⚙️ Add Voicemail Drops to Sequences

Ringless voicemails can accelerate your sales cycles by scaling your outreach, and empowering your sales team to focus more on qualified leads.

Ringless voicemail can be included as an automated step in any Leadfwd Sequence. When 'working' contacts reach the step, the RVM action step will trigger and send a voicemail to their voicemail inbox.

Prerequisites:

1. Leadfwd account and an appropriate access role.
2. Recorded voicemail (acceptable formats: .m4a, .wav, or .mp3) uploaded in your Asset Manager
3. Existing Sequence or Create a new Sequence
4. Contacts with known direct-dial or mobile phone number imported in a Leadfwd list object.

Step 1. Import Contacts for a Sequence

Ringless voicemail (RVM) requires a direct dial or mobile phone number. It does work with landlines and VOIP solutions, as long as the voicemail inbox is provided directly by the carrier. RVM will not work with PBX systems that have direct extensions, auto-attendants, etc. 

E164 Phone Number format

Phone numbers must be formatted for E164 standards.

For both SMS (via Twilio) or Voicemail drops, your recipient's mobile phone number must be in an E.164 format. The E.164 format consists of +[country code][area code][phone number]. You can import your mobile numbers in this format and execute SMS outreach or Voicemail drops without any modification.

1. Using the [country] custom data field property in your Contact database for each contact record, you can include the country name or country code (i.e. United States or US, France or FR, etc). When there is a valid country in this data field property, Leadfwd will append the appropriate prefix (+ and country code) to the phone number value as it is called upon for Twilio or Voicemail drops. You will still need to have the mobile phone number saved with the local area code and number.
2. If you have a value saved in the [country] field and your contact's mobile phone number already includes the country code, we'll recognize the presence of the country code and we will not append the country code to the phone number again.
3. If no + prefix exists in your mobile phone number entry, we'll always add it automatically. 

Missing Phone Number or Unsupported Carrier / Line

If a contact does not have a phone number or their phone number is not supported by RVM, the operation will simply fail and the contact will be permitted to move to the next step in the Sequence. If you do not wish to permit contacts to continue to the next Step, a workflow rule can be created to end their Sequence instead.

Supported Countries

Voicemail Drops are not available in every country and that's usually due to regulatory and compliance issues. These countries can be sent Voicemail Drops using Leadfwd.

1. Australia 
2. Austria 
3. Belgium 
4. Denmark 
5. Finland 
6. France 
7. Germany 
8. Ireland 
9. New Zealand 
10. Netherlands 
11. Norway 
12. Spain 
13. Sweden 
14. Switzerland
15. United States
16. Canada

Step 2. Add Ringless voicemail to a Sequence

1. Click Add another step
2. Select Ringless Voicemail
3. Select the data field that contains your contacts phone number
4. Click Browse to access the Asset Library to select or upload a pre-recorded voicemail file, then Click Choose.
5. Enter the Caller ID number that your voicemail will be displayed from. The phone number must be formatted for the E.164 standard. If you're in the USA and your phone number is 718-555-5555, then you would need to enter +17185555555. International user's would replace +1 with the country code for their specific phone number.
6. Click Save Step

Step 3. Add Multiple Channels

The goal of any Sequence is to make the AI powered Automation appear to be sent from a human and not a software platform. Connecting with people on multiple channels can help create a flow of events that demonstrates a human-pattern of communication and not automated software.

The ringless voicemail helps set the stage with a human voice and ideally some specific context that is relevant to the audience you're targeting. To help support that touchpoint with more human behavior, we can trigger follow ups via text message and email within a few minutes of dropping the voicemail. 

This will help us both connect the dots and replicate our messaging on different channels that our contacts are listening on -- while also adding some baseline credibility through simply communicating in a human way.