The Black Ops Files - Phone Deliverability

Nobody picking up your calls? It's probably not what you think.

"History May Not Repeat, But It Sure Does Rhyme" - A Clarion Call

When Google announced their intention to beef up their anti-spam infrastructure , email deliverability became THE hot button topic within outbound sales.

The message was clear: Reaching your prospects is a privilege, not a right. Suddenly operators went from bragging about how many thousands of emails a day they were sending to wondering if they'd destroyed their domain reputation forever. Experts like Matt Prewitt of Setwize - who had long been sounding the alarm on quality outreach - were rightly elevated into the spotlight to shed light on "the new normal".

Part of being a Tier 1 Black Ops Outbound Operator is seeing around the curve, and a keen practitioner sees beyond the symptoms to the root causes, recognizing the cat and mouse feedback loop in the process:

1. Proliferation of sales enablement tools AKA "better mouse traps" enable higher volumes of outreach or the ability to circumvent filtering, making it harder for prospects to separate signal from noise.

2. Communication service providers, seeing the demand for reducing the amount of noise in their customer's communication channels and seeking opportunity to differentiate themselves in a highly commoditized market, invest resources into providing this service.

3. With new headwinds to contend with, sales people go back to the lab and adjust their outreach, deploying new tools and strategies to work within the new constraints.

4. Repeat

While more and more operators have seen the light on how these forces impact email as a channel, there's still a strong lack of understanding of how the same feedback loop is at work on the phone.

The parallels should be obvious, yet most of the solutions you see proposed to address phone deliverability issues, if viewed in light of what is now mainstream about email, would be comical.

Take, for example, the widespread idea that the solution for low reachability on the phone is to "make more dials". Einstein warned us decades ago that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results"; this hasn't stopped sales leaders from looking at a model which has seen proportionate increases in activity be met with commensurate declines in outcomes (The Bridge Group) and concluding that the right answer is to simply do more of what isn’t working. This misconception is so widespread, that there are entire companies valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars with this as their "big idea".

I started this Substack to say one thing: Enough is enough, and we can all do better.

The arms race for bigger and better mouse traps has created a vacuum pulling all involved to the bottom, a place in which sellers and buyers drift further and further apart, otherwise productive relationships are never allowed to form, and the Sales Industrial Complex laughs the whole way to the bank at the behest of you, the relationships you would otherwise form, and a reality in which you are the trusted advisor.

Let's do our part to Make Sales Great Again (H/T Ryan Reisert & Justin Middleton) one step at a time. Today, we will do so with a discussion on how phone deliverability ACTUALLY works and give you a framework to improve not only phone reach with your prospects, but also receptivity, so when you DO get somebody on the phone they actually want to talk to you.

For our purposes, then, will proceed with the following definition of phone deliverability: "Identifying best practices to improve the reach of your calls, as well as the receptivity of your prospects when they DO pick up."

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The Role of Phone Carriers in Phone Deliverability

Whenever you make an outbound call to a prospect, the recipient's phone carrier - the big three in the United States being AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile - evaluates the "history" of your phone activity to its customers and then determines whether they should pass your call through, and if so how to present the call to their customer.

It's helpful to explicate here that the purpose of the carrier's guidelines are NOT to assist you, the caller, but rather to deliver the best possible experience to their customers. From the perspective of call deliverability, this has two components: (1) Passing through all expected and "desired" calls unencumbered (2) Identifying and screening out "unwanted" calls.

The use of quotation marks is intentional, as the interpretation of incoming calls to the network is done in live-time absent context from customers. This challenge presents an interesting optimization exercise - while a customer may forgive an unwanted call slipping through, they will almost certainly be less understanding if a call they expected or wanted is screened out. Error 1 can be forgiven, but error 2 is the type of mistake that can lead to a customer switching to a competitor. It is because of this risk-reward profile that the discerning sales person with an understanding of phone deliverability has an advantage.

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How Carriers Analyze Phone Traffic

As a means to achieving the two above objectives, carriers deploy algorithms that analyze incoming phone traffic in real time and make a determination on whether to pass your call through, and if so how to characterize the call - whether that's "positive" labels like the area code of the incoming number, or "negative" labels like "Spam Risk", "Spam Likely" that lead to reduced reachability AND receptivity . The specific components of these algorithms, as you might imagine, are kept-under wraps; after all, it doesn't do much good to have systems in place to stop spammers only to publish them and enable circumvention. The good news, dear reader, is you have me.

I sat down last week to talk to Jeff Osness of Phoneburner. Jeff is a bonafide expert on phone deliverability, and the contents of our conversation provide a wealth of actionable information to get your phone deliverability right.

THE Man.

Factors Affecting Phone Deliverability and Front-Line Tactics To Conform To Them

It's important to say once again that what we're talking about here is a dynamic optimization exercise, i.e: There is no "one right answer" that will work forever to ensure the highest rates of call deliverability. T

he carriers are constantly reevaluating how they monitor inbound calls how they weight each of the below variables also changes. Nevertheless, being mindful of these factors as you dial can make a big difference when it comes to if and how your calls are showing up for your prospects. Note that each of these variables is weighed at the CID (Caller ID) level - which is to say, per phone number:

VOLUME OF CALLS: Large volumes can raise red flags, but it’s not as critical as it once was. Consistency is key here - similar to volume in cold emails.

Recommendation:

1. Find your existing baseline and then bump it up slowly. If you're making 20 dials a day from a number, you probably don't want to crank that up to 80 overnight.

2. 10 calls per hour from any given CID, with a maximum of 80 for the day, should be your high end (Ryan Reisert) - we will discuss number rotation later.

CALL DURATION: Longer calls are seen more favorably by carriers, as they imply mutuality in conversation. Remember, carriers have no insight into the substance of a conversation, and the algorithms are making determinations based off of averages. A good target to aim for is an average call time of over 30 seconds.

Recommendation:

1. Use a script that a higher frequency of back and forth in the earlier stages of the call - not only is it good conversational practice but it'll also reduce the probability you get hung up on in the early stages (since you're, you know, practicing good conversational etiquette)

2. Speak slowly. A slow, even tone (think Chris Voss' "late night radio DJ") is likely to get a better response from your prospect AND all else equal lengthens the same conversation

3. If No Answer: Listen to the entire voicemail message up to and including the BEEP before hanging up - usually once you hit the voicemail, your talk time clock will start running, which means you'll be able to maintain a higher baseline talk time on No Answers (the majority of dials you make) just by having a little patience and waiting for the VM to hit.

   1. NOTE: This is mostly relevant if you're calling mobile data - if you're calling directories or a direct line then you can probably afford to ditch at the voicemail recording but I personally like global rules that minimize exceptions inasmuch as possible.

LOCATION: Carriers evaluate calls based on where they are made from and to, focusing on patterns like geographical alignment and consistent volumes over time.

Recommendation:

1. Have a large repository of phone numbers you dial from and leverage a dialer that automatically rotates which number you use based on prospect location - both Phoneburner and Frontspin are great choices.

2. When you're evaluating a dialer, make sure to ask whether the number rotation is AUTOMATIC, and if the answer is yes make them show you during the demo. A lot of dialers have manual number rotation, which allows you to manually select the number you want to dial from. This, unfortunately, is more distracting than it is helpful: The last thing you want to be doing is looking at your list of numbers and opining on whether somebody in Phoenix, AZ is more likely to pick up a call from your Los Angeles, CA number or your Denver, CO number while keeping track of hourly and daily usage. Let the pros handle it and focus on more important things.

CALLBACKS: The ratio of outbound: inbound calls is another fairly good proxy for mutuality (noticing a trend here?). Carriers prefer numbers that are called back by users, signaling legitimacy. If your calling campaigns are outbound in nature, this is a tough variable to optimize - but you didn't think that was going to stop me, did you?

Recommendation:

1. Get your list scored by TitanX (formerly Phone Ready Leads) so you can approach subsets of your phone data methodically

   1. For your P1's, AKA your "reachable" data, the frequency of your pick-ups (1 out of every 5 to 1 out of every 3 dials, roughly) will reduce the need to drive callbacks.

   2. For your P2's, AKA your "workable" data, leaving a voicemail will increase callback ratios.

   3. If you're a full-cycle AE, stick to dialing P1's, as the opportunity cost of your time is much higher, and have a BDR hit P2's with the TRIPLE - aka call/voicemail/email all in quick succession (Justin Michael)

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An Ounce Of Prevention Is Worth A Pound Of Cure - RevOps Overwatch Responsibility and Phone Number Rehab

All of these guidelines assumes you haven't cooked your numbers to begin with. If you just spent the last year double tapping, hanging up as soon as you realized you were listening to a voicemail, pitch-vomiting on prospects, making 5 calls at on-oops sorry got carried away there - is all hope lost? Fear not, dear reader, for the below steps will have you right as rain in no-time. Forward these over to your RevOps leader - if they love you (no pressure or anything) they'll implement these measures to maximize the time you spend in conversations.

1. Take a CSV file of all your phone numbers and upload them to the Free Caller Registry (https://www.freecallerregistry.com/fcr/#) . In their own words: "(the) Free Caller Registry enables entities making legitimate outbound phone calls to submit their data to the three major providers of call management services supporting the major US wireless carriers once via a standard, centralized experience." It takes less than two minutes and goes a long way to improving your phone deliverability.

2. Maintain a number bank of 100 phone numbers and at the end of every month, check to see which have been marked as spam and swap them out for clean numbers. It's important to understand that swapping out numbers is a last resort, but even if you follow all the best practices outlined in this article, all it takes is a couple of cranky prospects to get your number flagged. If your dialer company is not able or willing to perform this service, find one that is. This may sound harsh, but the reality is if you're truly about the Tier 1 Black Ops Outbound Operator life then you need strategic partners who understand the criticality of such a workflow.

   1. PhoneBurner’s "Armor" does this automatically, and even takes it a step further and tells you WHY your number was marked as spam so that you can course-correct on calling behavior.

3. Unleash your inner scientist and dig with true child-like curiosity into the mountains of data your calling team generates each day, week and month . Some questions to start you off:

   1. What time do my prospects typically pick up the phone most?

   2. What time are my prospects receptive to conversation?

   3. Do (1) and (2) differ?

   4. How does the use of different openers impact my average talk time?

   5. Are there certain questions I ask that on average result in longer responses?

   6. Which titles correlate with the longest talk times? Which titles correlate with the shortest talk times?

      Answering these questions will enable you to create YOUR org's unique calling DNA, and in doing so from a place of service the metrics that improve phone deliverability will also improve, but as a byproduct of your intention rather than trying to "game the system"

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Conclusion:

Phone deliverability is the next frontier, and if you want to be on the cutting edge of outbound then it's critical you embrace it. Use this article as your starting point and you'll have a more robust calling program than 99.9% of outbound programs.

I will leave you with a brief note on motivation, and not like the "David Goggins yelling at you to hurt yourself some more" type of motivation, but rather the "why do these things" type of motivation. Uncle Ben said it best when he reminded Peter that "with great power comes great responsibility", and the whole point of going through this exercise is to SERVE YOUR CUSTOMERS TO THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE STANDARD.

When we have service in our heart, we know that delivering our message in a way that underscores our commitment to professional excellence confers confidence in our offering and consistency with the value we claim to deliver. We recognize that this commitment shows up in EVERYTHING we do, and that no detail is too small.

How can you claim that you're going to transform your customer's business when your phone number announces you as SPAM LIKELY?

Why should your prospect take you seriously if they answer a call from you, say hello and there's silence on the other end?

My friends, being a Tier 1 Black Ops Outbound Operator is a point of pride, but far from being the precursor to the fall, this pride is one that reflects in a willingness to do whatever it takes to uphold an unapologetically elite standard.

Will you take the well-trod path, doing the bare minimum to collect your paycheck, sending your thousandth's "just following up" email of the month and whining about how business is bad and nobody picks up the phone?

Or will you plunge fearlessly into the thicket, shrugging off the thorns, barbs and brambles endemic to the road less taken? Will you shoulder the burden of responsibility, accept service as your North Star and by its light find yourself in rarified air, gazing across peaks seen by few?

If you're reading this, I have a pretty good of what you've chosen. and I hope what's written here will enable you to keep doing so.

Keep going. I'm proud of you.

With love,

Charles