Reach more prospects by manually overriding your internal caller ID system
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Mar 30, 2009 @ 12:57 AM
Probably the question most often asked in my telesales training courses is "How can I get more people to answer the phone in the first place?" With the proliferation of Caller ID, virtually everyone at every company can see who's calling, and they do make judicial decisions about which companies they're going to take calls from. If you've made a couple of calls and your party never picks up, go ahead and leave a good voicemail (what's a good voicemail? I'll cover that in a separate blog article within the next week or so). If your interesting, efficient, and brief voicemail isn't returned, call again, but this time manually disable your caller ID, and you'll be pleasantly surprised at how often your party answers the phone.
How do you disable caller ID? Every phone switch has its own system, so talk to your internal IT folks to figure out how to do it. I use AT&T, so I hit "*67" prior to making the non-caller ID call. I then get a second dial tone, and I'm off to the races. I have been amazed at the rate my contacts have increased. Your own IT people will be able to either do a global override, in which all outbound calls are masked, or give you a code that you can use with discretion. I don't recommend global override, as your company will have many customers and prospects that will want to take your company's calls. Use the individual override code instead, and you'll find that you'll reach more people, thereby leaving fewer voicemails and emails (I'll be writing about emails in the next few weeks, too). To sum up, here's the formula I recommend:
1) Make two "normal" calls. After the second, leave a brief voicemail.
2) If no response after a day or so, call again, overriding your caller ID.
3) If no response after 3 "override" attempts, send an email.
And don't forget to listen to your prospect's outgoing voicemail message all the way through, as he or she will tell you if he or she is out of the office, on vacation, or if there's someone else you can talk to. Through this 3-step approach, you can accelerate the process of having conversations with prospects fairly dramatically. Add it to your Best Practices playbook, and let me know how it works for you.