Ghosts Exist!

I can face. Yo, yo, yo. I can. Hello and welcome. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach and money mindset coach and all the things. It's funny, when you start introducing yourself as something different, your brain wants to go back to the old thing. One of the things that I realized in my world is that I don't really do a whole lot of leadership coaching anymore. I used to keep that part of my practice going, and now I've just gotten so busy in my business building side that I've kind of let it go. Anyway, today I want to talk about a very spooky topic. Want to talk about ghosts? Not the Ghostbusters kind where you have to have Bill Murray and his team come in and, like, you know, take care of them. Want to talk about ghosts in sales? And just to do some housekeeping, I am going live to the Facebooks, to LinkedIn, to YouTube, and to Twitter. So if you have any questions, please do comment. Just be aware that sometimes I don't see all the comments. Sometimes the technology just fails us. I'm not mad at you, I swear to God. It's just the technology. Unless you say something rude, and then I might be mad at you, but I'll probably yell at you for it. So. Hi, Valent. And I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. Welcome. And I have some water. I have been so dehydrated, so I don't know. Before we start, want to explain my water situation? So I have this amazing Berkey filter, and it's B E R K E Y K E Y. Yeah. And it's like this huge column, this metal thing that stands next to my sink. It lasts forever, like the filters do. But the filters have started getting a little slow. And I have found myself accidentally, like, rationing my own water because it's taking a while to filter through. And I finally realized this last week. I've just been so dehydrated. So I finally ordered more filters. But I'm very thirsty today for some reason. Anyway, so today I want to talk about ghosts. And if you're not familiar with this term. So when you do a sales call with someone, when someone inquires about your work and you have a whole call and you talk about it and talk about pricing, or you talk about your thing and then you never hear from them again, that is a ghost, my friend. You have been ghosted. This happens in dating as well. So if you're dating someone or you've gone on a few Dates, and then you text them and you never hear back. That's also a version of ghosting. It's not very nice. It's not us being our best version of ourselves, but let's be real. More of us do it than. Than we care to admit. And let's talk about what causes ghosting. All right, so there. There are three kinds of ghosts that happen in business. And I won't get into the romantic side of this. We can have a separate conversation on that later. So the first kind is the I will get back to you kind. Okay. They want to buy some time to like, quote, unquote, think about it, but what they're really saying is no. Or they genuinely do have to think about it, and then they go away to think about it, and they think about it so hard that they forget about it. You know, that happens as well. There is the person who says, yes, I'm in. Sign, let me sign the contract. And then you never hear from them again. They were just saying yes to get you off their back, essentially. Or they meant it and you didn't have any accountability in place for them to actually do it. Okay, There is a third kind, which is the send me the proposal kind, which is where you have the sales call, you send them a proposal, and then you never hear from them again. And I have some good news and some bad news for you. And it's the same news that most of the time it is your fault if you got ghosted. And I used to be in sales, and I know old sales me would have been like, no, no, ghosting happens because they're jerks. They're the worst human beings and. And they suck. And they owed me an answer, and they didn't give me an answer. And calm down, former Katie, I see you. I understand you. A salesperson who doesn't know how to prevent ghosting is really just someone who's being a massive weenie. It's someone who is not standing in their power in that first sales call, who is not being courageous and really asking more questions. And usually it's someone who is self conscious or worried that what they have to offer is not good enough. So usually how I find out that someone's getting ghosted is they come to me and they have a question about how to follow up with prospects that have booked calls and they never heard from again. And we dig in, and it's typically that their sales call wasn't that good. Because here's the thing about follow up. Follow up is designed in that sales call you design with your client in that first call how you're going to touch base with them. You, you even. I go so far in holistic training. My earned holistic selling my training course on how to sell. To insist that you do not get off the phone until you have another appointment scheduled for a yes, no. And if you're curious on how to do that, then DM me and I'll send you the link to sign up. But here's the thing about, about following up with people is it usually doesn't work. Usually just doesn't work. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but usually like if someone's excited and they're going to be your client, they're going to become your client. You have to be courageous though and hold them accountable to give you an answer either way. Now let's just take a moment and talk about the black hole that people seem to disappear into and what you can do about that. If it's already happened, people have booked sales calls with you and you want to follow up and you want to follow up, here's what you can do to re engage them. Tim's that is the way. Yes, thank you. So way you can re engage people who've already disappeared on you is just keep showing up honestly in their inbox. Just keep showing up. You showing up is not going to be annoying. If you send a newsletter once or twice a month, that's not going to be annoying. If you're giving them value, if you invite them to a pop up training or a webinar, that's a way for you to show up and say, hey, listen, like I'm here in your world and I wanna, I wanna support you in some way. It'll also remind you and I'm just gonna give my dog a treat because we just reward bad behavior here. It's just your way of saying, hey, listen, you had a problem once and you might still have this problem. And if you do, I'm having this webinar about it and it's a way for you to get them re engaged. Following up has to be designed in that call. And here's why, here's why your client came into your business. They asked for your time, they demanded information on your services or your product. They then, you know, needed some time to think about it and that's okay. We're not into pressuring people into buying our stuff on our timeline. That's just not polite or useful to anyone. They do owe you an answer, however. They're busy human Beings, they are busy human beings. They have a life, they have a job. They may have a family. They could have a demanding sheepadoodle who, you know, drives them up the wall crazy. You are not their. Their end all. Be all top priority right now. Maybe in that moment that you're on the call with them that you are, but after the fact, they're going to forget about it Anyway, sorry, I'm getting text messages from everyone. I'm having a white elephant party tonight. And don't plan parties on. On weeknights where you have a lot of things going on. It's just a little stressful over here. But anyway, you're not their top priority. So the fact that you follow up and they're not responding, it doesn't mean that they don't care. It doesn't mean that they weren't interested in this, and it doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It's very rare that someone will ghost you because you did something wrong. There was an instance where someone was pursuing me as a client for financial advising. I won't. I won't name any names. Pursuing me as a. As a client for financial advising. He keeps following up with me, but one of the things that he did that, like, really offended me was he booked me to speak for his group, a group that he ran out of the town. The city that he's based in booked me to speak virtually. And the day came and I, like, had prepared a whole talk and a whole workshop for his group and go to, like, in the morning to, like, see what the zoom link would be. And he had canceled the event and never told me about it. I doubt you're doing this to people that you're booking calls with. I doubt that you're doing this to prospective clients. You're not doing anything to offend them. They genuinely just. You're off their radar. There's another scenario where I booked a call with someone to find out about, like, you know, Facebook ads or something, and she put together this whole proposal and sent it to me. And for the life of me, like, the. I don't remember her name and I don't remember, like, the title of the thing. And she's never followed up with me, so I wanted to work with her at one point in my business. And I just, like, she sent me this thing and it was so bland, blandly named that I just couldn't remember it. So the reason I'm sharing these things is one, you're going to get all flipped out in your own head thinking, oh, God, I did something wrong. Oh God, I, like, messed something up. If you feel like you messed something up and offended someone, then please just go and make it right. That's a perfect reason to follow up. Hey, like, just want to make sure I didn't offend you in some way in our call. I haven't heard back from you. That is a perfectly acceptable way to follow up. Most of the time they'll be like, I think you're nuts. No, of course not. Like, I've just been busy. In the latter case, don't get self conscious about following up with people. If you've sent them a proposal and they were expecting it, it's within your right to follow up and say, hey, did you see my proposal? You spent time writing that proposal. You deserve an answer. And sometimes it just gets lost in their inbox. One of the things that I train in my holistic selling course is how you schedule out this follow up in a way that feels collaborative, like they're looking forward to this too. And the key here, the key to planning this follow up is actually counter to what you've probably heard in other sales trainings. It's that you have to empower the no. You have to empower them to show up and tell you no. You have to make the no completely okay. You have to ensure that they are in the space that they feel safe to say, hey, listen, this isn't the right choice for me right now. Because ultimately, when you're ghosted in romance, in business, anywhere, it's because they're being a weenie about being honest with you. That's it. Most of the time when you're being ghosted, it's because they're being a weenie, to be honest with you. But how this becomes your fault is that you didn't create a safe space. You didn't make sure that they know that that's okay, it's okay to be a no. Or they just forgot that you existed. And that happens too. Neither one feels good. If you struggle with getting ghosted in your business and you don't want that anym, DM me, I have a couple different programs and trainings like on. On a very broad spectrum of investment that's super affordable or super expensive that'll help you through this. But just want to pause with this one little message right now is that ghosts happen. Hopefully they don't. They're not happening in your home. They're not the spooky kind. Hopefully they're just in your business. And the fact that you have ghosts is 100% in your control. Okay? You, when you're the one causing the problem, you are both. You are both the problem and the solution. And you've got that. And oh my God, these text messages. I love all my friends and I really want them here. And also, I can't handle them right now. Anyway, Blend and Sims, thank you for joining. I hope this is useful. I'm going to be on with my day. I will have a guest tomorrow. I'm so, so excited to be working or doing a live with Jackie Wisbeak from Eyes to Analyze. She is a phenomenal OBM and I'm really excited to have her. Anyway, thank you for joining. This is day seven or day eight of me going live every day in December. I hope you have an amazing Thursday and I will see you live tomorrow. Bye.