Dylan Vergara explains why follow-ups kill deals: psychological reactance, a 1966 theory where prospects feel their freedom threatened and pull away. Business owners especially resist when they sense a salesperson trying to control them, even if they were interested.
Honestly, most sales content that I see today, I just keep scrolling because I've been in sales for a while and I feel like I've kind of seen a lot of it. But recently I learned something new I want to share with you. If you've ever had a deal that was like right there ready to close, you're basically going to log it in the CRM, but it's waiting on just one or two things. You follow up like 2 days later and you get ghosted or they don't respond to you or they're like so much less interested. Let's assume this isn't fake interest in the beginning. Genuinely, they are interested. You send a super nonthreatening follow-up like, hey James, how's everything going? How can I help? And you hear nothing back and you're like, what? Is happening? Well, that's psychological reactance, especially when you're selling to business owners, A-types, people that are used to making decisions. They will intentionally push away even if they want your product when they feel like there is oversight over their decision-making process. This is the same logic that goes into when you were a kid and you're in the forest and you see a sign that says like, danger, keep out. You kind of want to go in there. When you feel restriction over your decision-making process, when you feel like you're boxed in, it becomes less about the deal and more about your exertion of free will and your freedom of decision-making. And you might be thinking like, well, how am How am I supposed to follow up then? That is the most standard part of the job. Like, how— am I doomed? No, not entirely. There's a certain way you should go about doing it. I just put up like an 8-minute YouTube video on this explaining it a lot more in detail with some stats and how you can get around this. DM me the word reactance and I'll shoot you the link.
