I heard a story recently that made me chuckle. A new sales executive was working on prospecting calls to generate activity and appointments to fill the pipeline. A lot of time and effort was spent by the new sales executive and the management team to build knowledge and to help internalize the message. When the new sales executive start placing mock calls for training, the management team realized the wrong phone number was being used in the voice-mail.

After a good laugh, I realized there is a valuable lesson that can be learned from this experience! No matter how much time you spend training on messaging and learning all the intricacies of a solution, it doesn’t really matter if the little things are done incorrectly. Those little “things” can have a huge impact on success. A sales person can have the most stellar voice-mail message in the world with the most compelling value ever, but if the phone number is wrong, he/she will never receive a return call. That goes for speaking the phone number slowly or saying it twice too!