Setting Up Your Voicemail for Success

• 00:04 We have to talk about your voicemail.
• 00:08 Now again, I tried my hardest not to sound like a grumpy old man in this course.
• 00:13 And I think I held off for the most part to a little bit in the last lecture but
• 00:17 I really gotta let it all out here.
• 00:19 Many of you, of all ages, have a huge,
• 00:22 huge voicemail problem and it is destroying your credibility.
• 00:28 It is harming your career advancements,
• 00:31 it is shutting down your pipeline of new prospects, customers.
• 00:36 Let's start with some of the basics.
• 00:37 Okay, you've gotta have a voicemail on your cell phone.
• 00:40 If you don't have it, and it's pretty rare for people not to but
• 00:43 every once in a while, I encounter it.
• 00:45 You call on it, just rings and rings and rings and then it goes dead.
• 00:49 I do understand there are some cultures in the world where it's just not the norm.
• 00:57 And there are even some religious cultural influences as to why that is.
• 01:02 So I don't mean to sound culturally insensitive.
• 01:05 And if you are in a culture where it's just not the norm to
• 01:10 have voicemail, I understand but I do want to give you a tip.
• 01:15 If you want to deal with people from other cultures, you need to have voicemail.
• 01:21 If you want to deal with people who are used to having voicemail,
• 01:25 you're making it a lot harder for them to do work with you,
• 01:28 to feel comfortable with you, because you're wasting their time.
• 01:33 If I have to call you ten times before I get you and
• 01:36 I can't leave a voicemail, you're making life difficult.
• 01:40 So if you want to increase the odds of communicating more effectively
• 01:44 with customers, clients, prospects, bosses,
• 01:47 my advice is number one, you gotta have a voicemail.
• 01:51 Number two, this is going to sound obvious, but it's not.
• 01:57 You have to actually check your voicemail.
• 01:59 Again, it's very common in my experience for people say under 38,
• 02:04 just don't listen to voicemail.
• 02:07 You may have the function that record or takes the audio recording and
• 02:11 converts it to text and you read it.
• 02:12 That's fine.
• 02:13 I'm not saying you literally have to listen to it.
• 02:16 Although in many cases, the transcription isn't that great and it's
• 02:21 not going to capture a sense of emergency or the emotional component if you listen.
• 02:27 So I do actually recommend you listen to the voicemail from not
• 02:32 every telemarketer but an important client or a boss.
• 02:36 You've got to actually listen to it because if
• 02:39 someone leaves you a voicemail and you don't listen to it, how do you respond?
• 02:44 If you don't respond, that's a slap in the face.
• 02:48 You're telling the customer, client, prospect, you're not important.
• 02:54 I don't respect your time because I'm now going to make you tell me the thing
• 02:57 the second time if I just call you and say, hey, what's up?
• 03:02 Your client or customer prospect may have left you a detailed message about
• 03:06 a specific problem they want you to solve.
• 03:09 And if you don't listen to it, you're wasting their time.
• 03:15 It's a big world out there, there are a lot of other vendors,
• 03:19 consultants, people who do what you do, nobody has to work only with you.
• 03:24 So if you make life difficult for people,
• 03:27 they'll find someone who will make life easy.
• 03:29 So by all means, you've got to listen to voicemail and
• 03:35 respond to them in a timely manner.
• 03:38 Absolutely critical.
• 03:41 Okay, next issue with voicemail.
• 03:45 You gotta have an actual message that's personalized.
• 03:49 If I call you and all I get is the generic message of you have reached 212764495,
• 03:56 first of all, it takes a long time to hear all those numbers and the generic message.
• 04:04 Number two, I'm now wondering, did I call the right person?
• 04:08 Now I gotta look at the number I wrote down and if that's on the phone and
• 04:13 it's the same phone, it's difficult.
• 04:16 I gotta wonder, is this person still in business?
• 04:20 If I'm calling someone who is what I think was a highly successful
• 04:26 Internet consultant or real estate broker and I get just a generic number like that.
• 04:32 There's a part of me, and I'm not the only one who thinks this way,
• 04:36 there's a part of me that thinks, what, they're afraid to put up their own name?
• 04:40 Do they have bill collectors chasing them?
• 04:42 Are they a criminal?
• 04:42 Are they drug dealer?
• 04:43 What are they hiding from?
• 04:46 It just doesn't sound professional to get a random number.
• 04:52 Now I know a lot of people, I'm not picking on the young kids anymore.
• 04:55 I know people my age and older who are independent real estate brokers,
• 05:01 who are independent technology consultants, and
• 05:06 they have that situation where it's just a random number.
• 05:11 And guess what, they don't make much money.
• 05:13 They are some of the least successful people and nice people,
• 05:17 friendly people, but they just don't care about their image.
• 05:21 They don't care about their reputation, and they make it really hard for
• 05:26 people to get ahold of them.
• 05:29 So, you need a message and the message shouldn't be cutesy,
• 05:33 we don't need to hear your dog barking.
• 05:35 Again if this were 10 or 20 years ago and everyone had a clear differentiation
• 05:40 between here's my home number and my home voicemail or the recorder that played
• 05:44 it back on the tape and here's the office phone, it would be different.
• 05:48 But today, things have blended together, people's work phones,
• 05:53 personal phones, cell phones.
• 05:56 Typically it's not one phone,
• 05:58 it all filters into one phone through call forwarding.
• 06:02 So you need something that isn't too cutesy,
• 06:05 that isn't just personal if people are calling you and it's a business call.
• 06:10 Again, mine is very simple.
• 06:12 I'm TJ Walker, and I state the name of my company, leave a message,
• 06:17 I'll call you back.
• 06:19 It's that simple.
• 06:22 So here's my homework assignment for you.
• 06:23 I want you to have a friend call your voicemail and
• 06:26 then tell you what they think.
• 06:30 Ask for any kind of feedback.
• 06:32 What do they like?
• 06:32 What do they not like?
• 06:34 Some people try to be so curt and cute and
• 06:38 say, you've called TJ Walker, why, click.
• 06:43 I mean, that's cute for about two seconds the first time you hear it if
• 06:47 the person is less than 23 years old.
• 06:50 After that, if you're calling the person many times, it becomes annoying.

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