Your inside sales team is ready to start their day, feeling pumped and want to get on the phone to start selling. But the reality is that connecting with prospects on the phone is much harder than it seems. Stats reveal that just a small percentage of calls get picked up. This is why it's key to leverage every call, even those that go to voicemail, as opportunities to connect with your prospects.

In high-output sales teams, there is no time to waste when prospecting, and although the first connections might catch reps fresh and in a good mood, your team will start to wear down as the day progresses. As this happens, having the ability to leave pre-recorded messages whenever they hit voicemail will become critical, so they can focus on live connections instead of recording the same message over and over again.

Modern dialers and contact center solutions provide a feature called voicemail drop that allows reps to pre-record a message that can be easily dropped in their prospects' inbox if they hit voicemail.

If you've decided to integrate your telephony with Salesforce, this feature is a must. Having the ability to easily drop pre-recorded messages on a leads inbox while having this activity automatically logged within your CRM and generate reports is key to understanding the performance of high performing teams.

Here we'll share the 5 key benefits of using Voicemail Drop in Salesforce.

1. Boost agent productivity

Using voicemail drop is a very efficient way to reach out and communicate with your prospects. Your team is spending an average of 20% of their time leaving voicemails. With voicemail drop this time can be leveraged to make more calls, advance through their work queue and generate more revenue. 

If reps can easily pre-record a library of messages they need for specific campaigns or sales cadences, they'll be able to automate the process every time they hit an inbox. Don't forget that leaving a voicemail increases the odds of prospects dialing back and increases email response rates.

Let's take it a step further. If you pair this feature with a power dialer with AMD (Automatic Machine Detection), reps won't need to stay on the line and to leave the voicemail, making the calling process more efficient and saving you almost 40 days a year per rep!

📈 In September 2020, 1 in 4 workers in the US said they were working remotely - meaning that people are more available than ever to take calls for longer periods of time each day.

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2. Smooth customer experience

Why should customers listen to your voicemails? They must just want to pickup calls at their own rate and be able to fast-forward through annoying telemarketer or spam call recordings, and ensure they only connect with relevant callers. They also usually have to play messages more than once so they can get the important part right. In this regard, voicemail drop makes a huge difference as organizations need to deliver the best possible experience and crystal clear messages to build a solid business reputation. When using voicemail drop, the quality of every business call is a top priority.  

Providing your team with the ability to host their voicemail library within Salesforce makes it simple for both reps and management.

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3. A/B Test different templates

A/B testing different voicemail drop templates to figure out the effectiveness and call back rates is key to understanding the templates that are working and those that aren’t. Pair analytics with a solid process to review this data frequently and you’ll quickly identify the winning templates.

• Some good practices for A/B testing:
• Don't test more than 2 templates at a time.
• Establish 1 clear goal, e.g.: template with highest % of callbacks.
• Don't settle on the first winner. Test more iterations against the initial winner.

☝🏽🤓 Reps will be more likely to have prospects calling them back if they pair voicemail drop with local presence caller ID.

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4. Salesforce Activity Capture

If you are already leveraging Salesforce and a CTI or dialer, ensure that you are automatically capturing voicemail drop activity and identifying it as such. Having your team calling, texting, emailing, and leaving voicemails from one unified system within Salesforce while every interaction is being automatically recorded on your CRM will change the way your reps and management do business. 

Increase pipeline generation and overall revenue by using systems that automate the entire outreach and follow up activities within your CRM.

5. Pair Voicemail Drop with High Velocity Sales

Salesforce High Velocity Sales is the direct response to new players such as Outreach.io, Salesloft, Groove, etc. These sales acceleration platforms enable high output sales teams to automate their entire outbound sales processes.  HVS brings a new layer to your CRM, providing a customer engagement platform on top of Salesforce. Add an HVS enabled CTI and your reps will be able to call, email, text and even use voicemail drop with leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities.  
Leverage Einstein Conversation Insights to track call activity at scale, enabling management to share with their reps libraries of the best calls/meetings internally. This will reduce rep training cycles and create a culture of coaching while providing management with interesting insights like product or competitor mentions. 

With a robust CTI that provides Voicemail drop capabilities paired with HVS call result branching, your reps will move through their work queue at lightning speed.