• What is Voicemail Drop?
• How Does Voicemail Drop Work?
• How Do I Get the Most Out of Voicemail Drop?

What is Voicemail Drop?

First and foremost, voicemail drop services are huge time and sanity savers for salespeople. Simply put, voicemail drops are pre-recorded voicemail messages that sales reps can “drop” into someone’s voicemail inbox.

From there, the definition gets a little more complicated. There are two different types of voicemail drop, and which one you decide to use will depend heavily on your sales outreach strategy.

How Does Voicemail Drop Work?

For most sales teams doing traditional cold calling, individual voicemail drop (typically referred to as just “voicemail drop” or sometimes VM drop) is the most effective and efficient way to leave voicemails. It frees up precious time, and relieves sales reps of the tedious practice of leaving the same voicemail over and over throughout the day.

Let’s do the math. If a sales rep makes 100 calls per day, on average, 90 of those calls will go to voicemail. An elevator-pitch voicemail is usually between 30 and 60 seconds in length. That’s between 45 minutes and 1.5 hours spent leaving voicemails, and that’s not even including the voicemail greeting!

Here’s how it works:

1. A sales rep pre-records one or more voicemail messages.
2. The sales rep calls someone, and when they don’t pick up the sales rep can select that pre-recorded voicemail message with a single click in their dialer.
3. As soon as the sales rep selects the voicemail message they want to leave, the dialer will automatically end the call.
4. The sales rep can move on to their next call while the dialer is still leaving that pre-recorded voicemail.

Depending on the specific dialer, there may be some variation on when the sales rep can select the voicemail message and disconnect the call. There are three different ways this can work:

1. “Beep” detection: as soon as the sales rep hears a voicemail greeting, they can select the voicemail they want to drop. The dialer will automatically wait for the beep before dropping the voicemail.
2. Silence detection: this works the same way as beep detection, except instead of detecting the “beep” the dialer waits until it hears silence on the other end of the line. The advantage of this is that it will still work even if a voicemail greeting does not end with the traditional “beep.” The disadvantage is that there may be a slight delay before the voicemail is dropped, so the first few seconds of the voicemail might be silent.
3. Manual voicemail drop: the sales rep must wait until they hear the beep (or other indication that they may now leave a voicemail) before selecting the voicemail they want to drop. This is a more surefire way to know that your voicemail is left, but it doesn’t save as much time as the other two methods.

Typically, sales dialers will work one of these three ways. However, some dialers (Kixie, for example) offer the option to choose between all three.

How Do I Get the Most Out of Voicemail Drop?

It might sound like a fairly simple plug-and-play solution, but believe it or not there’s an art to voicemail drop.

Voicemail Drop Tips and Tricks

• Be selective. If you’re cold calling, chances are you will use voicemail drop for most of your voicemails. However, if you’ve spoken to someone before, it might be better to leave them a voicemail manually so that you can be truly personal and build rapport by mentioning something you talked about the last time you spoke.
• Be patient. ALWAYS wait for the voicemail greeting to start, and make sure it really is a voicemail greeting and not someone answering your call!
• Be informed. Before you start using voicemail drop, get a sense of what kind of voicemail greetings the majority of your customers have. In most cases, most of your leads will have the classic “beep” at the end of their greeting, but some regions or phone carriers might not.
• Take notes (and remember to check them). To avoid the embarrassment of leaving the exact same voicemail twice, make a note whenever you leave a voicemail drop.
• Personalize as much as you can. Voicemail drops have some obvious limitations, (you can’t greet people by name, for example) but that doesn’t mean you can’t make your message seem personal. The trick is to create multiple variations of the same message. For example, you could have one just for Fridays that begins with “Happy Friday!” and ends with, “Have a great weekend!”

In Summary…

• Voicemail drop is a great tool for cold outreach, particularly cold calling.
• If you’re leaving 60+ voicemails daily, you can save hours each day with voicemail drop.
• It’s a good idea to make an informed decision when choosing a voicemail drop software so that you get the right service for your needs.

Hopefully after reading this article, you’ll feel like you’re on your way to making an educated decision when it comes to voicemail drop! If you still have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us via the chat option on our website, by phone at (855) 505-4943, or sign up for a free, 7-day trial to begin using voicemail drop immediately.