Show notes
Do prospects ghost you? We've all been through it. You have a great conversation with an excellent prospect. They say all the right things and respond to you perfectly. It sounds like an ideal match! The right product or service for the right prospect at the right time. We just need to iron out a few details to get things wrapped up, but then they stop taking your calls. They stop responding to email. They ignore your texts. So, what do you do when people ghost you?
David: Hi and welcome to the podcast today cohost Chris Templeton and I will be talking about what to do when prospects ghost you. Welcome Chris!
Chris: Hi David. You know, salespeople have been dealing with prospects disappearing forever, and this term ghosting. I just heard about it recently and I wasn't quite sure what it was. It's apparently not the scary kind of ghosting, but it's really become popular as social media and texting have become more and more prevalent, hasn't it?
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David: Yeah, it really has, and I think there's an argument to be made that this type of ghosting can actually be more scary. If you're in sales, it's probably scarier to have this kind of ghosting than to have what's traditionally viewed as ghosting.
Chris: That’s a great point.
David: And everybody has experienced this, as you've said, it's been happening forever. But this term is kind of interesting and I think from what I've seen, it's developed recently as part of the social media culture where you're having a conversation with someone and then they don't respond. And it's their turn to respond and they don't, and you send a text or you send a social media message and you don't hear anything back and they just basically disappear. So, while it's found its way into the personal culture, I think for anyone who's been involved in business or sales for a long time, they're totally familiar with the concept. They understand immediately and instinctively what it means. And of course, then the question is how do you make it go away? How do you keep it from happening? Which is what I'd like to talk about in this podcast.
Did the Prospect Really Ghost You?
Chris: Well and this goes back to that whole question that we've talked about of kind of our default definitions. And I think especially as salespeople, we have a tendency to go to the place of saying, “Oh my gosh, I've been ghosted.” When maybe I haven't even been ghosted. And so, when you look at it, how can you tell if someone's ghosting you or if they're just slow to respond and busy?
David: Well, that happens a lot. There's a lot of times when people are just busy, they're tied up and they may not be intentionally ghosting you but you're not hearing back from them. And the only real answer to that is time is the final determinant of that. Time is the only thing that will tell you for sure whether they're ghosting you or whether they're just busy. If they're just busy at some point they will become less busy and you will likely hear from them again. But all of us in business have to determine sort of our threshold, our tolerance for pain. How long are we willing to endure a relationship that is completely one sided? If we're sending texts or if we're sending social media messages or if we're leaving voicemail messages for people, how long do we want that to go on? And there are some salespeople who will continue to pursue a prospect for months or for years. And I don't know, I guess that could work. I think to me it strikes me as a bit desperate. One of the things that we've always done in our organizations is we've sort of set a limit as to how many times we're going to continue to pursue a particular prospect. And I think it's a good idea for everyone to do. Say, “Okay, this is going to be my limit.” I'm going to go this far and then I'm not going to continue to do that. Part of it also though has to do with the messaging because the way that we communicate to people is also going to help to determine or dictate the response that we get. And if people just think you're going to keep chasing them and chasing them and chasing them and they just feel like you're going to be there whenever they decide to get back to you, then there's not a lot of incentive for them to do that in a prompt and timely manner. But if people recognize that your time is valuable as well and that you're actually looking for a response, then they might be more inclined, at least the ones who are serious might be more inclined to be more responsive.
Chris: I think one of the things that we should dig in a little bit deeper on is, you said sometimes it's just a question of the messaging and you know, what - if all it is, is this sense of, Hey, what's going on? Or you know, I really want your business or that sort of thing. Talk about good messaging and how that can help this process along.
David: Right. Well, some of this also goes back to what we had talked about in a previous podcast in terms of just conversation that helps to foster a relationship, essentially relationship building as opposed to straight out salesmanship. Okay, where ‘sell at all costs’ if that's the goal of the conversation; then people are going to be a lot more likely to ghost you, because they feel like the conversation could be one sided. The advantage that we have when we're good at what we do in whatever profession we're in is that we can talk to people about the types of situations that they're having, the types of struggles they might be dealing with. We can talk to them about how we could potentially help them with those things, and it doesn't mean that we have to constantly be immediately selling them on it. So simply having conversations that are helpful, that are useful, that get them thinking about the things that they would like to have happen. All of that can be done in a way that is not totally self-serving and when we do that, we are going to be a lot more likely to have people want to continue those conversations.
Chris: It's such a great point. And again, I think the other thing that I would look at also is if you've figured out kind of where your end point is, one of the things that I heard as a strategy and it's served me well over the years; is at some point if you don't get a response just saying, “Hey, I just want to check in with you and make sure that everything's okay with us because I'm a little surprised I haven't received a response. If I've done something, boy I'd sure like to know what it is that I could do to get us back on the right track.” Something that you totally own and the kind of the strategy behind it is, but when it's not accusatory, like “Where have you been?” And it's just like, “Oh my God, if I've done something to offend you…” typically you'll get some kind of response saying, “Oh Hey, I'm really sorry.” And there is this... I think it becomes almost a desire to strike that feeling from the person who sent that note. And it's heartfelt, you know? I mean usually if there's somebody who hasn't gotten back to me that I think I've got a decent relationship with, it's an authentic and honest question and so that may be another way; and then I think from that point on, can't you just move to kind of putting them on an automatic message? Here's our email newsletter, that sort of thing?
David: Yeah, we refer to that as a drip campaign and there are people who if we've haven't heard from them in a long time but that they have signed up to receive our newsletter, that type of thing, they can continue to get that for as long as they want to get it. Or until we get to the point where we say, okay, this person has received X number of newsletters. They haven't opened any, they haven't clicked on anything, they haven't responded to anything. Now we're going to make the decision proactively to remove them and sometimes that's a good idea as well, because if you have a lot of people who are getting your stuff and not engaging with it; that's going to impact your deliverability rates, it’s going to impact who's seeing your stuff on social media. So, it's a good idea to do that sort of cleanup every now and then to make sure that you're not just putting stuff out there to people who have absolutely no interest anymore in what it is that you're talking about.
David: And so, go back for me. Talk a little bit from your standpoint about how you determine if somebody's just been slow to respond?
David: Well, once again, it just goes back to how long it's taken. And you know, you had mentioned a great one to get people re-engaged, which is basically finding out if there's something you've done. And we've sent out emails that had subject lines of “Is it something I've done?” And that's typically the kind of thing that someone would think of in a personal relationship - Is it's something I've done? It sounds very personal, but it tends to get a decent response. Years ago, when we had our retail mail order catalog business, we used to send out postcards to people that we hadn't heard from in a while. People who hadn't ordered our stuff in a while. This is pre-internet, which is why we were sending out physical postcards, but we essentially would send out a postcard that said the same thing. “Is it something we've done?” And so, it would be personalized it would just be a postcard. It would have your name at the top and it would say, “Dear Chris, you know, it's been quite some time since we've heard from you. We've appreciated your business over the years, but we haven't heard from you in a long time…” and then headline would say, “Is it something we've done?