Dealing With the Ghosting Problem

Are prospects not responding to your follow-up after you submit a proposal? Blair goes through what might be causing their lack of response and then provides three tools to address the ghosting problem.

Links

“Ghosted. Now What?” by Blair Enns for winwithoutpitching.com

“The Power of a Metaphor” 2Bobs episode

Blair’s annual 100 Day Sprint post on LinkedIn

Transcript

David C. Baker: “Dealing with the ghosting problem.” Do you think this is worse now than it has been in the past? By ghosting, you mean like in a sales conversation, the other side has hung up, and you've been talking, and you don't realize it for a while. Is this worse than it used to be?

Blair Enns: Being ghosted by clients? Yes, I think so. I haven't measured it. I think anecdotally, it's measured. How did I pull off this lie? No. What's the question?

David: Do not take this out, Marcus. Is the ghosting problem worse now than it has been in the past? Anecdotally, it seems much worse. I keep hearing people talking about it. Well, they keep saying sales pipelines are moving more slowly. Is that another phrase for ghosting?

Blair: If your pipeline is moving slower, it's likely that you are increasingly being ghosted by your clients. I don't measure these things. I'm not a scientist. Anecdotally, absolutely. There seems to be a theme over the last couple of years. I think it's tied to any period of economic or geopolitical uncertainty, primarily economic. It's worse today, but it is an ever-present problem.

David: Well, you've talked about it for a long time. It's obviously been an issue that may or may not be worse right now, but it's been something that I've heard you talk about for quite some time. Maybe all the things that we're living through right now make it a little bit worse than normal. What we're talking about is, well, first, do you have a ghosting issue? Then, if you do, what do you do to solve that? How do you want to start with this?

Blair: Define it in the sales context. From my point of view, it's from the proposal onward. If you write a proposal for somebody and they say, "Yes, this is great, we'll get back to you," and they don't get back to you, and you might follow up multiple times, you don't hear a reply from them. That's what I mean when I'm talking about the ghosting problem in sales.

David: Yes. The ghosting clock doesn't start until you send a proposal, and you don't send a proposal until you think somebody wants one. One of the things I found most interesting, reading through your notes, was this notion that some people asking for a proposal from you, they don't really want one, or maybe they're not asking for one. Maybe you suggest you need to write a proposal, and they say yes because it doesn't cost them anything. It's not like that was new to me, but it just hit me in a new way.

Blair: Yes. I see two causes for the ghosting problem, and one is a problem of our time. It has increased because it's a period of economic and geopolitical, and trade uncertainty along lots of different dimensions. There's just a lot of uncertainty in the world. When it comes to big decisions, people are less likely to make a big decision. They're less likely to take risk. Matt Dixon, who's one of the co-authors of the great book The Challenger Sale, he has a relatively new book called The JOLT Effect.

In that book, he notes that between 40% and 60% of all qualified opportunities are lost not to competitors but to no decision. Within that, my estimation is at least half of those no-decisions, you're being ghosted. He calls the cause FOMU, fear of messing up. It's a prevalent problem. Again, two causes. One is a timely problem, period of economic uncertainty. I think the bigger problem that I want to pull on a little bit more, it's the ever-present one.

I've talked about it forever as the most common, most expensive mistake in any sale of expertise. That is the salesperson misinterpreting interest for intent, and then they crank up the pitching machine. They write a proposal that the client was never going to buy, a proposal they never should have written.

David: Man, just psychologically, what's happening in the salesperson's head where they are just looking for signals where sometimes they don't exist? What's happening there?

Blair: Even that word signal. In sales, there's this term buying signals. Your radar is up, you're looking for this buying signal, and you hear, "Mm, that's interesting, tell me more," or some version of that. You interpret any signal as a buying signal. I think that idea of buying signals does us a disservice. I think we need to be more nuanced about it. We need to recognize that people go through these stages in the buying process. Some of these signals, like, "That's interesting, tell me more," that is a clear signal of somebody who is an early-stage buyer as opposed to a late-stage buyer. We need to begin to make the distinction between the two and treat the two differently. We need to quit writing proposals for somebody who's merely interested.

David: Do you remember that episode we recorded a while back where you said sales is like, and then you filled in the blank? Your big example was skiing, I think, and one of the others was dating. I cannot help but think about dating in this context, seeing signals where they're not there. This is going to be new information to you. At night, I like to go into Craigslist. This is not going to end well. I like to go into Craigslist and look at the Missed Connections thing because that is full of people misinterpreting signals.

Blair: What is this, missed connections?

David: Don't act like you don't know what it is. [laughs]

Blair: I've been on Craigslist four times in my life and zero times in the last decade.

David: It's like, "Hey, to the girl at such and such a bar, I think you kept looking at me."

Blair: Now I'm going on Craigslist.

David: "If that's true, just so I know it's you, tell me what hat I was wearing."

Blair: Oh my God. Then, of course, somebody like you, you're busy replying to these people, aren't you?

David: [laughter] I'm leading them all along. No, I just cannot get this out of my head. It's like mixed signals. I think such and such a person is interested in me. It's like, oh, the truth is they just don't think about you at all. Mixed signals in a sales, it's like you're so desperate to sell something that you're seeing things that aren't there. If I could just reinterpret this and say, yes, ghosting is real, but it's not as real as you think it is, because you're starting the ghosting clock where it shouldn't even be started. They aren't even at that stage yet.

Blair: You proposed to somebody who wasn't even contemplating dating you, and you submitted a marriage proposal.

David: Meanwhile, they're off happily married to somebody else, and you keep wondering where they are.

Blair: They keep calling me. [laughter] Meanwhile, your boss is saying, "Hey, what's the status of that thing?" Looking at the CRM, at the pipeline report, just asking what's the status of that thing causes you to reach out again, which causes the person to go, "Oh my God, they called again. This person will not leave me alone."

David: We need a reverse CRM, people that you need to ignore.

Blair: Yes.

David: This is very helpful for me. Ghosting is worse because of the environment. Ghosting is not as bad as you think it is because you're starting the ghosting clock a little bit too early. If ghosting is real, then what do you do about it? You've got three tools here to address it.

Blair: Yes. One we've talked about at least once before. It's known as the magic email. I write about this, the first post I write in September every year because I see the 100-day sprint is starting the Tuesday after Labor Day. It's roughly 100 business days left in the calendar. I resend this post about the magic email. You've got all these deals that go dark. They tend to go really dark, or more of them go dark in the summer. Part of that is everybody's on vacation. You come back, it's the day after Labor Day. Everybody is focused on getting things done.

You look at all your ghosted deals, and you send them this email that was talked to me 25 years ago now as a voicemail script, and change it at your peril. It goes like this. The subject is usually closing the loop, and the short email reads like this. "I haven't heard back from you on this, so I'm going to assume you've gone in a different direction or your priorities have changed. Feel free to reach out if we can be of assistance in the future." That removes the emotional weight from the relationship that you've imbued by checking in, checking in, checking in.

I wrote that post recently, and somebody messaged me on LinkedIn and said-- I'll read you the two notes they sent me two days in a row. "Hey, Larry, just sent my first two magic emails to two of my ghostiest potential clients. They both responded positively within about 85 seconds. That email is cray, cray." I think this guy is like 60. "That email is cray, cray. Thank you." Then a day later, he returned with this update. "Final update on my magic emails, 8 for 8, 100% response rate. They are now all in the warm-to-hot lead category. Thanks again."

David: I've seen you post versions of this, well, the exact same email, but post notes like this on LinkedIn. People inevitably pop into the comments on that post on LinkedIn and say, "Hey, it worked." Part of this is just the tone of it, right? That's what I like about it. It's like, we're okay if this doesn't work, but we're here if you need us.

Blair: Yes, I get it. I'm reading between the lines. You've hired our competitor. You're no longer doing this. No problem. It's just business. You know where to find me. That's it. You're stripping all the emotions out of it. You are highly likely to get a response, and some of those responses are likely to be positive. "No, no, don't go.' Just the act of retreating will cause some people to step forward. That's the first of three tools you use to address the ghosting problem.

Any chance I get to put that back out into the world, it was taught to me by an old mentor of mine, Pauline O'Malley, not calling her old. I'm just saying it was many years ago. I forget where she got it from. I don't know the origin. It's often online attributed to me, but it's not mine, but it's been so powerful. That's the tool. Start there. See what you can revive from the dead. See what you can bring back to life here.

David: Then, do you mind if I go get some coffee while you walk through this part? You're going to talk about a CRM.

Blair: I'm going to get into the nitty-gritty of opportunity stages of CRM. We're going to lose half the audience right here, including my co-host.

David: You're going to talk about what we do in my Excel file, my CRM.

Blair: I have two other tools. It's really 2A and 2B. 2A is, think about measuring the problem. Let's conflate the two things here, being ghosted and losing to no decision, because being ghosted is losing to no decision, or you don't know what the decision is. For starters, let's measure the losing to no decision. Let's just see if we can't quantify the larger problem of how many of these proposals you're writing are you losing to fear of messing up or fear of poor qualifying as opposed to losing somebody else.

How you would measure it is in a typical CRM, almost every CRM, there are two closed stages, closed one and closed lost. I add a third, it's called closed slipped. What I mean by slipped is they were an intent late-stage buyer. They had the intent to hire somebody like me, not me specifically, but somebody like me. Then they slipped back to interested or even uninterested. They didn't buy from a competitor. They didn't buy from us. They didn't buy from anybody. I call that closed slipped.

That's the second tool that I would have you use. Then just see if you can't quantify it. You're going to come up with a number of somewhere around 50% of all of the proposals you write don't get acted upon. They didn't hire you. They didn't hire a competitor.

David: Could we rename this proposals anonymous instead of the closed slipped, proposals anonymous? You're still guessing here. You're not going to get actual information in some cases, or how do you decide what happened?

Blair: Well, when you send the closing the loop email, like I said, there's a high likelihood of getting a response. I don't know what that likelihood is. My guess is it's in the neighborhood of 80%, maybe even higher. You don't get a response to your proposal. They don't hire you, or they don't give you any information back. By sending that email, you should get most of the information you're looking for.

You'll hear, "Yes, sorry, we're no longer doing this," or, "No, no, it's still a possibility. We want to have a conversation," or, "We hired your largest competitor." If they hired your competitor, you marked it as closed lost. If they've decided to no longer do this, you mark it as closed slipped. If there's still an open opportunity, there's still an open opportunity, and you're still in the sale.

David: Then the third thing you talk about here is qualify for opportunity stage. This one is not as clear to me, so walk us through. The first one was use the magic email. Second is make sure you're measuring this accurately because otherwise, you're probably magnifying the problem bigger than it really is. Then this third is qualify for opportunity stage.

Blair: Yes. I mean open opportunity stages. If it's still open, make the distinction between an early-stage opportunity and a late-stage opportunity. If I cracked open the CRM of most of the listeners here, I would find open opportunity stages that are named by salesperson activity, got a meeting, delivered a proposal, as two common examples. If I showed you my CRM, you would see that the open opportunity stages are named interested, intent, and verbal commit. There are three open stages.

Interested, somebody's, "Mm, that's interesting, tell me more." Somebody who's interested is gathering information. They're assessing the pros and cons. They're overweighting the positives or the pros. We've talked about this before. Early-stage buyers overweight the positive implications of change, and they underweight the negative ones. They're actively looking for the emotional stimulus to help them form the intent to take action, which would then move them to a late stage opportunity, which we call intent.

What we're trying to do is separate the interested from the intent. I don't want to get too far into the weeds on this, but we do this by trying to uncover timeframes. We ask timeframe questions in a qualifying conversation for two reasons. Number one, resource allocation reasons. We want to determine when would we need to get started? Do we have the personnel? Et cetera. The non-obvious reason we ask timeframe questions is this goal here of separating the interested from the intent. Now you referenced that episode we did on metaphors.

One of the metaphors that I used was buying is like changing, therefore selling is like change management. That's where this idea comes from. We go through the stages of buying the same way we go through the stages of change. Now, when we're making a change in our lives, when we're what I'm calling interested, we're gathering information, and we're trying to form the intent to take action. As soon as we decide we're going to do this, the next thing we do is we look forward in time, and we anchor our change in behavior to a date, either a starting point or an endpoint.

In our role as salesperson, when we're trying to qualify for opportunity stage and determine whether this person is interested or they've formed intent, we want to pull on timeframe. When do you need to get started and why? When do you need to have a solution in place and why? My favorite timeframe question has nothing to do with timeframe. Here's my favorite timeframe question. Is this on the wish list or is this on the to-do list? I'm trying to get a sense of interested opportunity stage buyers.

You can think of them as tire kickers. They're not all tire kickers, but there is this propensity to stay at the interested stage for a very long period of time, and interest does not readily translate into intent. That's the mistake, the common mistake among salespeople. They hear interest, and they assume intent. What I'm talking about here, this third tool qualifying for opportunity stage is determining whether this is an early-stage buyer, somebody who's interested, or somebody who's formed the intent to take action.

David: If you have somebody who's not the decision maker, they can play around. I want you to tell me if this is true. I'm just making a statement to see if this is true. A non-decision maker can play around with interest because it helps their career, they have more to talk about, they can inform other people. If they aren't the decision maker, they can't even play with intent. It's like you have to be a decision maker to play with intent. The other thing I wanted to ask you is, if somebody is moving to the intent stage, they're going to hire somebody. It may not be you, but they're going to hire somebody to help them with this.

Blair: Yes. That's where you should be writing a proposal. There are things you can do to try to move somebody from interest to intent, sell them a diagnostic, do an envisioning workshop exercise, whether it's paid or unpaid. There's a saying in sales, no vision, no decision. Somebody who's interested is assessing the pros and cons, but they don't have this vision of future success that's coalesced in their mind that they're intent on moving to. Your job here is likely to help coalesce some vision of a beautiful future.

If you just bear this in mind, you're in a qualifying conversation with somebody, and there's lots of uncertainty, there's lots of talk about possibilities. "We might do this, could do this. I really like what so-and-so is doing. I like what you guys did for our competitor." There's a lot of nebulous talk about what the future might look like. That's a pretty good indication of somebody who's interested and has not formed the intent to take action. Somebody who is intent, they're committed, they've anchored their change in behavior to a point in time, either start date or an end date.

They're allocating resources in the form of people and budgets. Conversely, to somebody at the interested stage, they're now overweighting the negatives or the potential costs of failure of taking action. An interested early-stage prospect is quite prone to emotional arousal. I refer to as an intent nervous late-stage prospect is focused on fear of making a mistake.

David: If somebody just started listening to these podcasts and they want to go deeper, is the four conversations a place to get more about this?

Blair: Well, I'm glad you asked, David.

David: You go right into your sales voice.

Blair: Yes. Obviously, I blog about it extensively, too, but the latest book covers this. It's funny, not in a lot, a lot of detail. Now I'm thinking about it. I do talk about it in the book. I do make the distinction. There have been other times in my career when I've made the distinction more deeply.

David: If you're telling us to not write proposals to the interested, one obvious upside of that is that we're not wasting time. Another is that we're not getting our hopes up and thinking something's going to happen when the likelihood is much lower than we think. Are there other reasons to stay away from writing proposals to only the interested rather than people that have moved into the intent stage?

Blair: Well, I think just the math of it all is the big one. Let's go back to Matt Dixon's math. 40% to 60% of all qualified opportunities are lost not to competitors but to no decision. Let's take the middle of that number. Let's say 50% of your deals get lost to no decision. My estimate is 50% of those, so that is 25% of the proposals that you write should never have been written. I'm going to do math on the fly here, which is horrible, but let's say you've got a closing ratio of 40%. Here's my horrible math.

David: Buckle up, people. Blair's doing math.

Blair: 25% of those proposals, if you just don't write those proposals, your closing ratio goes to 50%.

David: I'm not going to check your math there, but [laughter] I'm not going to get dragged down with you on this one.

Blair: The audience holds their breath.

David: All I'm going to say is that your ratios are better at the end.

Blair: Yes, let's agree that the numbers get better.

David: I could see a firm that's really tightly positioned that has moved slightly further along the productization path, where sending proposals is not as painful. I could see how the advice we're giving wouldn't apply equally to every firm. Still, the whole thing of sending out a proposal seems to indicate there's a neediness, unless the other party receiving it really wants to get it. It's just interesting to me.

Blair: Yes, but even the productization, I know you run events at your own venue or your son's brewery, but you have booked other venues. Recall when you reach out to this fairly commodified offering, renting space for meetings, you reach out to two or three hotels. You want to have a conversation with somebody, you get a proposal emailed to you before anybody's actually ever gotten on the phone with you and just had a conversation with you.

That's an industry that is cranking out proposals that should never be written. I don't know how much time they're wasting on it. I don't know how much business they're losing because of it. Maybe the math works in that business. In a business of expertise, where most of these businesses are customized to a certain extent, it just doesn't make sense in these businesses. Be more discerning about the proposals you write.

David: One last question for me. I've been picturing a non-principal salesperson doing this who needs to please somebody and wants to show progress, and so on. I don't think that's really accurate because it seems to me like principals who are the sales, and there might be a partnership, and one of them is doing more selling than another. Even if you're the principal, if you're the owner, you need to listen to this stuff too. It's not just if you're a salesperson that just needs your hand slapped.

Blair: I have been in situations advising the biz dev person at a creative firm and getting them to get more discerning. Then witnessed their bosses, the owner of the firm, exert pressure on them to move faster, to push harder on a deal where it does not make sense to do so. It is not exclusively the problem of the salesperson. My friend, Scott Edinger, has written a great book on this issue.

It's called The Growth Leader. He basically says, "Sales is a leadership issue." He talks about all of the insidious ways that the people at the top of the organization destroy the business strategy by sometimes seemingly innocuous conversations that they have with salespeople that cause them to do things that are not in the best interest of everybody involved.

David: Yes. Wow. All right. This was a lot more interesting than I anticipated.

Blair: I'm glad I could brighten your day with some sales talk, David, your favorite subject.

David: Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.