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How to get ghosted less – Stephen Kenwright

It happens during a boom. It happens twice as often during a bust (and it hurts more). When we get ghosted, we feel like the victim. We blame the client. But, often, we can do something about it. You’ve spent hours creating a proposal, only for your prospective client to vanish from the face of […]
How to stop being ghosted

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It happens during a boom. It happens twice as often during a bust (and it hurts more).

When we get ghosted, we feel like the victim. We blame the client. But, often, we can do something about it.

You’ve spent hours creating a proposal, only for your prospective client to vanish from the face of the earth as soon as you’ve sent it.

We usually get ghosted at one of two points:

  1. After an initial conversation; or
  2. After we’ve sent a proposal or quote.

Let’s break down that journey and talk about the opportunities to reduce ghosting.

What to do before a customer ever calls you

During the initial conversation, our prospective client is trying to assess whether the agency can do the job that needs to be done. We can reduce ghosting at this stage by making sure our websites and other marketing materials are absolutely clear about what we do (and what we don’t do) and who we do it for (and who we don’t do it for). Good-fit customers should see themselves in everything we say and bad-fit customers should not. This has two effects:

  1. Bad-fit customers don’t call us. We don’t waste our time, or theirs, on a sales call that’s not going to go anywhere; we don’t add them to our CRM; and we don’t spend any time creating a proposal for them; and
  2. Good-fit customers call us more often. They are more confident that we can solve the problem that they uniquely have. They feel understood.

Ultimately, this means a few things for your numbers:

  1. Your conversion rate will go up
  2. The number of sales calls you have probably won’t change much (but if your sales team has “number of meetings” as a KPI, please, don’t do that anymore)
  3. You’ll spend less time on each opportunity because you’ve already demonstrated that you solve problems like this one all the time.

This is the hardest part. It’s a lot of work. But I’d rather do this work once every few years than once each deal.

What to do when a customer calls you for the first time

When a potential good-fit customer calls you for the first time, start by imagining what’s going to stop this deal from happening. 

If you track the reason you lost each opportunity in your CRM, that’s the place to start. I’ll bet that cost is near the top.

We need to know that we’re affordable as quickly as possible. Most often, the person we’re selling to vanishes because they couldn’t then sell us into their business. Sometimes that’s because we cost more than they expected (and we want to know that before we do anything). BUT…

My first question when talking about money isn’t “what’s your budget?”

My first question is “have you already got a budget allocated for this?”

If the client does have a budget, it’s much harder for them to not tell me (without feeling like a game of “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 10 million”)…I can at least give them a range of my typical costs and see if that fits with what they’ve got. 

But if they don’t have budget allocated, I’m going to approach this opportunity very differently:

  1. It might go into my pipeline in a different place (e.g. I might not be worrying about how to staff up for this just yet and I might not be telling the business yet either)
  2. I will ask several follow up questions about how the budget gets allocated. It might be my policy that I have to meet certain decision makers before I spend time creating a proposal because I want to understand what they need to see to sign this off
  3. I will ask “is the money going to come from the current marketing budget or do you need to find it from somewhere else?” because if it’s the latter, I know finance will probably be involved and they’re going to want to see something different
  4. If it feels appropriate (elsewhere in the conversation), I’ll ask about previous projects this person has got done (because I want to know that they’ve managed to get work signed off before).

The prospect isn’t (usually) a bad person: they thought they could get this done (because you’re helping them to do their job and they see their job as valuable, why wouldn’t the company invest?) but maybe a thousand others are asking for the same money and it only goes so far. We’re on the same team and it’s my job to help them make the best case for it. 

It’s not all down to money though. There are plenty of things that could kill the deal.

We want our sales prospect to put their reservations on the table.

We think we want to know what their concerns are so we can reassure them. We know that the “think it over” (as in, ending the sales call with the prospect going away to think about it) is that sale lost, so we want to talk that prospect round. 

But it’s not our job to convince or persuade. We are facilitators. We need to preempt what these objections might be (listening to patterns in our new business conversations and, ideally, doing some research) and put them on the table first. We want the prospect to convince us that the issue isn’t going to be an issue – and the best way to do that is to simply say “I’m concerned [this] might be an issue.”

Just doing this will probably increase our conversion rate and reduce ghosting a little, but often we’re not being ghosted because our prospect has objections…

We’re being ghosted because their colleagues do. 

In The Challenger Customer, authors Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner and Nick Toman explain that there are more than 5 people on our prospect’s team that need to be on board with us coming on board. 

So when our prospect takes our proposal back to their business, there are ~5 other people who each put their concerns to our prospect. That probably doesn’t happen in one meeting: our prospect first goes back to their team…then legal…then finance…procurement…they have to fight for us over and over. We’re on the same team, so we should:

  1. Know who’s likely to be involved. This can be as simple as asking: “in my experience dealing with organisations like yours, [these people] are involved in a purchase of this size. Am I missing anyone?”
  2. Ideally, we should be allowed to speak to them directly. We want to be a real person to them, not just text on a page. We want finance to know how much rigour is in those numbers, it’s not just back of a napkin
  3. If the client has professional buyers (i.e. procurement). We should invite them into the conversations early. Tina Fegent often shares tips on how to help get procurement on side, plus Blair Enns and Leah Power host the 20% podcast on exactly this topic
  4. When we follow up (more on that next), we should ask “how did the conversation with [this person] go? If you need me to write a quick explanation on how we came up with that, I’d be happy to”.

What to do when we’re following up on the initial conversation

The example above (“how did the conversation with [this person] go?”) is infinitely better than sending a message “just checking in”.

When you email saying “any news?” you’re really saying “I’ve done my part, you’re on your own.” That customer might still be fighting for you and they need you in their corner. We need to continue to add value.

So, before you get off the phone or leave the room any time you’re with your prospect, you *must* understand their next steps: who do they need to talk to? When is that likely to happen?

Ideally, you’ll put a follow up in both your calendars there and then. If this person always planned to ghost you (i.e. they’re fishing for ideas or they just want a price to beat their preferred supplier down with) then they won’t show…but most people aren’t like that. Life gets in the way of replying, but they go to the meetings they’re supposed to go to. 

If you don’t have booked follow up meetings and you chase them – “just checking in” – they will chase who they need to chase – “just checking in.”

You don’t want to appear desperate, so you give the impression you’ve got all the time in the world, then your prospect matches your energy with legal, or IT, or the CFO, or the commercial director, who think they’ve got all the time in the world…and forget. 

If you can’t pre-book a follow up meeting then you *must* create some urgency at every stage. Don’t feel like you’re being pushy – you are equipping your client to get the deal done. You’re on the same team. Here are some ways to create urgency:

  1. If you’ve introduced the team who’ll be working on the account, set clear expectations of when they’ll be re-assigned. Your team is busy: they can’t sit doing nothing, waiting to be appointed. Tell your client when you’re going to give them to someone else (and while you’re at it, sell them better. It’s not just someone who happened to have capacity: this is the best person for your business because X, Y and Z)
  2. Provide a forecast. If we roll into next month and performance is down vs forecast (which is quite possible: why are they appointing a new supplier, after all?) you can quantify how much their delay has cost them
  3. Work around an event. We want to hit the new financial year running: that starts in April, so to get a campaign in market, we’ll need to have these times for production; these sign offs; these research turnarounds…we need to get appointed by January or you’ll miss your numbers, Ms. Client (see also: Black Friday, Christmas, January peak for travel etc.)

What to do BEFORE you pitch

You and your potential customer have both agreed you can do the job. Your customer’s colleagues agree. Everyone agrees the job actually needs doing (and soon). You’ve indicated how much the job might cost and the customer has agreed that it’s affordable. But how much is in the budget, really?

Before you supply your proposal (which you need to talk through, not just send: your proposal is the words you say, not just what you write down), call your prospective client.

Call a week before. 

Call a day before.

Just make sure you call…and tell them what you’re going to pitch.

A lot of us love the pitch because it gives us a chance to think on our feet and show how good we are. They get the adrenaline flowing. We’re addicted to the big reveal. We love the theatre. Although we might not admit any of this. 

But some surprises are nasty surprises. The contact you’re pitching to might be dreading the meeting. This company I’ve brought in, are they going to make me look stupid?

Call them today (or at least the day before) and put their minds at ease. Here’s what I want to discuss on that last call:

  1. At an absolute minimum, here’s the cost I’m going to present. Is that going to fly? They might not get back to me if they think the cost is prohibitive and there’s just no point. I still have a chance to change it. I can tell that client we can reduce the cost to X if we reduce the scope to Y, is that going to be a problem for anyone in the room? I can still present the full solution and the big cost, but it’s my obligation to present a cost and solution that’s affordable too
  2. These are the problems I’m going to outline. Did anyone in the room cause them and are they likely to be upset if I mention them? Are there any other sensitive topics?
  3. How long have we got? Sometimes we think we’ve done well if the client says they have an hour and the meeting goes on for two. “They were just so into it!” – they weren’t, and now they hate you. If the prospect says it’s a hard stop then stop hard
  4. These are the general ideas behind our creative. Have you tried any of those before? Why didn’t they work? Are any of them going to really upset the brand people? Or legal?
  5. Is there anyone in the room that we need to win over? Because there’s always someone in the client organisation that doesn’t want this deal to happen. Always.

What you should do when you create your proposal or pitch deck

This is it. The proposal. The solution to the problem; the process and the price tag. This should be the close (although you might need to refer back to the section on following up). 

But some of the decision makers aren’t in the room (remember, there are at least 5 of them, some in legal, finance or other departments who typically don’t turn up to meetings like these).

So, when your contact sends your proposal around their business, who reads it and what do they think?

Here are a few of the more common mistakes:

  1. It gets sent to people who aren’t experts in what you do (let’s say you’re a marketing firm and they’re in legal): they open it, see that it’s 80 slides, and decide to come back to it when they have more time to understand what’s going on. They never have more time, so they don’t come back. If you’ve got a real champion (your contact REALLY wants you), they’ll go out of their way to summarise it for non experts. That’s actually your job
  2. It gets sent to people who are time poor. They see it’s 80 slides, give it a flick through and can’t easily see the key takeaways because you’ve got 30 slides that have one word of them and 40 creative executions. The first slide should probably contain BIG NUMBER. SIZE OF THE PRIZE. WHAT YOU’RE MISSING OUT ON. Just as a starter
  3. Some people in the client organisation need to see only one slide e.g. finance need to see costs. That’s right at the end, but you’ve added an appendix, so it’s actually SOMEWHERE in the middle. That’s creating work for the client (and they think you’re hiding something). If you must send an appendix (a bunch of slides that weren’t important enough to present), send it in a separate deck, ideally in a separate email
  4. Some people in the client organisation won’t be working with you directly, so telling them how good you are for 12 slides just puts them in the frame of mind that they should be skim reading this thing. EVERY SINGLE SLIDE needs to be about what you will do for them, not about yourself…also, imagine that some people have worked in some organisations for a decade and have appointed many firms like yours (and many more besides). They’ve seen that slide with awards logos and they’ve seen the map of the world with pins in it. Lose it.

I’ll practice what I preach and summarise. Follow these tips and your stakeholder’s stakeholders might actually read your deck and give them the feedback/decisions they need to get a deal done:

  1. You need fewer slides. Ideally, 1 slide. No, I’m not joking
  2. Separate things that aren’t relevant so the relevant parts can be forwarded easily. Consider a one page commercial proposal; case studies in a separate PDF; strategy in a PDF etc.
  3. Stop talking about yourself.

There’s always more to do

We talk about over-investing in the sale. Spending too long on a pitch deck that we didn’t need to create. Or chasing and chasing a lead that’s long gone cold.

When we invest in the right way – fighting with our prospective client to get the deal done – it gets reciprocated. If it doesn’t happen, our contact will tell us why. They’ll return our calls later on (and they’ll call us first if the deal is back on the table).

We’ll be able to use what they tell us to tighten our positioning.

To have better qualifying conversations.

To improve our pitch deck.

To stop other customers ghosting us too.

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Stephen Kenwright is strategy director at brand activation and creative content agency Ride Shotgun.