Stop Being Ghosted After Client Sales Calls

Hey friends and fans, Ryan Dorn here. Welcome to the Mr. Revenue Show this week. I sure hope you're enjoying our new format. If you are, give us a thumbs up, give us a subscribe, and down below give us some comments as well. All right, here comes your sales quick tip of the week. I would say, friends, probably the first or second most common question that I'm asked is, hey Ryan, I'm getting ghosted all the time, what do I do? So there's a lot of things that can cause ghosting, and in case you don't know what I mean, It's when you have a great call with a customer and then all of a sudden they just go dark, okay? It happens to all of us. It doesn't happen to me as much when I do 2 or 3 things. The first thing is, do I have some type of qualifying mechanism in place? Like, how do I qualify the people that I'm gonna meet with, or do you just meet with everybody? If you just meet with everybody, that's just kind of called spaghetti strategy. Just meet with everybody and hoping that something sticks. So you might need a little pre-qualifying process. Like in my business, I don't usually set up meetings with people when I don't think they have the budget. Very rarely do I meet with them and all of a sudden they discover some kind of budget. So I'm always looking for people that have already done marketing with either other competitors or in the landscape. But that's just me. You need some type of pre-qualifying process. All right. The second reason for ghosting is pretty obvious. You're not meeting with the correct decision maker. You might be meeting with a liaison. Now, I think it's a foolish statement to say always meet with the decision maker. Okay, that's great if it actually occurred. But marketing directors and CIOs and CTOs and people like that, they might not be the decision maker, but they're very, very influential in the process. So do you want to meet with the decision maker? Duh, of course. But these other people have jobs for a reason, because if the CEO or the decision maker was to take every meeting with every single person, they'd never get anything done. So what I like to do is equip the liaison to the fullest. So at the end of the conversation, or once I find out they're not the ultimate decision maker, I wanna equip you to the fullest so that you can carry my water for me. Now, it's easy to say, well, hey, I'd like to meet with the decision maker. Will you take me to that meeting? I mean, sometimes it happens, but friends, I would say overall it doesn't happen very often. Okay? Now, the third thing, and this is something I'd love for you to wrap your arms around and really, friends, kind of own. If you want to avoid being ghosted, you need to control the follow-up. You have to set the follow-up meeting. You need to set the time. You need to create the invite. Don't ever put the illness of follow-up or the responsibility of follow-up on your client, because if it's up to them, they're probably not going to call you back in a timely manner. So what do I do? I'm going to put it on their calendar while I have them on the phone call. So I'll say, Sally, Bob, great to chat today. You said you need to think about it. Let me make sure you have the right materials. What do you need from me? All right, so you said next Tuesday at 3 o'clock. Let me put that 5-minute phone call on your calendar. I'm gonna put it in my phone. Did you get it? Did you accept it? And I go through that process with them. But then one final thing, it's not really a part of my core training or preaching, if you will, is a lot of times we get ghosted friends because quite honestly, we're nice. We're just really nice people. At least I'm a nice person. I hope you're a nice person as well. So sometimes we do have to give people permission to say no. Now, oh, I hate that because most sales trainers would say never give someone a chance to say no. Okay, good luck with that. What I'd like to do though is just give people permission. Hey, if this is not the right opportunity for you, if we're not the right vendor for you, or whatever the circumstances, it's okay to tell me no because you might be like me. I want to get a yes, but I'd rather get a no and move on than not hear from somebody ever again. So friends, when you think about being ghosted, a lot of the times it falls on you and it's your responsibility as well. All right, here comes your prospecting quick tip of the week. One of the things that a lot of times we don't prepare for is what device will our prospecting email be received on. So as an example, most of the time people aren't like you and I that are just sitting at their computer all day and we're just writing emails and waiting for emails to come in. Depending on the business industry circumstance, people are on their phones a lot more than they sit on their computers. It just kind of depends upon the industry that you're serving. I would share with you that most people, not me, but most people, when an email comes in, their phone buzzes. So their natural inclination is, oh, what was that? And they often will see your email on their phone first. So you've got to be asking yourself, what does that email look like on a phone? So if you're beginning to do an email sequence, I'm a big fan of that. I've been doing a bunch of sequences inside my CRM and using Apollo AI and things like that. I want to look at the email that I'm writing and look at it on a phone. What does it look like on a phone? Do people have to scroll? Are the links working correctly? What does it look like on that phone device? Friends, in my opinion, I mean, sales is a glorious game of math. I mean, don't get me wrong, but in my opinion, you've really in today, 2026. You got to get a lot more strategic of what you're going to do to be successful during your prospecting process. So just think about that for a second. What will my prospecting email or my emails in general look like on someone's mobile device? All right. Next up, your sales tech tip of the month. Now, a lot of you know, I do a ton of classes on using ChatGPT and AI sales tools, and people are like, oh, ChatGPT, that's for the children to use. All right, that's not true. I just really believe that the OpenAI model is, is far superior for a lot of reasons. But rather than get into that, let's talk about another AI tool that I really love from Anthropic, and that is Claude.ai. Now, as I sit here today and report to you, I just think Claude is really slow compared to ChatGPT, but it also is designed to do different things as well. All right, so if I'm going to be doing reporting for my clients, I prefer to use Claude for that. So here's what I do. I simply take my various reports, okay, that I have. So let's just say that I have a banner ad report from marketing, and then I've got a sales lead conversion report from the sales team, and then I've got an audience report from all of our media partners. A lot of times what I'll do is I'll drag those 3 files over into the Claude app. Now what I do is I put the Claude app on my computer, and I do notice that that runs quite a bit faster, and I can just let it run in the background. Okay, now what I do is I take those 3 pieces of data. Let's just say one's a PDF, one's an Excel file, and one's a JPEG example of what I want it to look like. Set those into Claude and then let it work. Now what I can also do is use the connectors inside of Claude to connect Claude with my different tools. So I can connect it with reporting, I can connect it to my calendar, I can connect it to my Gmail. There's a lot of different things I can do with Claude that I'm not doing with ChatGPT. Now there are third-party apps for GPT, you can do that as well for chat. But when it comes to building reports, personally, I like Claude better for it. I just feel like it's a lot more visual and pulls a lot of the information in in a much more colorful way. But what you really need, whether it's Chat or Claude or Perplexity, whatever it is that you're using, you need examples. If you just let AI run crazy, it kind of gets a little wacky. So a lot of times I'll take an example of what I want the report to look like. I'll load that into Claude, give it my various data sources, tell it what I want it to do, and then I can set up a skill so it'll actually run every single month and it will work for me in the background. Friends, I just like Claude.ai as a part of my sales process and my technology stack for doing all kinds of reporting. All right, here comes your retention idea of the week, friends. What I'd love to do for just a brief second is I'd love to go old school with all of you and really think seriously about what can we do using the expensive but good old-fashioned United States Postal Service to our advantage. A couple things that you might think about. First, I love at least once a year to send a nice formal written letter. You could even do one, you might even type it out as an example, or something that's written out. I actually put it into a manila envelope. I might say personal and confidential. I sit down and I take a couple of minutes to actually write a letter, an actual letter to each one of my clients. You don't know the number of times that somebody has reached back out to me and said, Ryan, I can't tell you the last time anybody has sent me a letter. Now you might say, oh, What is this? You know, Little House on the Prairie? Are we gonna start writing letters with the quill and pen? Or, you know, what are we gonna do? Friends, I just want you to think about being different. What are some of your differentiating factors? I mean, sure, you could type them a letter. I actually received from a friend, they had gone to an auction and bought an old typewriter, like a clickety-click typewriter, and wrote a bunch of letters on it and sent it to a lot of their customers. People loved it. They thought it was so unbelievably cool. You could see the errors, you know, and all kinds of stuff like that. Friends, I don't think there's anything wrong with old-school sales strategies. As a matter of fact, I'm getting kind of passionate about just thinking about it. There's a lot of old-school strategies that work extremely well. So friends, let's not discount what folks of the past used to do because they were relationship sellers like no other. And I think from a retention perspective, you could get creative in sending handwritten thank-you notes and letters to your clients. Friends, I think especially if you're a young seller, I think that your, especially your older clients would go dang, okay? All right, I really, really like it. Remember friends, from a retention perspective, customer service, that's something you should always do. Retention are the things you do beyond customer service to keep those customers around for a lifetime. All right friends, one of my favorite times of our show is when we answer your listener questions sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. Next question comes from Terrence Hey, Terence, I spent a lot of time in Chicago. Go Cubs, go Bears, you name it. Put your favorite team down below, Terence. All right, Ryan, my question is, I'm having trouble communicating and connecting with younger buyers. What are your thoughts? What should I do? I am 64 years old. I don't feel old, but maybe I am just old. So, Terence, a good question. So, I feel that same way every day. I'm not quite as old as you. Terence, it's important to remember there's 2 groups of people. There's young people and there's old people. If you don't know which group you're in, you're old. Okay? So, just wrap your arms around that. So, there's 3 things that you might consider. One, the first and most important is be authentically you. Now, I think you want to make sure you step up your style. I think you want to make sure that you don't wear things that intentionally make you look old. But I also don't think that you want to try so hard to be 40 years old that it looks like you're trying way too hard. Like when you see these guys that wear big graphic tees, and they're all pumped up, you know, and, you know, wearing jeans that are too tight, you know, and things like that. I think you want to be authentically you, that would be kind of the first thing. The second thing is you want to own technology, Terrence. There is nothing cooler than somebody that's a veteran seller that knows how to use AI, knows about marketing strategies, pays attention to things that are going on in the world. Now, I mean, you don't have to know the number of the tracks on Taylor Swift's new album that just came out or something like that. I think that's trying a little bit too hard. I mean, even if you know the tracks of it, I think that's trying a little bit too hard. But being authentically you, but then also knowing technology, Terrence, I think that really can set you apart. Then the third thing is, Terrence, lean into it. Lean into your knowledge. You've been doing this a long time. But here's the thing to remember. Don't mansplain. If you don't know what that is, look it up and make sure you're not talking down to people. Now, I tend to have a— not a huge problem, a little problem with that because of what I do, the nature of me training all the time. I tend to be a talker and like to like kind of mansplain a little bit. I've got to be really careful about that. Humble yourself, realize that everybody can learn something from everybody, and just make sure that you're not kind of talking down. But lean into your experience. Say things like, my experience in the business has taught me. Things like that seem to be pretty helpful to a lot of folks. The other thing is just keep up with keep up with the times. You know, just really pay attention to the things that are happening out there in the world. So, Terrence, I hope those ideas are helpful to you in your sales game. Keep your questions coming: Ryan at RyanDorn.com. If we don't answer your questions on the show, on the podcast, or I don't email you back, we didn't receive your question. So send it in to Ryan at RyanDohrn.com. Terrence, good luck out there. All right, last segment of the show this week is all about brain work, and I just love, as you know, I love psychology and how my brain actually works and love to help all of you. One of the things that I talk about when I'm on the road quite a bit is time blocking, but a lot of people actually fail at time blocking, and the reason they fail is they try to time block too much of their day. So just think about it, friends. It's very important for you to really understand what time blocks do. Time blocks are not always 60 minutes. That's so important for me to share. Time blocks are not always 60 minutes. So if you use the Pomodoro technique, which we've talked about on the show before, you would set a time block for prospecting as an example. You'd work on that prospecting list for say 25 minutes and then take a 5-minute break, and then maybe you move to a different time block. The reason people typically fail at time blocking is because what they do is they try to time block their entire day. Then when the boss calls, the kids call, the school calls, a report comes in, a client is angry, then it block— your time block gets all messed up. So, what I would encourage you to consider is this: Time block in a lot more smaller segments. And then those smaller segments then lead to more time blocks. And It's sort of like this. If you're thinking about going to the gym, okay, block that out and don't say I'm going every day this week because it's not going to happen, right? Typically. So say I'm going to do it 3 days this week. Then once you own 3 days, then move it on to 4. If you're going to prospect every day, you should, probably that's a lot. So you might say I'm going to prospect heavily, 25 minutes at a time, Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 10 and 3. And create a schedule that actually is achievable. A lot of times when people are creating schedules, friends, they're just not achievable. And so because of that, it can get to be a little bit weird. And then all of a sudden you fail. And then once you fail, you're like, oh, I'm a failure. I can't do it. So friends, to get your brain to work in order, you need to make sure that you create wins for yourself, create smaller time blocks, own them. Once you own them, then begin to duplicate them and take it all from there. Friends, I would say to you this, many people are trying to work smarter and not harder. I would tell you good luck with that. You hear me say it all the time, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. They're not, friends. It's a great career, it'll feed your family for a lifetime, but from a brain works perspective, time blocking, friends, probably gonna be one of the best things that you do to get your schedule under control. Alright friends, that is our show for this week. I hope you're liking the new format. I'm sure enjoying cranking these out for you every Friday. So give us some comments, give us a thumbs up, like us, subscribe, go to the channels, Let YouTube and Spotify and iHeart and everybody know that you love the content that we're putting out. Hey, still got time. I'm pretty booked up, but love to come to your national sales meeting and get your teams all pumped up. I can drive to Charlotte, I can drive to Atlanta, and I can fly just about any place in the entire world. So hit me up. Love to come and motivate your team. All right, stick around, stay close, friends. We've got more information on prospecting, what you can do to better sell, and what you can do to make sure you're booking a lot more meetings That's coming up, friends, in the next video. We'll see you next week.