There was a time in the not-too-distant past when people didn’t give out their cell phone numbers.

photo by nandyphotos/adobe stock

Those days are over: these days, email signatures and business cards only have cell numbers on them. I’ve encountered (and have written about in the past) account executives who don’t even check their landline voicemail anymore.

If you have only your cell number on your cards and email signature, it’s official – you want customers to call you on your cell phone. So let me ask you this:

Have you ever called your own cell phone?

Take a moment to borrow a phone and call your own right now. Whatever you hear when your voicemail picks up is what your clients hear.

Is it just a series of numbers?

Way too often, this is what I hear when I call an account executive (and sometimes a sales manager): a robotic voice that says something like, “You’ve reached five… oh… three… eight… one… nine… eight… oh… three… three. The person you are calling is not available. Please leave a message after the tone.”

If that’s what your clients hear, your cell phone is costing you money well beyond your monthly bill.

Your customers have no idea if they’ve called the right number! Are they leaving a message for you, or somebody else at a completely different business?

Faced with that uncertainty, some of them will hang up without saying anything. Their next call may be to your competition.

If you want your customers to call you on that cell phone, take a moment to record a personal greeting. It doesn’t have to be fancy – just give your name, and the name of your company, and ask callers to leave a message. They know how to do the rest.

Sometimes the greeting is fine, but there’s another issue: If you don’t regularly clean out your messages, the robotic voice comes on and says, “The voice mailbox is full and cannot accept messages right now. Please call again later.”

Unless they really want to talk to you, they won’t call again later. They are disgruntled, and are likely to take their business elsewhere in search of gruntling.

Call your cell phone, listen to the greeting, and try to leave a message. It doesn’t hurt to pretend to be your own customer every once in a while.