Do you tell a seller the person calling them is a VA overseas?

The fake first name is the part I'd cut. Once a seller hears "Ashley" and then hears an accent that doesn't match, you've told them you were managing them. That's the moment you lose.

Two separate things are getting mixed here. One is what your callers legally have to say. The other is what works.

On the legal side, outbound calling to residential numbers sits under federal telemarketing rules plus a state layer, and several states have their own caller identification and do-not-call requirements that are stricter than the federal baseline. Some of those rules require the caller to identify the company on whose behalf they're calling early in the call. None of the ones I'm aware of require disclosing the caller's physical location. Whether your specific script complies depends on which states you dial into and how your list was sourced, and that is a question for an attorney who does telemarketing compliance, not a forum.

On what works, the number to watch isn't the answer rate. It's contacts per contract. Disclosure changes tone at the top of the call, so it moves the rate at which a live answer turns into a real conversation, and it can also move how many of your booked appointments actually hold. Those two can move in opposite directions. A script that gets more conversations and fewer held appointments looks like an improvement in your dialer report and a decline in your pipeline.

The assumption doing most of the work in @pike's question is that his volume is too low to test. If a seat runs 150 to 250 dials a day, you get a usable read on conversation rate in about two weeks by alternating scripts by day. You will not get a read on held-appointment rate for a couple of months. So test the top of the funnel, and don't conclude anything about the bottom of it early.

One more thing. If the caller is doing anything that looks like negotiating terms on your behalf in a state where that triggers licensing, the location question is the smaller problem.

Does the answer change if it's inbound? Someone who called your number already decided to talk to you. Feels like a totally different conversation than an unsolicited dial.

Say it flat out. Not for ethics reasons, though that's there too. It's because my callers get asked constantly, and a rep who has been told to dodge one question starts hedging on all of them. You can hear the confidence drain out. Give them the true answer and they stop being nervous.

@thatch that's the argument that moved me. Managing a script that requires the caller to be evasive is its own ongoing cost.

Property management side, so my calls are mostly tenants and vendors, and I'll say the opposite of most of this thread. Tenants do not care at all. They care whether the person on the phone can approve the plumber. What kills us is authority, not geography. A VA who has to say "let me check with the manager" three times has lost that tenant regardless of where they sit.

We tested it on about 1,100 dials each way last spring on a probate-adjacent list. Script with the location line up front: conversations per live answer came in slightly lower, roughly 5.4% against 6.2%. Appointments that actually held were better on the disclosure side, though the sample was small enough that I wouldn't defend the difference hard. Net cost per booked appointment was close to a wash. What was not a wash is complaints. Callbacks where the seller was angry dropped noticeably. That alone made me keep it.

@cobalt the complaint number is the one I'd care about. Angry callbacks eat my time, and my time is the expensive part of the operation.

I'm building the agency side of this and the position I'm taking with clients is that we disclose by default and they can ask us not to. Puts the decision in writing on their side rather than mine. Two prospects walked over it. Fine.

Worth being careful about one thing nobody's separated yet. If you hold a license, your brokerage almost certainly has rules about who can communicate on behalf of a licensee and how they identify themselves, and advertising and unlicensed-assistant rules differ meaningfully state to state. Where I'm getting licensed, an unlicensed assistant can set appointments but can't discuss price or terms. So the answer to @pike depends partly on whether he's licensed and where he's calling into, and he should get that from his broker or state commission in writing.

@halyard is pointing at the thing I'd diligence first. I've passed on service businesses because the whole pitch depended on a script that a regulator would look at sideways. The revenue is real until it isn't.

Voted disclose. I've been sitting on this decision for weeks and reading this thread the honest reason I was hesitating is I assumed disclosure would cost me answers, and @cobalt's numbers say the cost is small. So I was optimizing against a number I never measured.

Basic question, sorry. When people say "disclose," is that one sentence in the opening, or is there some longer thing you have to read out? I've been picturing something legalistic and off-putting.

@juniper it's one clause. Something like "my name's X, I'm on the acquisitions team for [company], I'm calling from the Philippines." Then straight into the reason for the call. It takes two seconds.

The place this gets messy for me is scope. My VA started at data entry, drifted into calling contractors, then drifted into telling contractors when to show up. By the time she was doing that, whether she "disclosed" anything was the least of my problems, because she was making commitments I hadn't approved. Decide what the seat is allowed to say before you decide how it introduces itself.

Nobody in here has put a dollar figure on the downside case, so let me. Say disclosure costs you 12% of conversations and your cost per contract is $4,800 on a seat that produces four contracts a year. That's roughly $2,300 of extra cost annually, assuming conversations convert at the same rate downstream, which @cobalt's data suggests they don't. Against that, one complaint that escalates costs you more than that in attorney time before you've read the first page. I'll take the disclosure.