#136 - The Don't Get Ghosted Playbook

Foreign. Everybody. And welcome to this scary episode of 30 Minutes, the President's Club. My name is Armand Farouk and I'm here with my co host, Nick Sigelski. And today we, we got something really scary, guys. Our guest has disappeared today. Our guest has disappeared. And look at this. Nick and I have been ghosted today. And so, Nick, we don't even have anything to talk about. So what are we going to talk about today?

Well, Armand, we've got some scary tricks that listeners could use to prevent themselves from getting ghosted. So if you are getting ghosted and, and if you want to learn how to prevent yourself from getting ghosted, or if you want to learn how to re engage a deal where you've been ghosted, you may enjoy this mini playbook episode.

All right, folks, so because Nick has suddenly turned into a goat, I will now explain to you what we are going to discuss. So this is going to be comprised of two different areas of being ghosted. The first thing is, honestly, folks, I hate to say it to you, but the stuff about sending fancy emails and videos and all this stuff, it's nice we're going to talk about that, but we're going to talk about it at the end. And the reason for this is 90% of the battle of not getting ghosted is preventing yourself from getting ghosted. So we'll spend the first half of the interview talking about how to prevent yourself from getting ghosted. And then we'll spend the second half of the interview talking about, okay, let's say you do get ghosted. What do you do in that scenario? Okay, so let's start with section one. Why do you get ghosted and how do you prevent that from happening in the first place?

Okay, so Armand, you're ripping the phones, you're making some dials. Somebody answers, they don't hang up on you immediately, and they're slightly interested in the thing that you are doing. One of the areas that a lot of salespeople screw things up is they don't secure the tent on getting that meeting actually booked. So what are the quick bullets we've got to make sure we nail so that that first meeting set from prospecting doesn't end up ghosting you. Exactly.

So the first place you can get ghosted is a no show off of a prospecting meeting. So once someone says, yes, I am interested. Interested in your thing. There are a couple places that people screw things up. The first is they leave that call without time on the books. And so whenever you get someone who's Interested in your thing? I always like to suggest a range of times. It might sound like, nick, I know you're a super busy guy. Let's find 15 minutes, yada yada yada. Are you more of like a Tuesday afternoon or Thursday morning kind of guy? Right. And I explicitly like to have ranges and times of day as opposed to are you free at Tuesday at 2pm which they are probably not free at. Okay. From there, if they book the meeting, what you need to do is you need to confirm their email so you make sure that that actually goes through to a proper invite and explicitly ask them to accept the invite once they get it on their side. So ask for the confirmation. Now let's say they say, armin, I'm super, super busy. Could you just send me some times? This is the other place where people get prospects ghosting them all the time is they follow up with three times over email. And then that prospect is now in the witness protection program. They are nowhere to be seen anywhere. And so if you ever get someone who says send me some times, what you should probably be doing is you should send a dart or throw a dart at the calendar. And what that sounds like is totally Nick, yeah, I'll send you some times after this. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to throw a placeholder for Thursday afternoon just so it's the there. And in parallel, I'm going to send you an email with two or three times that also work. If that invite doesn't work, would you mind just declining it and picking another time? That works. Just so we have something in place, I promise you that will lift your show rates by at least 10%. Okay, so we've set a meeting and now hopefully someone has shown up. Nick, we're starting our discovery call and this is the second place that you tend to get ghosted is it's right at the upfront part of the meeting. What happens?

Yes, so the root cause of somebody ghosting you once you're sort of in deal cycle is they want to opt out of the getting sold to process, but they don't feel comfortable opting out to you. And one of the reasons that somebody would want to opt out of your sales process is you're not really running your calls with a clear set agenda, AKA the prospect doesn't feel like the way that the interactions go with you are a good use of their time. One of the ways that you can combat that is by setting a very clear and succinct upfront contract or agenda at the beginning of every single meeting. This does not need to be long belabored or extremely formal, but you do need to confirm a couple things. One, hey, I've got us down on the calendar until 10 o' clock this morning. I want to make sure that that still works for you. All you're doing is you're calling out, hey, I'm going to respect your time. I'm not going to be the person that consistently goes over and makes you late for your other obligations. That's a good way for the prospect to say, I don't really want to meet with this person anymore. The other thing that you need to be doing here is making sure that you confirm the content for said meeting. So you might say something like, hey, given that this is our first meeting, I had a couple questions about you and the way that you all do things. I also imagine you've got some questions for me and I'm prepared to give you a sense of how we typically help fintech companies based in the Midwest. By the way, is there anything else that you really want to make sure that we cover in today's session? A big reason that somebody might ghost you is if they feel like they're not getting anything out of the calls with you. And so you must, you must give the prospect an opportunity to voice what they want to get out of the call.

One key thing to note here is, folks, whenever someone spends more time with you, 99% of their job is not buying software. And so every time you jump on a call with a prospect, they are taking time away from their job and to look at your product, right? And if all you did was interrogate them throughout the entire discovery call without even explaining to them that when they click the request a demo button that they in fact might not get a demo on the first call, they're going to think twice before jumping on this call because they have to jump on four calls with you just to get what they want. So the other thing is as you ask questions now that you've set the expectation for discovery, we talk about this a lot. But do not interrogate your prospect. Just because you are not showing software does not mean that you don't give them anything. Okay? And so as you get to a pain point, make sure you recap the pain point, tell a story of how you have solved that pain point for another customer, and give them a sense of when we go through the demo. Here are two or three things of how we might be able to help you. And so as you discover Pain, tell stories and do mini pitches, and then you do one grand pitch at the end of it all. So they feel like they have a very clear sense that you can solve their problems. Now, Nick, let's say I observe a couple things that lead me to believe that I might not be able to solve all your problems, or I sense some hesitations on the call. This is another place that reps tend to get ghosted is as the prospect starts to ask questions or show hesitations, we don't respond to them the right way. So what do we do in this scenario?

Right. The golden rule of sales is if you sense it, say it. If you feel like there is a hesitation coming from the prospect, it's your responsibility to call it out and you can do it in a respectful way. Words that you might use are it sounds like, or I'm getting the sense that. Or it feels like. And if you think about it, common areas that prospects are going to have resistance or hesitation about your deal might be stuff like implementation timeline and process. You might not be able to solve certain elements of what they're looking for. Maybe they have three things they need solved and you only help with two of them. And you get a feeling that that one you can't help with. You see a look on their face or they make a And so you can just say something simple like, it sounds like that might be a concern for you. It sounds like you might have some reservations around our implementation timeline. What you're doing is what our good friend Charles Mulbauer calls looking for trouble. When you sense there is trouble or hesitation, call it out. This is actually some of the most effective discovery because you're giving them a chance to voice their reservations. Also, not just the great rah rah about the solution.

The other thing is, let's say that you're observing some hesitations. That's great. If it's very, very obvious, then you can use the labeling language like, sounds like X, right? But another thing is to recognize is that a lot of times prospects won't be very, very clear when they have hesitations, they will show it through the way that they ask questions. And they might ask questions like, so how much does this cost? Or it looks like this is a lot of software. How long does it take to implement? Right? Or it's like, hey, do you have integrations? Or are you able to deal with SoC2? Or things like that. And oftentimes a level one seller will just answer those questions and they say, oh, we have a great implementation process. Oh, we do all these integrations. But if you're smart, you should be listening to the questions that your prospects are asking and you should be asking the questions behind the question. So if someone is asking a lot about price. Right. You might ask something in return as totally. Once we get a sense of exactly what you need, I'll typically go through price at the end of this call. But I'm curious, is that the main factor? It sounds like that's really important to you. Are there budgeting constraints or are you working with a certain amount of budget or. Or did you get the sense that pave was really expensive? I want to make sure that I'm addressing all of your concerns as we draft a proposal. And you will again be looking for trouble as they ask those questions.

Armand, one thing related to that, so another reason why you sometimes get ghosted, you actually mentioned your prospect's full time job is not buying software. And sometimes the complexity of navigating the buying process slows them down tremendously and makes them deprioritize your process or your project. Rather, I want to comb in on the one piece you said about like SOC 2 compliance. If I think about it, let's say you're talking to a director of finance and they know that like security is a thing and that SOC 2 compliance is a thing for their org. And so they ask you that question where it's like, hey, are you guys SOC 2 compliant? You should be thinking about the question behind the question. What's driving that? And so what you might say is, well, yes, we are. It sounds like you might have some concerns or questions about security. Typically when people have questions about security, we would set up a conversation between our head of security and your head of IT so we can make sure that we check all of the boxes related to it. I guess maybe we can spend the last couple minutes of this conversation, provided you like what you hear in the rest of the call talking about setting something like that up. Because what you're doing is one, you're calling out, hey, you said this thing and I'm willing to go deeper on it. I'm not just trying to give you the oh yeah, we handle that and move on side of the conversation. I'm taking your asks seriously. But then two, I'm showing you I know how to teach you how to buy software. I will take ownership and responsibility for navigating the sales and buying process. You don't have to go figure it out on your own. Because a director of finance who's never bought software before doesn't want to have to figure out how to buy software. It's your job as a seller.

And so, Nick, let's say that we've done all of the right things in our agenda. We've set the expectation for discovery, and then we've done some great discovery. We found some problems along the way as they raised questions or concerned. We asked the questions behind the questions. We've done almost everything we need to do to prevent ourselves from getting ghosted. And now we get to the point where we need to set next steps. And this enters what is called the five minute drill. Okay, so once you get to the end of the discovery call, again, we have all the mini pitches. Roll those into a grand pitch where you say, these are the ABC things that you told me are problems. Here are the XYZ ways that we could solve those problems. Are you aligned with that? And so the first question in the five minute drill before you set next steps is based on that, we would typically do a deep dive. And if that goes well, we would get in front of your chief people officer or your CEO. But I'm curious, based on the problems that we think we can solve, does it make sense to set that next step or if it were free, would you buy this thing? You have to first ask them, do you want to buy this at all? And this is probably the single most common place that I see sellers get ghosted is they get to the end of discovery. They say, great, this has been an awesome conversation. Why don't we do a 60 minute deep dive next week? And the prospect is like, awesome. I find finally get to see the demo. Sure, great. I'll set up a demo. I'll set up a million calls with you. And the reason for that is I want to see the software. Why wouldn't I want to see the cool little toys in the toy store? Right. But what you need to do is you need to explicitly get them to agree. If we take a demo, it is because I believe that the problems that you've identified are in fact worth solving. Then and only then are you allowed to set a next step. But it's not just about setting the next step as a deep dive, Nick. It's about setting multiple steps and being aligned on a buying process. And so what, in addition to setting a next step, do I need to do to prevent myself from getting ghosted?

Well, you alluded to it. You are foreshadowing multiple steps ahead. So you're saying, all right, typically what we would do is we would set up A deep dive on the software. And then what you're saying is that call usually has one of two outcomes. So I'll say, like Armand, typically we would set up a 60 minute deep dive to show you the three different ways we address the problem that you called out in today's meeting. Those meetings typically end up going one of two ways. You might actually see the software and say, hey, this thing isn't a fit for me. And if that's the case, no problem, you'll never hurt my feelings. I'm not the guy who built the software, I'm the guy that shows it and usually sells it. The other outcome might be that you say, hey, this looks relatively interesting and there might be something here if that's the case, Usually what happens next is your chief people officer would come in to see a 15 minute high level overview, or we would go through a security review, or we would take some of your reports and make sure that we can create them in our system. Whatever your next step after that next step is, you're foreshadowing multiple steps ahead. And the reason for this is, Arman, you talked about there are tire kickers out there and it's not a good use of your time or really the prospect's time just to show software. For the sake of showing software, you should have alignment with the buyer on, hey, these problems are worth solving. And this is typically the path that we go down to evaluate this thing. Because again, the root cause of you getting ghosted is buyer wants to opt out, but they don't feel comfortable opting out with you. We've got a couple other quick hits, stuff like using mutual action plans or joint execution plans. Do you want to talk about that piece, Armand?

Yeah. The key thing, folks that Nick has already described is in the spirit of Halloween, what you need to do is you need to shine a flashlight bright enough down the spooky road so that a prospect knows where the road is going. And then you need to agree together to walk down that road. And that road is longer than five feet. And if you don't want to walk down that road with me, the moment I asked for power, two meetings down the road, I don't want you to ghost me then I'd rather just have you decline that access to power. Now, when I present to you a joint execution plan or set next next steps, for instance, right, the last piece on this is, folks, there's a concept here of a lot of what we've discussed is with one single individual trying to get the ghosting out while you are in front of them, trying to get them to tell you they don't want to buy this thing or they don't want to embark in a buying process while you are in front of them. The other common way that people get ghosted is, look, the reality is even if you do all that stuff right, one person might ghost you, but it's really hard for three or four people to all ghost you. And so the last recommendation that we have for not getting ghosted is being multi threaded. So Nick, during your sales cycle, what are a couple different ways that you should be ensuring that you get multi threaded so that you have multiple lines to not be ghosted?

Well, trick or treating alone is really, really sad and a little depressing. And trying to sell to a big organization with just one person is very similar. So, couple things. One, we've got the idea of the no exec ask. So I meet with Armand. He's my director level buyer. We have a decent first conversation, maybe we have a good demo at that point. I know I need to engage power at the organization, but maybe we're not at the place where I'm talking to Armand's chief people officer. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go to my CEO or our chief people officer and I'm going to give them a ghost written message, not to be confused with a ghosting message, but I'm going to say, hey, this is an important deal that I'm working. Can you send a note to this person over here just to open lines of communication? And the key with this no exec ask is your exec is sending an email to their exec but not asking for anything. It's as simple as saying, hey, I heard from my team that we've had a couple great conversations with your team. I'm just here if you need anything. I'm the exec sponsor on our end. Feel free to get in touch if you need anything. There's no hard ask. And what ends up happening is now you've connected your power with their power and you've had your org say, hey, this has an exec sponsor on our end and folks will respond in kind. If they respond and they say, I have no idea what this is even about. Okay, fine. Now you have a data point that tells you about the health of your deal, but more often than not that opens up a line of communication with the person. Okay? So the only other thing I want to add here is these tips that we just shared are not just Self serving things to help just you not get ghosted. Actually, everything that we recommended here is good for your buyer. You're looking for trouble, you're giving them clarity into the sales process. You're letting them voice what they want to get out of every single call. You're setting a clear agenda. These are all good, healthy sales best practices. So don't sit here and think, well, yeah, this is helpful for me to not get ghosted, but how are the prospects going to respond? This is actually good for your prospect. Now, let's say maybe we forgot to do some of these things or we're sitting in a situation where I can't find my prospect. They're not responding to me. What do we do when we get ghosted? Armand?

So let's talk first about the channels you can use and then we'll talk about the messaging within those channels. So first, there are a couple of places you need to hit a prospect from. You should not just be following up on email over and over and over again. You should be calling them. Okay. The easiest way to get to a note is just to hear it live.

Okay.

Obviously you can email them too. I would also be sending them notes on LinkedIn and if it really gets ghosty, you can send them something as well, like a donut, for example, whatever you want to send them. But my personal favorite channel here, and this goes back to preventing yourself from being ghosted, is as you multi threaded in that deal, as you got your champion on board and you were getting ready for that big exec demo, that was the perfect time to ask for their cell phone number so you could text them. And so I would strongly recommend, if you've gotten the digits, get on a text basis and use the text message channel. Okay, so Those are the three or four ways that you can target someone through LinkedIn, call, text, et cetera. Nick, how do we think about the different people that we can call or the different voices we can use to wake someone up?

Yep. So obviously you've got a champion that you're trying to get in touch with, but if you're listening to this part of the playbook, that person's not responding to you. A couple things you can do. One, if there are other people that you have met in the sales process, even very, very briefly, even if it was a quick IT and security review call that took 20 minutes, go through those people, either contact them directly or put multiple people on a thread. Hey folks, I've been trying to get back in touch around the initiative regarding problem they Were looking to solve inserted here. Is this still something y' all are focused on? I certainly don't want to be a pest with my follow up. I use that phrase frequently. I certainly do not wish to be a pest with my follow up if this isn't a priority anymore. So you want to try to engage anyone that you've even touched in the sales process. One other thing that I'll do is I think a lot of sellers will just try to go directly through their champion to call their champion. If I'm getting ghosted, one thing I will do is I will call the main line and ask to be connected to Armand because now another person at that org, the receptionist or the operator, is aware that I'm trying to get in touch with Armand. And if you think about your prospect's perspective, they don't want to be known as the person that just totally blows off well meaning and professional vendors, which hopefully you are. So try to get multiple people engaged. Now talk to me, Armand, about sort of the tone of the message that we're either sending or saying to our prospect.

Exactly. Well, you want to emulate the tone of a scared llama, similar to what Nick did you at the beginning of this episode. And so, guys, the way to not do this is to be like you said, that there was this much value in our solution and we should set a next step. And I truly believe that there is XYZ value in this partnership with your company. It should be extremely pitch light. Okay. Josh Braun calls this commission breath. You should be smelling wonderfully minty because you've had Listerine that has purged all of your commission breath. And what you should be doing is pushing away and putting it on yourself. So common ways you can do that is you can say things like, hey, did I mess something up? Or hey, when we last spoke, it sounded like XYZ were really important to you. Sometimes when this happens, this means that this just isn't that important to you anymore. Would you mind letting me know just so I don't keep bugging you? I would hate to be a pest here. Right. Another thing that John Barrows uses very famously is he'll just send an email after one or two touches and it will be subject line, did I lose you? And it will just be a reply to all the previous emails that he said with no message in the body. The key thing here, folks, is you're not trying to get them to say yes. I believe that your tool is so valuable and I finally want to buy what you're Trying to do is you are trying to seek out the truth.

You can actually say that. One thing that Charles Mobauer taught me is he says, you say, hey, I'm meeting with my boss next week and I know they're going to ask me for a status update on this. I guess I would always rather be accurate over optimistic. Do you mind sharing a status update that I can tell my boss? The key here is throughout the entire sales process, you signal that you're looking for the truth. You're not looking for optimism, you're not happy ears. And at a certain point, just like I had to do with Halloween candy when I started to get heavier and heavier and heavier, you got to throw in the towel and give up. So at what point, Armand, should I be just giving up on my ghost?

So folks, the whole purpose of this episode, believe it or not, is the end of this episode should lead you to more closed lost deals. But the key thing is you were going to get those deals closed lost anyways. And you should take pride in closed losting deals. Okay? And so to me, if you've done all these things, what that means is you've run a great sales cycle. And if someone's not responding for 30 days after a couple touches, that usually means that I'm going to close this thing out. No bilateral communication within 30 days. Close it out. Okay. From there you should probably transition them to a warming drip, which is once a month you send some value add content, whether that's an ebook or a PDF or some industry article or what have you, that is explicitly not selling. Just let them know that you're thinking of them and you hope all is well and explicitly spend at least 90 days not trying to sell the heck out of that person. And then later on try to find something you learned in your discovery as your point to re engage them. That might be a product launch, that might mean a batch of new hires, that might mean a quarter is ending. Whatever it is, try to find a reasonable trigger 90 days out that you can use to re engage engage with that person. But Nick, that's just talking about this person again. What should we be doing with the other people on the account?

Well, the best part about actually giving up on said prospect is you can now reallocate all of that freed up effort into new prospecting. And so if this is a massive enterprise account, AKA Honeywell. Okay, well, Honeywell didn't say no. That one individual said no. So if you feel like there's still a fit, go prospect other people at Honeywell. If you're at a smaller org that you were selling to, Instead of sending 37 follow up emails on a weekly basis, accept that the deal's gone and go make 37 other cold calls to new prospects. The big issue is a lot of salespeople. They get their hooks in the deal and they so don't want to give it up because they don't want to mark something closed, lost, or have their pipeline look smaller or they want to delude themselves into thinking, oh, I've got so many deals working, look, if the deal isn't hot and it's not moving, it's probably not a deal, so go prospect other people. The other thing that I might note, Armand, is that person that ghosted you. I don't frequently hit the little bell icon on LinkedIn to get notified of every prospect's post because that would get overwhelming. But for those people who had interest in the past, you might want to follow them in the company on LinkedIn to see if there are pertinent triggers to reach out again in the future.

Alrighty, folks, so you've got everything you need to prevent yourself from getting ghosted. And you have some core tactics that when someone gets ghosted, you got multiple channels you can attack. You know, the messaging that shouldn't be pitch heavy and you also know when to give it up. But there are a couple of tactics that we'll call danger zone tactics. In other words, tactics that might work, but they might get you burnt. So, Nick, what are a couple danger zone tactics that we can use to wake prospects up that we should tread quite carefully with?

So the first is the cold invite, the cold calendar invite. The person hasn't responded. You've emailed them, you've called, you've linked in. At this point you send Armand a calendar invite for next week and you say, armand, I know we had planned to reconnect towards the end of the month on your initiative regarding X. In the event that this time works for you, I'm free. Let me know if you're able to make it and if you can't, let me know some other times. What I'm doing here is I'm sending at this point sort of an unsolicited calendar invite, but it's almost a different channel of communication. This will get their attention at the very least. The other thing you could do is go over their head. So let's say you're talking to a director and you had mentioned at a certain point we got to talk to your chief people officer, what you can do is actually put together a summary of the things that you learned in discovery with this lower level person and say to the chief people officer, hey, Armand, here's six things that I learned talking to your organization. It sounds like there's some priorities related to this thing. I've had some great conversations with Sean. He's been really, really awesome. Compliment your champion who's now ghosting you so that when it gets back to them, hey, this guy sent me an email. You've said nice things, but it's okay. If you've identified that there was pain and you could solve said pain and there's a person at the top that should be involved at some point, go to them. Because the current state for you is you're not making any progress on the deal. And if they get mad at you and disappear, well, you're still not making any progress on the deal. But at least you give yourself more than a 0% chance of having a deal when you take that risk there.

Okay, folks, and the final piece is you're actually able to use this danger zone tactic right now. And this last danger zone tactic is trick or treating, because trick or treating typically involves door knocking. And so if you happen to live in an area where there are still people in offices or if you're in a densely populated area, specifically areas like SF or New York, I have had people drop by an office. And the key thing is you don't want to just drop in and be like, hey, let me talk to this person. You oftentimes want to drop in with a gift or a nice note, et cetera, because it can be really, really intrusive if you just show up. Right? And so I've literally had reps every week drop a donut at the front desk or drop a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts at the front desk, just as a funny thing with a little note to say, hey, still thinking about. You hope that there's a way for us to partner, but if not, that's totally fine. I hope you enjoy this delicious donut. All right, cheers. And so find low friction ways to keep in touch with people that are oftentimes less about pitching and more about giving goodwill and giving them the space to come back and tell you no if it's a real no. All righty, folks. So to recap, we've talked about all the different ways that you can prevent yourself from getting ghosted. That starts with securing the tent on meetings. Then it goes into setting an agenda on your calls during discovery, listening and looking for trouble. And then at the end, before you set a next step, making sure that your next steps are backed by the fact that they want to buy your thing. Okay, from there, when you get ghosted, we talked about a couple different channels that you can be using to re engage someone. And so examples include you should be texting using LinkedIn, you should be calling other prospects in the deal, and you should be changing the voice and having one of your execs send a note. And then the last piece is the messaging is you want to make sure that the messaging is very pitch light. And so you should use messaging like did I mess something up or did I lose you? And the last piece is, guys, don't chase these bad deals forever. The key thing here is you should be doing things to engage and proactively seek out the ghosting. And then from there what you should do is you should drop the deal or go prospect other people. Alrighty, Nick, that's Halloween. How can people help us out here?

Well, folks, do not ghost 30 minutes to President's Club. If you have not yet subscribed or followed 30 minutes to presidents Club, you might want to do that so that we show up at your front door every single week. Just like the box of donuts that Armand is sending all his ghosted prospects. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week on the show.

Sa.