How to Avoid Your Phone Number Being Marked as Spam on Sales Calls

Imagine you’re a business with a legitimate reason to call someone, but 74% of the time, your call is marked as “spam.”

That sucks. 

Unfortunately, that’s the reality these days. If you’re trying to make sales via the phone and aren’t aware of how often the customer’s caller ID is labeling you as [Potential Spam], most of your calls are potentially going to waste.

Even if you have legitimate business prospects to call, imagine how it looks on the other end when the prospect sees your number with the tagline: [POTENTIAL SPAM]. 

It's not a good look when you’re trying to establish trust.

You can differentiate your calls if you build a solid reputation with customers and telecommunication providers as what you are: a non-spammer. But if you’re going to overcome this limitation and establish trust with customers, you need a combination of two elements: tactics and technology. 

Here’s how you can combine the right cold-calling software with the right strategies to ensure your phone calls make it through the spam filter:

Caller Reputation: What It Is (And Why It Matters)

Caller reputation is a score your phone number earns based on a few factors: history, user feedback, and caller behavior. 

“Caller reputation” might sound intangible, but it has tangible consequences. A telecommunications operator might flag or even block your phone number if they’ve determined you’ve earned a reputation as a spammer.

There’s also been a crackdown on poor-reputed callers recently. In 2024, India reduced spam callers by 20%. In Australia, hundreds of millions of spam calls have been outright blocked recently. 

Fewer businesses are breaking through the filters. Even when they’re not actually spam.

You’ll need a positive caller reputation if you’re going to differentiate yourself on caller ID. Without that, you might find that even your legitimate business calls—like when you follow up with a prospect who offered you their phone number in an online web form—get blocked and unanswered.

A Glossary: Avoiding Your Phone Number Being Marked as Spam

We’re weaving through some technical weeds here. Let’s help clarify things with a brief map of the terrain:

• SHAKEN/STIR: No, it’s not from a Bond movie. Short for “Secure Telephone Identity Revisited and Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information using toKENs.” All you need to know: this is the caller ID authentication framework that telecommunications companies use to flag you as spam.
• CNAM: Caller Name. This is the database lookup service that displays your name alongside your phone number when a recipient glances at their caller ID. You want this to be accurate so it reports your business along with your correct number.
• Voice Integrity and Voice Reputation: These are broad terms referring to the total combination of your strategies and practices as a caller. Do you avoid spam-like behavior? Do you generally make sales calls only when people have opted to receive them?
• Branded Calls: You can use calling software to set up branded calls, featuring your company name and logo. Generally, spam tactics want to hide the fact that they’re a company calling—because they don’t want customers to know if they’re a third-party service that’s trying to scam them. For that reason, you should look at branded calls as a positive thing.
• Smart Views: This is a feature of Close that helps you organize and filter your leads. You can track your outbound call performance, for example. Smart Views allow you to filter out contacts who don’t answer after a set number of attempts. This way you place calls to truly interested parties—and avoid harassing anyone who isn’t responding.

The Keys to Maintaining a Positive Caller Reputation

A positive caller reputation isn’t something you buy. It’s something you earn with two elements: sound technology and high-quality sales strategy. 

One way to think about this is to invest in your caller reputation with two key formulas:

First, make “pre-call” investments. For example, you’ll want to register your phone properly with the appropriate organizations and agencies (see below). This is a nice preventative measure to kick things off on the right foot—but keep in mind that it’s not a “get out of jail free” card, either.

Second, don’t annoy people. That’s a rule of thumb for good caller behavior: you’re not trying to use underhanded sales tactics that could get your number dinged by unhappy customers.

You’d be surprised how much you can achieve before dialing anyone at all. In fact, it’s a great practice to be as thorough as possible before you start calling potential clients cold—because what you do before the call will set you on the appropriate path. 

You’re either going to be a business with a phone number in good standing, or you’re going down the wrong road and you’ll end up marked [spam]. 

Here are the key points to observe before you start calling:

Comply With All “Do Not Call” Lists. 

In the U.S., that’s Do Not Call, which offers a separate section for so-called telemarketers. For example, agencies that are third-party sellers for certain businesses should register to the appropriate category.

In your case, you’re likely a Service Provider directly. There are specific rules for “Exempt Organizations,” for example, and to be able to qualify, you’ll have to generally be doing something other than selling, such as taking surveys. In other words, you don’t want to use any “bait-and-switch” techniques, as these are classic red flags that will get you marked as spam.

Keep Your Calling List Up-to-Date

Don’t call any “ghost” numbers! Remove any numbers that don’t connect. Call service software can help you—for example, Twilio Voice Insights, Call Resources, and Dial Call Status offer call summary records where you can look at your key tracking metrics for each call. 

If there are phone numbers that don’t provide valid pick-ups, you’ll want to deactivate them from your list and stop cold calling.

Keep Your Call Connection Rates High. 

Duh, right? Sounds obvious yet not everyone follows this advice. The more you successfully connect to people, the more likely it is that your call is a legitimate service—which keeps your reputation up. Spamming techniques tend to work on volume, using robo-callers to move through huge volumes of numbers that may be disconnected. 

Call During Business Hours. 

If you place calls outside 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., for example—local time—you can get flagged.  In fact, some states have even stricter requirements for when to call. And while it might be tempting to call someone when they’re more likely to be free, that’s the exact kind of practice that spammers target, too. Close can help here—you can include business hours as a filter when building a Smart View. 

Take a Specific Approach with “Neighbor” Calls. 

You know the types—the ones that use a service to spoof local area codes to make it seem like someone nearby is calling. This is a tactic spammers love to use, which means that even if you think it’s a good idea, it could get your phone number flagged. 

The right way to approach local presence: own a pool of numbers that you dial from regularly and use the closest number to the recipient on your outbound calls. 

Avoid Repeated Calls. 

One of the worst violations of all? Harassing someone through a phone. If you’re consistently calling someone with a phone—intending to annoy, abuse, or harass the person on the other end—is going to get you flagged, and for good reason.

A funny thing about Close’s technology: it can be tempting to break these rules! You’ll see all the technology you have at your disposal and may want to adopt phone calling practices that violate these ideas. 

But avoid the temptation. 

Your sales team—not marked as “spam”—will thank you for it.

Best Practices for When You Make Your Call

We’ve addressed what to do before the call. But what about handling the call strategy itself?

• Use a consistent Caller ID. Don’t mix up your caller ID usage. This can get you flagged as exhibiting evasive behavior more typical of spammers.
• Match Up your CNAM with your specific number. You don’t want your Caller ID Name and specific caller ID number to look different.
• Allow five ring cycles or 30 seconds before moving on. When you leave a voicemail, start talking within 2 seconds of the greeting, as silent calls tend to mark you as spam.
• Use Close’s Smart Views feature. Smart Views lets you set up a system to integrate these best practices of avoiding being labeled as spam, such as setting up a filter to remove numbers from a call list (after a certain number of attempted calls). 
• Be clear and respectful. Spammers tend not to get to the point. They want to lull people into a false sense of security. To avoid this, don’t be shady. It’s hard enough to get someone on the line, so get straight to the reason for the call in a clear, professional manner.
• When you leave a message, always announce who you are. Be clear and unambiguous. Remember: no sales tactics. Announcing who you are and who you’re affiliated with are standard business practices—and they’re also a courtesy for the call receiver.
• Use Close’s segmentation to build a sales script. If you can get enough caller data into Close, you’ll have more personalization data about each customer. This helps you tailor your message a bit more to their pain points, which helps you build a strong and direct script that appeals to each customer’s specific issues.
• Let callers know how you got their calling consent. Did they hand over their phone number to register for a webinar? Mention it. “Hi, this is So-and-so with XYZ Insurance. You came to our website last week and requested that we call with a car insurance quote—is now a good time?”
• Use strong opting-in strategies. Even if you register your phone number the right way, behaving like a spammer will still get you flagged. Any time you’re calling a phone number that hasn’t elected to opt into cold calls, you have to be extremely wary. That’s why we typically recommend to people that they have a secondary strategy for outbound calls ready wherein you’re capturing leads by having people opt in. This will give you far more flexibility for handling your calls when you do have to place them—after all, those clients have opted in now.

Building a Stellar Reputation as a Caller

Caller reputation should be simple, even though the amount of acronyms here might leave your head spinning. But it comes down to a few things: good caller ID technology and simple, courteous best practices in place to help your potential customers.

If you make those cold calling strategies commonplace with the caller in mind, you’ll be able to show up as a legitimate business on customers’ phone calls. It should feel a bit more like “warm calling” when you do it right. And when you do, you’ll avoid that dreaded tag:

[LIKELY SPAM]