Michael Arrington at TechCrunch posted an intriguing column called “Think Before You Voicemail“, in which he points out the ever-decreasing value of leaving recorded voice messages in light of more efficient new alternatives.  He says:

…Now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail… It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

I must admit, he’s got a point - I just said exactly that to a work colleague.  In our increasingly time-compressed professional lives, the luxury of sitting back and listening to rambling voicemail messages just doesn’t make sense, especially since there are so many good ways to communicate via text now.

For example, our sales team uses Skype for quick messaging, and it’s much more efficient.  I sometimes have two or three Skype messaging sessions open on my PC, all going at the same time that I’m on the phone with a prospect or customer, and I can manage the workflow quite easily.

Of course, there’s the danger of text overload, especially in our e-mail inboxes.  But getting rid of a text message only takes a few seconds for a quick scan and a click, whereas a voice mail requires you to listen all the way through, which consumes precious minutes.

And here’s what I find most annoying about voicemail: you’d think that people would know how to leave a decent message by now.  I’d have to say that at least half of the voicemail messages I receive are long, sometimes incoherent three-minute soliloquies that could easily have been compressed to just a few seconds. I can’t count how many times I have groaned halfway through a voicemail message, and muttered between clenched teeth, “C’mon, get to the &%#ing point!” I’ve now mastered the “666″ key sequence in our voicemail system, which speeds up recording playback and makes everyone sound like Minnie Mouse, but at least I can get through my voice messages in one-half the time.

How voicemail hinders sales

Voicemail has replaced the stern administrative assistant as the principal means of protecting high-level buyers from salespeople, and for two very good reasons: it’s cheaper, and it’s harder to penetrate.  In the “good old days”, at least one could find a way to develop a relationship with an “admin” and then gain access to a high-level decision maker, but no longer - it’s impossible to develop a relationship with an impersonal voicemail system.

So, in order to reach potential buyers, sales pros now must decide to either (1) game the voicemail system, or (2) play the game.

I have heard dozens of tricks that salespeople use to get over, around, under or through a voicemail system, seeing it as some sort of electronic obstacle course.  Here are a few:

• Leaving a dramatically-spoken message like… “This is Bob, at 555-555-5555, and this is an urgent message for Mr. Prospect!  Please call IMMEDIATELY to resolve… (click)” — yep, they just hang up in mid-sentence.  The key word here is “resolve”, which implies some sort of legal or financial problem.  OK, that might get them to call you back, but what then?
• Dialing random extensions - if you get voice mail, just start dialing numbers until you get through to someone, then act lost and ask to be transferred to your target prospect.  But what do you say when the prospect asks, “How do you know (name of person that transferred you)?”
• 0, 0, 0… - just keep hitting zero to get to an operator, then harass them until they connect you with your target prospect.  If they send you to voicemail, simply repeat and get increasingly more agitated with each cycle.  This assumes that they have live operators somewhere, of course - which is becoming increasingly rare.

Those who decide to play the game try to leave short, pithy messages intended to pique a prospect’s interest.  This is certainly the more professional route, but it may be less effective.  We all know that the callback rates on these kinds of messages is low, and probably getting lower - after all, your prospects have the same kinds of time constraints as you do, and it’s so easy to just hit “delete”, no matter how perfectly phrased your carefully crafted voicemail script might be.

And, of course, we all have our stories about being trapped in “voicemail hell” - where you try to navigate through endless loops of “Press 1 for…, or press 2 for…” menus, never getting closer to your objective.  I’m convinced that the designers of voicemail systems are all laughing at us, delighting in the lost productivity time they are causing to sales pros everywhere.

So, what’s a sales pro to do about voicemail?

It’s time for sales professionals to recognize that a shift in behavior is taking place today.  Just as the introduction of voicemail in the 80’s changed how businesses operate, so too are text-based alternatives now affecting how people interact.  Continuing to bang one’s head against the insurmountable voicemail wall makes as much sense as trying to sell “riding on a smile and a shoeshine” - and that wasn’t effective in Death of a Salesman either.

We need to recognize that our prospects are under the same kind of pressure to use their time more productively as salespeople are - and that they are going to continue to steer further away from voicemail towards faster, more efficient means of communication.  There are a number of emerging new technologies that promise to at least make voicemail more helpful, or better still, to replace it altogether.

Michael Arrington points out a few good examples of these in his column:

There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.

The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag, Yap and Jott, for example).

More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).

He’s right.  The world is changing, and while I don’t think that voicemail will ever go away completely, it will become relatively unimportant in lieu of new text-based services.  We’ve already reviewed Jott, and liked it a lot — we’ll definitely focus more attention on some of these other emerging services.  Sales pros also need to understand this trend, and adapt - or else they will just keep battling against automated systems, with ever diminishing results.

UPDATE: Here’s another interesting web-based voicemail application, Say2Go, offering “asynchronous voice messaging”.

UPDATE: Here’s a new service that enables you to go right to someone’s voicemail: Slydial

Tags: end of voicemail, Michael Arrington, sales voice mail messages, TechCrunch, voice mail alternatives, voice mail hell, voice to text services

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