Have you ever had a lead seemingly fall off the planet? We’re talking all about ghosting in this episode of Closing Time. Welcome to Closing Time, the show for go-to-market Leaders. I’m Val Riley, head of content marketing at Insightly and I’m joined today by Sam McKenna. She is CEO of #samsales Consulting, an award winning sales leader, and a brand ambassador for LinkedIn. Welcome to the show, Sam. Thanks, Val. So nice to be here. So Sam, I’m happily married, but I have heard from my girlfriends all about being ghosted on the dating scene. Is it possible that being ghosted by a lead is actually worse? Oh, you know what? I think being ghosted by a lead is actually worse. I would rather be ghosted by my date and still be successful and alone, maybe. Is that the saddest thing ever? No, I totally think that’s the stance, being ghosted by a lead is worse. All right, so let’s start about being ghosted. When you’re trying to set the meeting. So I think a lot of things happen here. One, is sometimes we will go and respond to, let’s say, inbound lead or somebody who responds to us and said we’d love to take a meeting, but we miss a critical part here. We kind of get our happy ears.. We get very excited. We’re like, oh, my gosh, somebody wants a meeting. This is great. And we do nothing but reply.. And so if you think, well, that sounds like the right move, here’s the thing. When you reply, you’re just sending that reply into the ether and you’re not building a process for making sure that that person responds. So let’s make sure they don’t ghost us. When you reply, just CC yourself or make sure you’ve got a reminder set through one of your sales engagement platforms. We want to make sure that we follow up and say, Val, I know you said you wanted to meet.. Just checking back in to make sure there’s a good time we can find, et cetera. Most reps don’t do that. They get so excited about the prospects saying yes, that they immediately reply and then forget about that person, which leaves so many leads unscheduled. I know you’ve talked about like just taking a moment and personalizing that first interaction. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, you know, what I think is interesting, even thinking about inbound leads, it’s so important that we show them, we know them. We are known for “show me you know me” thinking about how to personalize that. But imagine it takes work to even convert an inbound lead. So if we’re getting an inbound right, it’s not automatic that they’re going to take a meeting with us. So take just one second. Do a little research on them.. We still want to be urgent, right? We want to capture quickly but do a little research, take a look at their LinkedIn profile, take a look at what’s going on with the company. Find something that you can connect on.. Really knock the socks off your buyer. If instead of just saying,. I’d love to take a meeting, you do a little “show me you know me” and do that homework. Yeah. Sam, when we were meeting each other,. I know we went to rival universities so I think I threw that into one of the first messages. And I really think that it got us, you know, quickly engaging with each other on another level. Off on the wrong foot right out of the gate, Val. But you know what? Like, what a great way to show your personality. And I think sometimes we’re afraid to do that in emails or at work, but bring your whole self forward, toe the line a little bit, see what can happen. And what an amazing way to build trust and rapport even before you’ve had the chance to meet. Right. Okay, so we talked a little bit about ghosting with that initial meeting, but let’s talk about ghosting after you’ve sent that proposal. So you send the proposal, then they go dark. What’s the strategy? Yeah, so let’s actually take two steps backwards if we can. So one, I think one interesting thing is sometimes we do get people who say they want a meeting. We follow up, we follow up and then nothing. So they’ve kind of ghosted us there.. What do we do then? What do we do at that point? Right. If we followed all the right steps, one of the things that we always talk about is the proactive booking. So, Val, you tell me if this would work on you, you respond to me, you say you want the meeting, I diligently, non-annoyingly follow up with you. And then I say, you know what? I bet scheduling is half the battle. So I’m going to send you an email and I’ll say, Val, really excited that you want to meet. I know that scheduling is half the battle sometimes. I’m going to send you a calendar invite two weeks from today at this time, it’s coming in just a second. Let me know if there’s a better time that works for you and I’ll update it accordingly. Otherwise, looking forward to meeting you. How would that work for you? I mean, it feels like you’re being proactive. Also, you’re recognizing that I’ve reached out to you at a time that is convenient for me. So potentially that’s a blank spot in my calendar. Exactly. And some people just rush and say, like, I booked time for tomorrow, and I’m like, again, they’re so busy, they can’t even respond. So use a little EQ, book that out two weeks. This works like such a charm. And again, just a good way to capture that booking. Now, the ghosting on the proposal, when we send that out one important thing to think about is the reason we often get ghosted is because that person hadn’t earned the right to the proposal yet. And we just put our happy ears on and created this for them. So you’ve got to just take a step back. If you have an initial meeting and somebody says, yeah, this all sounds good, can you send us a proposal? What do we know about the deal? Do we have BANT established? Do we know their timing, their needs, their challenges, the authority, buying authority, the budget? Do we have all of that? And if we don’t or if we don’t even have two thirds of that, three fourths of that, we have to think, well, we don’t have what we need in order to make this happen. And let me give you a different example here. Sometimes we’ll get on a discovery call and somebody will ask us, Hey, we love everything you’re saying. We want to check your referrals. Well, we would never give up our referrals until we knew they were serious. Right. We want to be protective of our current customer’s time that are going to give those references for us. So we’ve got to think about is the same thing for us. Have they earned the right to this proposal just like have they earned the right to those reference checks? Make sure you’ve got what you need before you take the time to put this together, because oftentimes that proposal goes, they might look at it and then it just goes into the ether and we get ghosted. Gotcha. So you’re saying that the ghosting might be a result of the proposal coming too early in the process? Exactly. I think as reps, we’re so quick to just hear a buyer say jump and we say, how high? Right. That’s our immediate response. And we get excited about things or we even think, well, I don’t think this opportunity is quite right or quite developed, but I really want to show something advanced in my CRM. So I’m going to send out the proposal and then I’m going to show this opportunity at the 50% stage just to make myself look better when in fact we know we still have work to do to qualify and to prove value before we take the time to put that proposal together. I think I think that value is a key step because sometimes, you know, you haven’t done enough work upfront and they get the proposal and then maybe they have sticker shock. Right. Exactly. Well, even think about this too, with pricing. So we get this question a lot in discovery calls. So we’re going through we’re asking these questions or maybe we demo, but we still haven’t had a chance to truly prove value. And we have a customer who says this is all great, but how much does this cost? And as reps, we typically panic. Let’s look at it just very easy example. Let’s say we’re selling a software that was $2,000 a license per year, and let’s say our buyer said we need 100 licenses. So they say, how much is this all going to cost us? And we say, $200,000. If we say that, it’s basically on the first day you’re saying, I want to get married, have 16 kids, the person is going to run for the hills. So back to dating examples there. But instead just think about it like this. If you say we know at a minimum our licenses cost $2,000 and we have a minimum engagement of ten licenses, that is your worst case scenario. $20,000. How many licenses you buy, the tenure of your contract, the speed at which you buy. There’s so many factors that make that price go lower. So we can look at that as we continue to work through this. But for now, just know that’s your worst case scenario, highest pricing. That number doesn’t panic someone like $200,000 does. So just think about that. You give them something, it’s a foothold, but it’s not the big scary number. Right. So you said that maybe there are some ways you can capitalize on being ghosted. So it’s happened. You’re sitting there, your sales manager is like, hey, what happened to this opportunity? It seems to have evaporated. Like what happens next? Yeah. So I think one thing, just to make sure also this doesn’t happen but bring your leadership in and let’s multi-thread early in the game so that when you do get ghosted, you have levers you can pull on your internal team who have built their own connective threads. I think another thing that’s really interesting is just to think about how we need to sometimes make a little effort even for existing relationships we have. So if the proposal is out there, let’s say we don’t far along and then all of a sudden they stop responding or let’s say we have an existing customer, we have a great land and expand opportunity, but then the person stops responding to that. What do we do? We did a really cool thing with one of our female VIPs recently. We had a great conversation going, great expansion opportunities, so much need. But then she stopped responding and there’s only so many times we can just check in. We never do that, by the way, or add value so we changed it up and we employed “show me you know me.” We researched a little bit. We found a podcast she was recently on. We absorb some lessons from that, and then we use that right in the subject line as a reply to the other emails we sent and said, This resonated with us so much. It made us think about sales just wanted to say, we loved your podcast. and we got a response right away when we hadn’t before. You know, I can’t imagine you mentioned bringing in the sales leader. I can’t imagine there’s a sales leader listening to this video who wouldn’t have loved to have been brought in at any phase during a deal that, you know, that the rep might actually end up needing help with? I think sometimes the reps are hesitant to bring in their leaders and really we have to shift that. Absolutely. And think about this like we don’t want to bring a sales leader in for every single opportunity, particularly our transactional ones that have short sales cycles. We can generally work through those on our own. But when you have these larger complex deals, when you have the right decision maker on the phone and you know that this deal has legs and you book your second call, say that to the buyer and say, you know, I want to bring in some of our team as well. I think they could really contribute value to the conversation so even at call two or three, you start to multi-thread right away. And for anybody that’s listening who says that’s great, in theory, my boss is not great in front of clients, you know, or isn’t a good salesperson or jumps to the discount, now what do I do? Bring in your cross-functional partners as well. Bring in somebody that might have the same title as them. Bring in somebody from sales operations or a champion that you have on another team. There’s different ways to pull those levers, even if you’re not blessed with an incredible sales leader. Yeah, I can’t imagine the prospect not appreciating that extra effort and appreciating, you know, speaking to more than one person at your team. I mean, I just I can’t see how that wouldn’t be positively received. Exactly. And I love this, too. You know, when I saw the marketers previously, I would bring in marketers from our team and say, you know,. I want you to hear from them how they use our platform, what they do with it. And then you basically at that point,. I just pay my nails the whole time and then they have their own conversation in their own language. It’s great, but no, this is great. You also want to make sure you know that, again, the opportunity is the right size and then not to inundate them. So I’ve also been in situations where sales reps have brought 14 people to a meeting and it’s just me and my boss and I’m like, this feels aggressive, so make sure it’s a good one to one or so ratio. And not to overwhelm them. All right, Sam, this has been great. Appreciate the conversation. I’m now going to just go chat with my girlfriends at the next happy hour and I’ll be able to totally relate to them and all their ghosting problems and, you know, thank goodness I’m off the market. I appreciate you joining us, though. Thank you so much for having me. All right. So that’s going to do it for this episode of Closing Time, the show for go-to-market leaders. Be sure to subscribe, like, and ring that bell so you do not miss an episode. We’ll see you next time.
