 So I left a trainwreck of a voicemail to a prospective client this week which has led to this week's 2 minute tip Tuesday. So if you've ever left a voicemail that had you saying, what the Sam hell was that after you hung up, then you need to watch this video. So this week I was calling on prospective clients and in some cases getting people's voicemails and the irony is I even wrote a blog post recently about voicemail etiquette and if you want to read that article you can find the link in the description. So I had all the etiquette tips in my head but then I picked up the phone to this one prospective client and bleh it was just verbal diarrhea which left me wondering at the end of the call if I had even left my phone number for them to call me back. It was terrible and I had the little devil on my shoulder going you should read your own blog post dumbass but I didn't and the voicemail is now sitting in that poor girls inbox and I'm so sorry for that. Here's the thing with voicemail. When you craft an email you have time to read the words, go back, change the words around, add delete and when you're finally happy with the product then you can hit send. Even with video you have the opportunity to edit, edit, edit, to edit the content before you hit publish but with voicemail you sometimes only have one chance to leave a coherent message because often voicemails don't have that delete and re-record function on the telephone. So here's my own advice that I'm really really taking to heart this week and I'm hopeful that this will resonate with you as well is to script your voicemail and practice it before you even pick up the phone. It's going to take you four or five minutes to script it out which is time consuming but I did it and wouldn't you know it I have scribbles and notes all over this script which means if I were to try to do this off the top of my head it would have come out as crap. So now I've scripted it and then I practiced it once. Now when practicing if it takes me more than a minute to go through my script then I got to rewrite that script because your voicemail should be under one minute but I am really hopeful that I am going to save the world from my crappy voicemails by scripting and practicing the voicemail before I even pick up the phone. And friends this script is not to go to waste after all the time you put into it. If this script actually works or you feel confident reading it now you can use it as a base for other calls as well. So there's my two minute tip Tuesday script and practice your voicemails before even picking up the phone and maybe you won't look like a dumbass like me this week. Thanks for watching. See you next time.