1: How might it impact your calling results?
2: How to get around it?
3: What’s actually happening right now?
4: Check your number’s spam status.
Background
Apple’s latest iPhone update, IOS17, has a new feature that allows iPhone owners to silence any and all callers who are not saved in their contacts.
The goal of this is to stop scams & spam callers.
Parts of the sales fraternity are saying that this will kill cold calling.
There’s no doubt that this has the potential to make it even harder for you to reach your prospects via their mobiles.
I can’t predict the future, but I don’t think it will eliminate calling, and even if it does prove to create a challenge, I think I’ve already found a workaround.
Why won’t it work?
1: You have to turn it on.
It’s not the default setting.
Many people operate their phones in the mode they come out of the box..
2: Contact data is mostly incomplete.
Most of us don’t have ‘everyone’ saved to our phones, and we know that.
So if someone were to enable it – I think within a short period, they would realise they are missing some valuable calls.
They’ll then turn it back on.
3: Phone companies.
Many large companies, including Apple, make their money from providing other companies access to their end users.
They don’t want to kill phone calls as a communication channel. At the end of the day, these handset makers still want people and businesses to be able to contact us to sell us stuff.
This is also true of Microsoft & Google for email access. They make some surface changes but they don’t want to kill the channel.
Our early experience making dials in the immediate days after the IOS release is that it has made no measurable difference to our pick-up rates.
** Disclaimer. The update was only released 5 days ago, so not everyone would have updated their phone.
The last reason it won’t work is that the most effective way of making outbound calls is only to call people who have demonstrated they answer their phones.
People who didn’t answer before IOS17 will be the most likely to turn this setting on, and these people would’ve also been reluctant to answer their phones before this update, so I predict that the pool of people who answer their phones will be roughly the same.
As a (small) example, I typically answer all calls unless I’m already engaged in a conversation with a team member, client or prospect. My email signature says, “I answer unscheduled calls”.
I will continue to answer unknown numbers because the reality is the positives of answering, such as new business conversations, new team members, and other interesting conversations, far outweigh any negatives.
So no meaningful change. That is my prediction.
How could we get around the update if someone has it enabled?
According to one of my connections, if you send your prospect an email prior to calling them, the new operating system allocates your name to that number from the email, and the call goes through. Assuming your number is in your email signature.
So, the simple hack might be to send an email before calling.
The sales game is constantly changing. It’s one of the reasons why I love the game.
You’ve got to change your approach regularly, or you see a reduction in effectiveness.
Let me know if you start seeing a decline in your pick-up rates.
