online when my sister would get home from school and want to use the phone. She'd pick up the phone. He'd lose connection. And you could hear him yell from the living room.

Like so angry that he got kicked offline while he was downloading some random chess game or something. I had, you know, what are you really downloading in 1995? You actually had speed. You could download things. You could download. You could download. We barely got, it took me like, this was back in the day. Like I remember like the first time I tried to download something, it was a song. I think it took, I think it took six hours for a two minute song. Yeah. And that's when I, and that's when I abandoned downloading things for about five more years. Yeah. It takes a long time to download anything back in the nineties. Yeah. I'll keep burning CDs and making mixtapes. Thank you very much. Mixtapes were the jam, but those tapes went into the voice message machines.

I remember you had to like flip them over. They'd like, you know, cause it would flip over, it would roll the other way to record. If too many people called you, you'd have like a number of people that called you. It was always like five or six, very few people come home, hit that play button. There's like 80 messages. Right. But now we live in a world where you can literally like leave, like send somebody a voice message on their cell. You can go in LinkedIn and you can open a DM if you're a first degree connection and you can send a voice message on your, on a DM. Instagram gives you that same opportunity to do that. So like from a voice message. I think this is an important distinction. I'm talking about voicemail where you're calling a.

Somebody's phone. Somebody's phone, whether it's an office or a cell phone voice messages, like what you're talking about with Instagram, with LinkedIn, the most powerful tool behind video. And just barely, just barely of the past four of the past two years in sales. Holy cow. The return on those is insane. Do all of those. Yeah. I, again, point at like the different channel for voice that we have. I think voicemail related specifically to leaving voice messages on phones has its nuances. I will say it depends on your voicemail. A lot of times. Yes. As to whether or not you're going to get a reply. Some people have a tendency to tell somebody why they're calling on a voicemail. You're literally trying to sell somebody in a voicemail.

Stop this. Right. Like sell at the meeting that you earn, not in the message that you send. And that's kind of where I think a lot of people fail in the voicemail realm, specifically around like leaving a voicemail on somebody's phone. The other part is, is that I feel like we don't call people's cell phones enough in today's environment. We're afraid we're going to step over some social line, like people's phones ring all the time and they make a decision in that moment as to whether or not they're going to have that conversation. And I don't think cell phones are off limits. It's, do you think it's too aggressive to call cell phones specifically and leave voice messages every chance that you get?

Okay. So a couple of things here when it comes to cell phones. One, yeah, we are totally not using cell phones enough, period. Call them more, call them all the time. Sales reps in general, I think need to get over this fear of kissing off prospects. Specifically because there is, in my opinion, nothing you can do that will ruin a deal that you can't walk back with a sincere apology unless you're lying or you're insulting. So don't be, don't be a jackass. If someone clearly has a screaming kid or a fire alarm going off in the background, politely excuse yourself and say, Hey, it sounds like you're really slammed. I'll call you back later. No big deal. Don't be a jerk. Don't insult people. As long as you're not doing that, you can walk anything back.

If you call someone on their cell and they're clearly offended, you called their cell. Apologize. Hey, I'm sorry. You clearly weren't expecting me to call you at this number. What's a better number for me to reach you at? Just be sincere, be direct and apologize. Move on. No big deal. Then you're the person who at least acknowledged your mistake. And now you've got trust. You can send an email, follow up saying, I'm so sorry. You can even go a little overboard and try and make them feel like, oh, it wasn't that big of a deal. No, no, don't worry about it. Let's set up a call. You can use this as something to actually distinguish yourself. Stop being afraid of pissing people off. Get good at apologizing.

Plus, the benefit of pushing right up to that line where you're apologizing means you're not leaving anything on the table. In my mind. A lot of the people who are early in their sales career, I tell them, make sure you're apologizing to a prospect at least once a month. Because then you know you're towing that line really well and you're getting the experience that you need to figure out and read situations properly. You'll get better at it with time. And this is something, especially if you've got cold call reluctance, if you're really nervous, if you're really like, I'm going to piss someone off. Yes, go piss someone off. It will be okay. Because you think it's this big, scary thing and they're going to hate your company.

They're going to hate you and you're going to get fired. And no, none of that's going to happen. And if it does hit up James and I will get you into a healthy environment that will actually respect your courage. You know, there are certain verticals that I think don't appreciate the overstepping of dialing somebody's phone number or even leaving a voicemail. Like personality type plays a huge role. One of the pieces of advice I give people is like, look at their LinkedIn profile. Check out their picture. If they look like with this sullen look, like serious business look, you know, maybe consider leaving a truly professional voice message instead of like, hey, what's popping, right? Like a little bit different, right?

But if they look like me and they're all smiles with their thumbs in the air, chances are good. They're going to be amped to hear from you in like a really joyful and bubbly way. And that's all right. But know your persona before you're like reaching out, leaving random generic voice messages. And if you're going to personalize, make it fast. Don't leave some like huge, like long Lord of the Rings tale in somebody's voice message. They don't, they're probably not going to listen to all that stuff. So let me ask you a question on that. What do you think the ideal voicemail length is? 30 to 45 seconds, give or take. Oh, I'm 15 or under. Okay. But what is your voice message consistent? So let's do it.

No, let's do it right now. If you were going to call me and leave a voice message, what would it say? Hey, James, just dropped you an email. Do me a favor. Make sure it didn't get caught in spam. Search for A-S-H-L-E-I-G-H. I'll give you a callback later. Thanks. Hey, that's actually really good. And I like that. I'll give you a callback later because there's no like phone number at the end, which I've kind of abandoned. Right. Nobody's calling you. Here's the logic behind abandoning the phone number, which a lot of people like, you know this, but you never actually thought about it. Right. Everyone looks at voicemails on their computers or on their cell phones. The phone number's right there.

They don't need it. Yeah. They don't need it. I can see where the call came from. The only way they would need it is if you're using local presence or something like that. And even then they could call the number back or local presence is weird, but I want them to call the number in the email anyway. If I dictate a phone number, they have to write it down or copy paste it into their thing. Just go read my email. No, I'll put it in there. So that's how I've been doing it is if we're going to leave a voicemail, it's super short. It's a little ambiguous and I have them and you spell out something that is unique about either you or your company that's in your voicemail. I'm lucky. I have a unique spelling of Ashley.

It's pretty rare. They can search that. You probably spell out Buckley. So I don't really spell things. I like that you spelled that because your name is spelled a little bit differently and you don't want them going out searching for Ashley with an EY. You want them going searching for the right Ashley early, right? Not that there's another Ashley early with the EY out there. Maybe there is. Maybe there's not. I'm sure there is. I'm confident that if we look hard enough, we'd find one. Oh, I'm the one that's concerned enough about identity theft. I know everyone who has. I have connected on LinkedIn and Facebook with everyone who has variations of my name. Oh, okay. Well, hey, I'm in a James Buckley group.

There's a lot of Jims and Jimmies out there giving me a bad name. I'm going to tell you. So I liked your voice message because it was short and concise, but also you abandoned that number. And it was a little bit, you know, hey, what is this person calling me about? Right? Like there's really no like try it hard to sell there. My voice message to you would be something like this. What's up, Ashley? Ashley, I am calling you because I've been looking at your profile and your company for a hot minute and I love what I see. I think we can do some really fun stuff together. Give me a shout back. This is James Buckley with JB Sales. I'll reach back out later. Right? And that's it. And again, I don't, I abandoned that phone number, but I'm like you, I'll call you back another time.

Right? And I do this pretty consistently. And I think right after that is when I send that email, like literally in the next like five minutes, you get that email from me that says, Ashley, what's up? I just left you a voice message. This is the number I called. Is it the right one? I really want to connect because, and I have that reason I'm reaching out to you in text, but not in the voice message. And the two play really nicely together. And I think I get a high response rate for the emails as a result of that message lining up well with the voice message. So what do you think about that? No, and it's pretty spot on with what I would recommend if you're going to leave a voicemail. Right. And this is where it comes down to that question around time investment.

So that's a 15, 20 second voicemail or 15, 30 second voicemail. That's 15, 20 seconds of listening to you've reached three, zero, five. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Leave a message after the tone. Press five to mark urgent or whatever. That's 30 seconds. Yeah. That's at least one more call I could make during that time. So this is where like what I, I'm not saying never leave voicemails, but what a lot of my clients are finding is they're leaving voicemails less than 20% of the time. They're only leaving voicemails where it's a vetted prospect, where like it's a referral or something like that. We know they're the decision maker where the research has indicated like this is a top tier, top 10%.

I want to get this person or situations like that, where it's really, really clean. Once you've engaged with someone, once you've had a conversation, all bets are off. You're getting voicemails from me all the time because that's building trust and building like, Hey, Ashley said, she'd do this. She said, she'd call me back. She's calling me back. She sent the email. She said, she'd send the email. That's a trust building thing, but with prospecting, it really depends on balancing that quantity quality thing. The other thing you mentioned there is like different, you know, different mediums, different messages and stuff. I found if you're going to leave voicemails, it's the very first and the very last.

I don't do them in the middle. So if you've got a, if you've got a 10 to 15 touch sequence with five or seven calls in there, it's literally the first call, Hey, I literally just sent you an email. Please respond to it. So I know you got it. And it's the last one. Hey, you know, hello. So-and-so sent you some emails about blank. Not sure if they're getting caught in spam or not. Let me know. Yeah. I love using the spam line because everyone's had stuff get caught in spam or weird things happen. And again, it's the same thing. The goal is to get people to engage with the email or whatever other messaging they want. But it's giving, it's a, it's that general prod. I'm a real person. I'm human.

I'm just trying to make sure if you're the thing or not. And it's leaning into your personality. And like you said, matching the persona, like he taking cues off the photo and stuff like that. Yeah. The other thing, the other thing that's really great where voice builds can be fantastic is if you have any sort of a regional dialect. Yeah. Let's them know you're from where they're from. Bingo. Yeah. So, um, but that does not mean just as a caveat, don't change who you are. You speech wise, super fake. You don't want to do that. Do not put on an access that that's in Boston. Don't call somebody in Boston and pretend like you're the Southie because the phone, the phony gets sought out really fast out there, man.

You will definitely end up in a bad situation. Well, in my mind, that's insulting. It is. Yeah, it's that's that's appropriating a culture. You don't need to do it. Yeah. But if you've got that something. So, like, I'll give you something I do use, for example, because I lived in the South because my best friend growing up was from deep Georgia, even though I was raised in Washington State. I use y'all a lot. Oh, it's a great term. It's a really good term. Everyone should use it more. I will use it more when I'm calling the South. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, that's just that regional that's that regional selling that we love to talk about so much. I think it really does matter. I want to move.

I want to move topics and I want to talk about leaving voice messages later in the sales cycle, leaving voice messages when you're prospecting. That's like one of those typical conversations where there's a set of people that agree that it's useful and a set of people that agree that it's not. But I think it's a real mixed bag when you're talking about later in the sales cycle. So, specifically, I want to hear what you think about leaving voice messages when you've been ghosted. Oh, no, that is you're getting all the voicemails and texts and you're getting I call that at that point I call it professional stalking, although I'm trying to I'm trying to find different words that are less the less charged to describe that.

But no, it's like, look, you engaged with me. It's literally my job to follow up with you. It's literally my job to get a reaction out of you. I will stop when you give me any sort of indication. I'll happily leave you alone. Trust. It's fine. I do not want to keep calling you. This is not what makes my day happy is calling you and leaving voicemail messages. Yeah. Chasing you for weeks is no bueno. Exactly. Like, I don't want to do that. You don't enjoy this. And honestly, that's one of the things that I do that gets people to stop ghosting me. Is I say that in email and in a voicemail. Hey, it's been, you know, it's been two weeks I heard from you. You indicate this is really important. If it's no longer a priority, that's fine.

I don't want to keep blowing up your inbox and your voicemail. I love saying, I don't want to keep doing this because it's, it's not a threat, but it kind of is. It's like, I'm going to keep doing this. I don't, I don't need to keep doing this, but I need, but I will keep doing this. If you don't want me to just tell me I'll go away. It's not a problem. And this is something I think is, is, I appreciate you mentioned this too, because I see a lot of people on LinkedIn and, you know, in war room and Reddit and stuff like that, who are just angry at prospects who ghost them slided, slided, right? They're, they're slighted, but they're, they're just how, how could people do this? Why were they did?

And it always rubs me a bit the wrong way. Cause it's like, put yourself in their shoes for a hot second. Yeah. Like they're clearly something happened that made them really uncomfortable or stressed out, or they just couldn't handle it. Take for a second and go, I mean, think about in your own life. Think about the last time you ghosted someone, everyone goes to people. I'm currently ghosting everyone. Everyone does. I'm currently ghosting two different doctors right now who are trying to get me to schedule things or pay bills. I don't want to do it right now. I'm totally ignoring those numbers. That's fine, but I'm doing it because my in-laws are arriving in two days and I am up to my eyeballs in a million different things.

I don't have time to deal with figuring out how to schedule something in the Dutch healthcare system right now. Sure, sure. I'll deal with it later. So have a little bit of like compassion for like, Hey, stuff happens, especially today, especially with COVID. Everyone's going back to school and Delta's going crazy. And who knows what's going on in that person's life. You can be angry and frustrated, be like, Oh, this was, I forecasted this and all this other stuff and take a second and go, okay, compassion for them. And what did I do to contribute to this situation? Yeah. What questions did I not ask? What did I, did I, Oh, was I overly aggressive with my forecasting? Did I not set next steps?

Did I not lock in those next steps? That's usually the culprit right there. Right. It's such a basic thing. And yet we all screw that up constantly. We do. It's such a basic thing. Oh, sure. I'll hit you up next week. Bye. Yeah. I just got to look this over and I'll get you my response, you know, 48 hours. No problem. Take some time to digest this. Anytime someone asks for time to digest something or read something or respond to something, say, great, no problem. Can we put 15 minutes on the calendar for a week after they said they would do it? And if you get, if you get and just tell them, and if you, if you're done, if you review it, if we don't need the call, we'll cancel it or we'll just all take a long lunch.

I, I, I like the, I'm going to take a page out of Kenan's gap selling here, because I think one of the things that he preaches all the time when people do this to us really is it resonates with human beings, like universal statement, but he likes to use that phrase. I'm confused. I'm confused. The last time we talked, this was a big priority for you. You even gave me the numbers and broke down where you wanted to be, but I've reached out three times and I've not heard back from you. And that makes me uncomfortable about how much of a priority this might actually be. I love this voice message because it kind of puts the onus on them to decide if this is still a priority. And if it's not, as you said, I'm fine with that.

All right, y'all people feel like they shouldn't waste their time leaving voicemails for lots of reasons. The fact is that the decision to leave a voicemail or not is largely contingent on a few variables like vertical, persona, research, triggers, and so much more. This is a fun conversation, and I hope you're having a good time with it like we are. Send me your sales wins at james at jbarrows.com to be shouted out on next week's episode of Make It Happen Mondays. Today, I want to give a big congratulations to Sterling Franson at Adobe. Sterling is a JBSales member, and when he started using video for prospecting at the beginning of this year, his delivery was, well, a little bit creepy. Not my words.

That was what a prospect said to him after he sent them a video requesting a meeting. Now, Sterling has created over 300 videos, and for the first time, he hit his quota in Q2. Way to go, Sterling. JBSales has got your back. Let's have some more fun with Ashley. I think that the reason why we get upset seeing sellers get mad about people ghosting them is because we've been ghosted before and it's no fun. But at the same time, can we all just agree that it's not just the selling process that is sometimes broken? The buying process is sometimes broken as well. A hundred percent. The way that buyers interact with sellers is a give-get scenario almost every time, but it's usually the seller doing most of the giving and the buyer doing a lot of taking.

The give is in the form of information, discovery, even like next steps, nailing those down. That's a give in the eyes of the buyer. But in the eyes of the seller, that's a natural thing that should happen in my sales cycle. It's not truly valuable until you're actually in the paperwork process. So we get upset when sellers get mad, but then we look at the buying process and we're like, man, is this normally how you buy? Do you engage with people and set next steps and then poof, disappear for months and then come back and begin negotiating pricing? Like, I think this happens a lot. Oh, yeah. And I don't think that buyers truly see themselves as equals to the sellers. Are they? Oh, yeah. No, there's a whole...

This is something I've really had a great experience with in moving into consulting and being my own boss is that dynamic, that service dynamic. The level of service versus client, right? Yeah, it's level of service versus client, but it's also, it's framing discussions from a very early point on. And one of the things I found is really key to success is the language that my prospective clients are using with me. If they're using language that is indicative of a subservient relationship, I'm coming in to fix, to do, to execute, to... And these are all great active words, but it's all about what I'm doing for them, what I'm doing for them, what I'm doing for them. And it's my job to just do the things.

That's not going to be a good positive engagement from a consulting standpoint where there needs to be a lot of give and take and figuring out what things debate and discussion and trying things and failure, like failure is going to happen, it's sales. And going from there, iterative, words like that versus... Those are all indicators for me. It's like, I don't think this is going to be a really good, healthy relationship. You want someone to come in and drop some training so you can check a box. That's not me. Or if you do, or if that is me, I'm just going to add a zero on my price because you're going to be stressful. I can tell. Versus on the other side, which is an absolutely legitimate pricing strategy, by the way.

Just add a zero? That's the add a zero structure, y'all. The add a zero structure if someone's going to be a pain in the ass. At the same time, looking at someone who's talking about collaborating, working together, figuring out, those are indicators for me that it's going to be a good fit. And it's not that kind of, you're here to do us a favor. We're doing, you know, you're lucky to work with us. You're lucky to get our money sort of thing. It's like, no, this is a fair exchange of goods, whether it's a service or a product. We're both giving, we're both giving, that's literally commerce. This is a two-way street. It's not a, and especially, this is especially true in the US. And now that I'm in Europe, Europe's much better about this.

I think this is the States is the worst with the client is always right. No, you're not. And sometimes as salespeople, that means we have to walk away or we have to step back. But it also means standing up and insisting, no, we deserve to be treated with respect. We deserve to have meetings set. And I find it's really interesting because you talk about Kenan's gap selling, which is really legitimately fabulous. If you're not reading it, you should. And they just, Kenan and Rachel and the whole team over there does such great content. Really, really does. One of the things I love about how he put that was he used a lot of I messages. And I messages are like one of these things I remember from like early elementary school, where it was like, you'd start by talking about your feelings by saying, I feel blank.

Or when you do this, I feel, it's a way to start conversations. The I and you. Exactly. What I didn't like about that was it was all it did. It is a little. It is a little confrontational. Yeah, it is. It is a little, which can be a, which can be a strategy. I would probably use that as like a last step before that. I'd probably do more of a, I like doing, I'm a big fan of guilt. I do guilt really well. I blame my, blame my grandparents, but I love leading him with just, Hey, is everything okay? We had this meeting. You didn't make it. Yeah. You know, just doing kind of the, Hey, just checking in. Well, I don't say just checking in because that's superfluous, but is everything all right? We had said X, Y, Z.

I haven't heard from you. If something's changed, let me know sort of thing. But it's that little bit of like, I do the same thing with someone misses a meeting. I call them five minutes in. Hey, are you all right? Got a call right now. Let me know if you need me to resend the invite. But it's a little bit, a lot of times people will respond back and be like, Hey, really? Sorry, kid stress. Or, Hey, need to push because of this. Or, Oh, I'm so sorry. It's getting that little bit of like, Hey, we agreed because humans and people and connection. I'm here versus going to that point. If I do that and they don't engage with that, then it's okay to be like, Hey, we said X, Y and Z, you know, going to that.

I think that's there. But I think most people will respond to that little bit of, you said you do this and I'm sitting here waiting for you. Most people will be like, Oh crap. From a seller's perspective though, we have to understand that life happens when people are trying to get work done. I had recently had a deal. And then I want to switch to this, this stuff that I pulled up. Cause I think it's so much fun to just banter back and forth since we disagree so much on this, but I had a, I had a prospect. This was a large deal. One of the bigger deals I've had this year. And we had a lot of great momentum going and then he just vanished on me. So I left him a voice message, left him a couple actually.

And he finally did reach back out to me in an email. All of my voice messages were to the tune of, is everything okay? I want to make sure I didn't say anything to rub you the wrong way. I want to make sure there wasn't something I was supposed to do that I didn't do and let you down. I hope everything's all right. Let's connect soon and catch up. He responded back in an email, James, sorry. And I haven't gotten back to you. My house flooded, right? I'm dealing with recovery and disaster right now. I'm going to have to put this on hold. Let's reconnect when the time is right. That small response was enough for me to be empathetic towards that situation as somebody from born and raised in Miami.

That's been through many a hurricane to say, I know exactly what you're going through, man. Let me know if I can be of assistance, if I can help in any way. But be strong, stay right, take care of your family, and let's connect when the time is right. I promise that he'll come back to me when and if he decides to pick that back up and look into that solution again, right? It's just a matter of time. But I think it was my default to is everything okay that made him comfortable getting back to me instead of, yo, are you ghosting me? Like, there's a time and place for that kind of aggression. To your point about Kenan's response where I'm confused. Yeah, I think it is a little aggressive. But I think in the book, he leads up to that point.

It's not his first time being ghosted. No, no, no, no. Yeah, we're taking it out of context. We are taking it a little bit out of context. There's a whole line of attempts to reconnect with somebody that leads to this point where you're, I'm confusing them, right? I'm confused. So I think that's a good point. All right. I want to switch gears one more time because I did a little bit of research, and I pulled up some 2018 and some 2020 data that I want to share. So this comes from Shoals Business, and this is the top five reasons that salespeople shouldn't leave voice messages. Number one reason, and I can't wait to hear what you have to say. The prospect will hear your name and the name of your company and then not recognize either and delete the message without listening to the rest of what you've said.

Go. Yeah, I do it. We all do it. Hi, this is JV Sales. Hi, this is Ashley with the other side of sales, right? Delete. Because here's the thing. You know what they're hearing in the background is, hi, I'm wasting your time to try and sell you something that you don't want. Yeah. Hi, I'm here to make you interested in something you don't really care about. Exactly. This is, if we could change society's perception of salespeople from Glengarry Glen Ross and Wolf of Wall Street to, hey, we're here to help, that would be different, but you're not going to change that. Yeah, that's true. And you know, there's a really easy technique that you can use to not have this be a problem for your voice messages.

And that's not start with who you are and who you're from because they don't care about that. Yes, stop it. Pattern interrupt. Well, and like straight up, they just don't care who you are and who you're with. What they care about is the reason that you're calling. So that's the first reason. The second reason that salespeople should never leave voice messages is that the prospect will hear your, and this is in quotes, pitch and delete it because unless he's been thinking about what you have to offer at that particular time, they're too busy to act on it. Yeah. Another reason why. That whole thing can be boiled down to people are busy. People are busy. Well, and beyond that, too, we even hit on that earlier.

We both did our voicemails. Neither of us pitched. Yeah. Neither of us did have a pitch. But that's why I always say, like, leave that shit out, man. Like sell at the meeting, not in the message. Thank you. Well, it's what are you trying to do with the voicemail? It's and people forget this a lot. It's what are you trying to do with each medium? Yep. When you're trying to get, when you're cold calling, you're trying to secure a next step. You're not trying to sell the product. You're trying to secure next step, verify, you know, ADA sort of thing. You're trying to get ADA. You're trying to get, you're not going for Bant. Attention, interest, desire, action. That's all you're going for in a cold call.

That's it. Basically, it goes down to interest. That's it. Voicemail. Same thing. You're just trying to get there a little bit of interest. It doesn't matter what that interest is in as long as it's not a bait and switch. Yep. That's right. And for those of you that don't know Bant, it's budget, authority, need, and timeline. Just to clear that up. All right. So here's the third one. This one I think is interesting. The prospect will hear your one-way communication and be somewhat frustrated because there's no opportunity to ask a question. Then they will hit delete and click to the next message without thinking about it again. Or worse. They'll go, oh yeah, that's a good point. Delete it on it.

Delete it. And then never be able to find you again. So I push back on this one because of course it's a one-way communication. And there's no way to ask questions. The hope, I think, is that you're going to leave some thoughtful question that they're going to reach back out and be like, oh my gosh, what a great question. I had to call you back and answer it. That is an unrealistic perspective. That's not an expectation that is realistic in today's selling environment. Your question. People aren't in the business of answering our questions. That's not what they do with your time. And I don't owe you an answer to your question. I don't know you from anyone else. Yeah. There's a decision maker is sitting at their desk waiting for someone to call and ask them questions.

That's not happening. Not at all. So here's four. Reason number four, why salespeople should never leave voice messages. You may say something in your message that you assume is important to the prospect. And we all know what happens when we assume. For those of you that don't know, when we assume, we make an ass out of you and me. But um, so what do you think about that? We assume that what we're talking about in our message is a priority for our prospects. How do we leave messages? And we've talked about this a little bit already that aren't assuming too much. Lower the ask. What's a, what's a high ask and what's a low ask? High ask is listen to this 45 second pitch and then get back to me.

That is a, that is a lofty ask. That's a lofty ask. Um, a high ask is just high ask is, it really is kind of this, think of it like this. You're walking down the street and somebody comes up to you, starts talking about worthy causes, but you're trying to go to the grocery store. Yes. I care about the tiny, adorable animals, but I don't need celery right now. Exactly. Can I please just go in and get my beer? Once I've had the beer, then I'll look at the animals, but like it's, it's thinking about it like that. Like the voicemails are basically that if they're the people who, if you're trying to pitch and trying to get them to do something like agree to give you more time or give you money or anything like that.

Like it's, it's just not the best place for the medium and the message voicemail is not the place to pitch. So to me, this comes back to stop pitching. Yeah. Hey, here's the thing. That's, you know, check voicemail. Know you're busy. Talk to it. And again, for me, it's, it's the voicemail is the emphasis on directing them somewhere else. It's not the means into itself. The, the days of leaving, like we were talking, we started this whole thing talking about like back in the days with like the tape voicemails and stuff like that. My mom's old Mary Kay for years. Hmm. I know that role. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The door to door, but also like the calling and leaving voicemails. Hey, I'm throwing a party next week.

Tell me if you're coming. Yeah. There is a place for it, but even that doesn't work anymore. Now that's all done on social media because nobody's going to listen to this thing or they care or whatever. It's, it's better when you know someone. It's true. It is better when there's a common person there. And there's no selling that happens on voicemail. Yeah. All voicemail does is emphasize something else that you're doing. Yeah. Again, you know, sell at the meeting, not the message. Uh, all right. Number five, top five reasons why people should never leave voicemail. The message is most importantly, the more times you leave a message, the more your company and your company's name is burned into their memory negatively.

Oh, I disagree with that. Yes. Tell me why. Okay. Again, unless you're being, unless you're being insulting or lying, we know it takes, you have to see a company's name between 15 and 20 times before you're familiar enough with the brand to take a meeting. A voicemail is a way to hide, to amp up that process, especially if they're listening to the voicemail and then looking at it. Right. That's two free hits. Negatively comes in if you do it badly. So this is where it really comes down to for me. So it's, this is where I agree and I disagree. If you're doing it bad, yeah, you should probably stop, but you should stop doing a lot of things badly because it just makes everything harder. You're hurting your brain.

I can't believe I'm using this word. Just, just be best. Just be best. Make that, but just don't do stupid things and it will be a lot easier. Then it's something, at least it's neutral. It's only negative. If you do it badly, I, you're, you're only burning me when you, when you connect and pitch, you're only burning me when your pitch is completely irrelevant to everything about what I do. If you're doing an honest connection and you do it four or five times, I will respond to you. I'm sitting here realizing there are two or three people on LinkedIn that have been hitting me up really consistently for a while about a service that is completely irrelevant to what I do, but they've been consistent about hitting me up.

I'm going to respond to them and be like, Hey, by the way, check your search parameters, whatever indicator, whatever trigger said I was a good prospect. You should probably fix that. Yeah. But that's the sales coach in me saying your trigger is wrong, not go away. Or something like that. So I think, I think this is the difference that John and Morgan and Megan, Leslie and Shelly, like we all, all the trainers talk about this difference between professional persistence and obnoxious sales rep. And I think, I think this, this reason why people shouldn't leave voice messages ties very closely to that difference. And the difference between that is very obvious. One is very heavily automated emails with almost no personalization.

That's constantly asking for 15 minutes of your time or move to the next step in my sales cycle. The other is thoughtful messaging. That's usually relatively customized anywhere from 10 to 15 to 100% customized. Even though we find too much customization to be a little bit less performing, it performs a little bit lower. Yes. It's too much. Absolutely. But 15, 20%, 10%. Like this is a good avenue to go. And we find that to, to be really, really effective, but professional persistence is different from obnoxious sales rep because of that personalized touch. And let's be Frank, there's not much more personalized that you can do to leave a, than leaving a strong voice message, right? Meaning a good voice message.

That's not pitch heavy. That's not a novel. It's not five minutes of listen time. Like that's none of that is good. No, but I think when you're looking, when you're looking at what it is that puts that negative connotation in people's brains, it's that, that ugly persistence. That's the same message over and over the same time comments, the same request, the same ask the same all the time. Every day, this number calls me, you hear people all the time. Every day, this number calls me. I don't know who this person is, right? Like that you're being an obnoxious salesperson when that's happening, but when somebody is willing to be like, oh shit, I haven't had a chance to call that guy back. I really need to call that guy back.

Now you've stepped into the realm of professional persistence. Agreed. All right. And, and, and something else I'll give you too, is again, this is a tool in your arsenal. Yeah. The crux is, is you and I agree on, I think probably about 95% of this. The big thing where we disagree is we prioritize or we stack rank methods of communication differently. You stack rank voicemail a lot higher than I do. I think that's probably near the bottom of the weapons in my quiver in terms of how often I go to it. Yeah, that's probably true. I think I do rank it a little bit higher than you and that's okay. Right. I mean, you know, it all fits in different places based on our verticals. I sell to salespeople for me, you know, voice message is one of the many, multiple channels that get used every day to get the attention of sales professionals.

All right. Exactly. Let's switch gears. Top. This comes from center, center for sales strategy, and this is 2020. So two years after why people shouldn't leave. When in 2020? I don't know. I don't have that answer. We'll assume COVID. I only wrote it back. I only wrote it here. Yeah. It's a good question. It could be post COVID could be pre COVID. I'll take a look and you know. We'll assume it's post COVID. We'll assume it's post COVID. All right. So top three reasons. There was four reasons, but I didn't agree with the fourth one in any way, shape or form. I'll share it with you, but we can agree that it's irrelevant. All right. Reason number one, why you should always leave a voice message.

Leaving a voice message takes less than 30 seconds. Reason number one, why you shouldn't leave a voicemail. You can call someone in that 30 seconds. So you can see why we decided to do this show guys. It's because perspective is everything and not everybody agrees with this stuff. I agree that it does not. And they're both right. That's right. I, that's right. I agree that it does take a small amount of time to leave a voice message. What I don't agree with is not leaving that voice message just to be able to move on to the next call. Because I feel like I tie that back to, oh, you know, it's just not worth that. And every prospect is worth that 30 seconds in my brain. But again, I think we tear out those priorities just a little bit different.

Exactly. Reason number two, this is a valuable opportunity for a point of contact. Define valuable. Ah, there it is. Valuable is the subjective term there that I think is worth diving into. So let's talk about real quick, non-valuable message that you got on your phone versus a message you got on your phone that you were like, I have to take advantage of that. Can you think of two examples? Yes. Okay, go. I'm currently in the market doing a team building event for one of my clients. I'm helping them coordinate. So I sent out, this has been fun because I sent out like eight or 10, like, hey, give me quotes for a group of 14 people who are RIP my phone. It's been fun the past week or two. I'm like, oh, I'm going to target some of your companies for some training.

A lot of them are just, hi, you requested and, you know, did I'm following up on your message. It's the generic, I'm following up on your request for a quote. Hit me back. Did you see the proposal? It's, there's nothing to it. I have their email. I'll engage with them when I want to. And right now I'm up to my eyeballs because my in-laws are coming, which is not going to be today. I also told them that my event's at least a month out. So they also are being re-alerted on booking with me, even though I know this is like at least pretty far out. So those are good. But one person did hit me up and said, hey, you specifically expressed interest in this specific event. We just had a bunch of bookings.

It's now booking at least eight weeks out. If you're okay waiting that long, that's fine. But I didn't want you to make a decision assuming we had availability and you don't. I'm going to hit that person back up because there's a scarcity thing there where reps could use this a lot. Everyone does it. There's a way to do it with class. There's a way to do it that's trashy. And a quarter. And a quarter and a month. Stuff like that. They know this stuff's coming, especially if you've sent a proposal. Hey, that pricing is only good for 30 days. Let me know if you need an extension. But if we let this lapse, then we have to redo the process and that could add another week or two onto your cycle. It's fine.

But either way, let me know. So there's just a specific action that's time bound. Just give me something time bound. I'll probably respond to you a lot quicker. And the time has to be about me, not about you. Yeah, my timeline, not yours, right? I don't care that it's booked out eight weeks except for the fact that I might want it. It's not, hey, we're super busy. Let us know. It's, hey, if you want this, I can try and figure it out and help you. But you got to tell me. It's an interesting project you're working on. I would love to talk more about the results of that and what you guys see. All right. So the third reason why people should always leave a voicemail, and this will be an interesting one, too, right?

I think there's some validity here, but there's, I don't know. Voicemail gives the seller an opportunity to deliver business insight. What? I'll read it again. Voicemail gives the seller an opportunity to deliver a business insight. I'm just not sure exactly what they're referencing. Like, are you like, hey, did you know that 80% of companies are now exploring work from home? So that's actually interesting, right? Like, why don't salespeople deliver any type of, like, random business insight that could pique the interest of the person? They're leaving a voice message from. I think it's that fear that we talked about right at the beginning. It's that fear that we're going to be too pitchy, come across too salesy, if you will.

So how would you leave? What is the business insight that you would leave if you were going to leave a voice message that included that? Both you and I's examples did not include a business insight. They were personable, and they were, like, positive and uplifting and hype. But I don't think there was any, like, business insight in our voice message. So what would be a good example of this in your brain? I liked your did you know. I know. Some sort of did you know. Yeah. And for me, that treads a line on way too pitchy. And I'm not, it's not a fear thing. But for me, it's an authenticity thing. My whole brand, as it were, and I avoid using that term too much. But it's important to me to create authentic connections.

And that requires I have to be without a lot of edifice. If you jump on a call with me 99% of the time, my hair is not done. My makeup is not done. It is just, all right, let's go. Let's pound some coffee and make this shit happen. That's who I am 99.9% of the time. So for me to all of a sudden switch gears and be like, did you know? Break out my nice microphone and go all NPR on this. That's just going to be horribly inauthentic. And it's not going to resonate. So that's one. But the only way I could say doing some sort of a business insight or something like that is if you're sharing data that is data research, something like that, letting them know about a webinar that is going to give them information that will help them do their job better.

Yep. Not sell your product, help them do their job better. And then it would be, hey, this is really important. Want to make sure you saw the information. Let me know if you need me to resend so it's top of your inbox. I'll tell you what. That's the only thing I could see there. This has been a lot of fun. And I think we've hit some high notes here that are going to resonate with a lot of different types of sellers. And that's interesting because some sellers are the type that are really heavy on voicemail and they find it valuable. Other sellers are the type that don't bother leaving a voicemail because their verticals and their personas don't respond well to them. And there's really no silver bullets in this game.

And we say that a lot. But when it comes to voice messages, it's really true. There's no right or wrong way to leave a voice message unless you're actually trying to sell your product in your voice message. That is not a smart move in our opinion. We can agree on that no matter where we're at in our journeys. So, Ashley, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Before we say goodbye, tell everyone how they can reach you. Yeah. Hit me up LinkedIn. A-S-H-L-E-I-G-H. Spell that again for you early, just like early in the morning. You can also find me on Twitter at Ashley at work, on Instagram at OtherSalesCoach. Please do also check out OthersideofSales.com, our podcast devoted to creating a truly inclusive B2B sales environment so everyone can thrive.

While you're at OthersideofSales.com, please do sign up for our mailing list. You can get all the alerts about our upcoming sales census and some crazy research we're going to be rolling out later this year that you're definitely going to want to be a part of and get the results from. That's great shit. I appreciate you coming out, being on the show today, talking about voice messages. I'm so glad that we were able to have this disagreement publicly and let people decide which side of the fence they fall on. Thank you so much to the Make It Happen Mondays audience. You guys are amazing. This podcast has been a lot of fun to create with all the different personalities that we bring on to the show.

Reach out to us anytime. Follow us on Instagram at JBSalesTraining, all one word. And we will see you next week when we bring you another great guest to help you sell better. Make it happen, everybody. All right, y'all. That's a wrap. As always, we encourage you to become a JBSales member and gain access to the JBSales team. Our training, our courses, tips, webinars, and replays are all available for you at ondemand.jbarrows.com. Follow us on Instagram for daily sales techniques and tactics at JBSalesTraining, all one word, and we'll catch up with you on the gram. Have a great week, everybody. Get out there and serve those clients. Catch up with those prospects. Be sure that you are asking the right questions, doing the right things, and serving people to the best of your ability.

Get out there and make somebody smile today. It'll make your day and theirs. We'll see you next week when we bring you another stellar guest to help you sell better. Make it happen, everybody.