Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to penetrate the highly protective Fortune 500 prospect and secure the decision of the executive buying committee before the close of fiscal year end. New intel suggests that your main competitor is already enroute, leaving you 4 days and 8 hours to infiltrate. To save time, we've chosen your team for you, SDR Carter and Account Manager Dunn.
As always, should you or any member of your team be ghosted or thrown out, the CRO will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck sales professional!
Of course, this is not how any sales opportunity goes down, particularly an enterprise sales deal. There are times however when navigating a deal at a large company feels like Mission Impossible, except for the bullets, violence, car chases, and evil plot to conquer the world. It’s a spy game though where you as the sales rep have to sleuth your way through a maze of misdirection, dead ends, and cliffhangers.
The week before I hosted an Enterprise Sales Forum talk on Clubhouse about getting ghosted. For those not familiar with the term, it is when someone you had been in contact with is no longer responsive or reachable. Sometimes it is expected, like when a prospect shows little interest or engagement during a call. Then there are instances when it is a total surprise, when you felt certain there was strong interest and alignment to your solution. Early in my career, I would feel absolutely gutted by this.
For those that have been in sales for some years, there is self-defense mechanism that we develop to avoid the disappointment. We are immediately suspicious of overly eager prospects. We are careful to downplay meetings with highly visible prospects. We extend timelines for deals and pushback on moving these deals into the forecast.
Of course, this is not every deal. These are just the deals where things seem too easy and our brains pick up on signals that something is not quite right. There are catch phrases that you hear that trigger our sales Spidey senses:
“We have only invited you to talk.”
“We need to move fast. How fast can you start?”
“We got all the approvals we need.”
“Budget is not going to be an issue.”
“No need to talk to anyone else.”
I am sure you have your own catchphrases that cause you to go on high alert. There are many others I have found over the years. Sometimes it makes you think that every prospect is a liar.
The truth is that we run up against a mix of best intentions and the corporate vortex. Many prospects are juggling multiple initiatives and doing their best to stay afloat and employed. At the same time, the priorities of staff and of management are not often aligned, particularly in large organizations. This causes mixed signals. There have been times when prospects have reached out months after ghosting me to apologize for the confusion caused because of sudden shifts in priorities from senior leaders.
On the one hand, I could take offense at being gaslighted. Early in my career, that was my attitude. Now I understand that people generally mean well and are just doing the best they can do. While getting an explanation sooner would have felt better, I also understand the human nature to avoid embarrassment.
Responding in a more stoic manner has its benefits. You do not feel the emotional whipsaw from the highs and lows that happen with deals. You also build trust with prospects. By not taking the initial rejection personally, I have been able to move on, reengage later with the prospect, and secure a much better deal down the road through collaboration with the contacts that originally ghosted me.
Every deal is an intersection. The intersection is need, capacity, impact, and solution. The solution is what you offer the prospect. That solution only makes sense though if the customer has a clear business need, the resources and budget to solve it, and solve the need with enough impact such that it becomes a priority for the organization.
With this in mind, there are two approaches to ghosting. The first is to avoid being ghosted altogether. The second is to mitigate those situations when you are ghosted. Even if you excel at avoiding the pitfalls that lead to ghosting, there will always be the few that slipped by.
There are three things you can do proactively to prevent prospects from ghosting you.
Better qualification – There are most likely a few patterns that can be drawn when you have prospects that ghost you. Review each stage of your sales process and look for common elements in the contacts and companies in each of the stalled deal plus the answers to qualification questions and additional notes to assess if there are ways to calibrate qualification to qualify out poor fits.
Better meetings – The death of many deals are negative interactions between salespeople and prospects. Not being prepared and a not listening to the prospect during the meeting or call leads to a poor experience that destroys trust and credibility. Make sure you are well-prepared, have well-researched questions to ask, and make the meeting less a pitch and more of a collaborative session.
Better follow-up – You build trust and credibility when you do the things you say you promise. It is baffling then when a salesperson does not respond in a timely way to prospects, does not send the right information, and does not plot out clear next steps to help the prospect buy. Every interaction with a prospect should have follow-up actions with an owner and due date that lead to outcomes and move the buying process forward.
Despite all attempts to better qualify, manage meetings, and follow-up, there will be situations when you still get ghosted. When that happens, focus on the long game by doing these two things:
Thoughtful engagement – The typical process in sales is to create automated email sequences ending with some sappy or funny “break-up email” in hope of drawing a response. The effectiveness of this strategy has diminished with the flood of others doing the same thing. Avoid that and instead stay top of mind by sending a personalized email or message every few weeks with some insightful and relevant content. Be the helpful advisor instead of the needy salesperson, so that you can build trust and credibility that works in your favor. When the intersection of need, capacity, and impact aligns with your solution, you are positioned to be the first call from the prospect.
Go broad – There are multiple ways into a large organization. Start to explore other people and departments for other opportunities to engage. If there was a fit in the part of the organization where you were ghosted, chances are that similar problems exist elsewhere. This is where having strong account coverage matters, because the more people and departments you engage with, the more chances you have in securing traction towards developing a winnable deal.
These are some general principles that have always helped when my teams faced larger than normal percentages of ghosting. Let me know what you have found to work, I would love to hear about your suggestions to either avoid being ghosted or recovering from being ghosted. Till next time, happy selling!
Mark Birch, Founder of Enterprise Sales Forum
Howdy and hope you had a restful Easter / Passover holiday. I was in Charleston, South Carolina enjoying some decent weather and time with family that I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic.
I mentioned the Enterprise Sales Forum talks on Clubhouse in the essay above and it would be awesome to have you join us for our Monday / Friday 5 PM ET / 2 PM PT discussions. They are low-key events and everyone is invited to participate and speak if you want. The learning though is real and very peer-to-peer driven to help each other out with whatever struggles you are facing.
The sessions will start up again this Monday on the topic of Managing Pipeline, followed by Managing Sales Meetings and Calls, both relevant to today’s newsletter.
You can join the Enterprise Sales Forum club. Once you follow us, you will get alerted to new talks that are coming up on the app. I do realize that not every one has access, but if you have an iOS device, I would be happy to provide an invite. And for Android users, good news is that Android is coming in May.
Thanks as always for being a loyal and supportive community. Chat soon!
The Enterprise Sales Forum is a professional community championing the practice of sales through monthly sales talks at chapters globally. Our chapters provide an open, collaborative and diverse environment to share new ideas, network and learn actionable insights for professional sales development.