Leave a Voicemail That Tells a Story

One of the best things you can do right now in B2B marketing is look at old channels and breathe some life into them, because they're essentially dead. Not many people leave voicemails anymore. There's an argument for going back to leaving them, but mix and match the format.

Don't just leave one saying, hey, it's so-and-so from such-and-such company, I heard you might be interested in this, or I saw you downloaded our thing. Everyone sounds the same. There's no reason you can't rethink what a voicemail is. It's a tiny audio snippet. Treat it like a TikTok video, or one part of a five-part movie montage. It has to be audibly interesting.

Open with the hook of the mini movie you're narrating, then tell a very short story, then leave your contact info and move on. Then call back for voicemail number two, story number two, montage piece number two. You're taking a channel everyone either abandoned or uses generically, and you're the one doing something interesting there.

For example: “Hey Jack, thought you'd be interested in the story about ABC company. They had a problem a lot of companies have today. If you've got it, it's a really interesting story about how they tackled it. What they did was…” and then your little vignette. You'll have to do it in forty-five to sixty seconds.

The fine line is that because a human being is leaving this, they won't want to say something that makes them sound stupid. But if you write them well, you get one or two moments at the start where the listener either gets hooked on the story or starts to trust the voice. People recognize voices extraordinarily well, within one or two sounds, or at least recognize that they've heard it before and last time was pleasant, so they'll stay and listen.

The stories should illustrate what your company does or solves, but ideally they're really entertainment. You're the person who leaves a voicemail every Monday morning. Around Monday number six, they think: who is this guy? I have to talk to him. This company seems like someone we should talk to.

Old channel, new format, and a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than you'll get in the channels that are still crowded.