One of the most frustrating things that can happen in a sales cycle is…….nothing at all. After months of talking and promises, your best, fully qualified, enthusiastic prospect is ready to move forward. You send them a proposal and…….silence.
It seems there’s no accounting for it. It makes no sense. You’ve done everything right, and the decision maker was keen to receive your proposal, but now, you can’t get hold of them. This is very common. Despite the ‘relationship’ you thought you’d built, you just get the cold shoulder, not even a clear “No,” or, “Here’s what happened,” or, “I’m still interested, but something happened…”
It’s easy to blame the buyer. But maybe it isn’t always the prospective customer’s fault.
Why does this happen? Here’s a few reasons:
Their situation has changed—they lost their job, cuts have happened internally, their company is getting bought, or they are genuinely swamped with an exceptional short-term workload. It may have nothing to do with you.
You haven’t diagnosed, demonstrated and agreed a strong enough value-case, so your initiative is still sitting at No. 34 on their ‘To Do’ list. They just don’t care enough.
Your proposal contained significant new information. It has caused further internal discussion and debate. There were some surprises in there, possibly including the price.
They’re not properly qualified, or were never serious in the first place. Maybe you were the cannon fodder in a market benchmarking exercise.
Your contact is meeting internal resistance and is embarrassed or not keen to admit they have hit a wall. Perhaps they see the value, but their colleagues don’t or would rather pursue alternatives. Perhaps they don’t have the authority they think they have or told you they have.
Some of these reasons we can definitely do something about – earlier in the selling process. For example, when a prospect asks you for a proposal, explain to them that the written document you will send will merely be a confirmation of everything we’ve discussed – ask yourself: have I covered everything? Have we discussed the costs? Do I understand the complete evaluation process they may now undertake? If not, do that first, and make sure you have all the bases covered before you send the proposal. There should be nothing in that document that upsets the apple-cart. No surprises.
Some of the reasons above are outside our control. But we must at least attempt to discover what has happened. Maybe we can do something about it, if the buyer will at least re-engage.
It’s no good having a pipeline filled with ‘Maybes’ and ‘Still Interesteds’ – a clear ‘No’ gets the dead wood out of the pipeline and allows you to focus on better things. For this reason, after several attempts to re-engage, I would personally challenge the buyer to give me an answer – even a negative one. An email along the lines of “I am assuming you no longer have any interest in this. Please tell me if that’s the case” often gets a response, simply because it invites the prospect to call time on the whole thing. It’s a relief for them, if they haven’t managed to get the internal traction they expected, for example. This will also flush out whether it is a time/workload issue. If they think you’ve finally had enough and are essentially giving up, they come out of the woodwork and often sheepishly explain the problem.
Before we get to that point though, there are a few other things we could try:
It’s important to make at least three or four separate attempts to reconnect, in an unemotional and professional way. Consider how you will use a combination of email, phone, messaging and other methods to make contact again.
For example: you phone, leave a message and explain briefly that you need to understand what the next step is. Then, you email a short confirmation of your call some time later. Then call again to follow up on that email. Your email needs to provide a reason to react.
Clearly restate the value case in simple bullet-points. If you suspect the costs were not properly understood or were only made clear for the first time in the proposal, the buyer may simply have got the wrong end of the stick, or may in fact have cold feet. Tell them you can help them justify the cost, present the value-case to colleagues and even help them with an internal justification if that’s now needed.
Use new or additional material to further drive home the value/benefit case – for example, a new customer case study, or a white paper, or an ROI report may get the conversation going again. It may give the buyer more ammunition internally. These materials will give you regular reasons to open up the discussion again.
Try to provoke a discussion about the costs. This should not be an attempt to negotiate, but an attempt to get the buyer’s view on the proposal. Since cost is often the sticking point, let them know you understand this, and that you realise there may be more work to be done. This is about acknowledging their fear of risk.
Ask other contacts in the customer’s business to help you out – after all, inside intelligence is really what you need. Again, if you are working on widening your contacts list during early selling stages, this helps enormously when it all goes cold.
Try using the word “because”. “Because” has been shown by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer to be a very persuasive word.
Langer tested this by asking a favour of people lined up to use a copying machine: She asked, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the photocopier because I’m in a rush?” The result? 94% percent let her go ahead of them in the queue.
When she didn’t use the word “because”, the results were starkly different. “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the photocopier?” Only 60% allowed her to jump the queue.
To make sure it wasn’t a fluke, she tested the theory again with a series of requests adding back in “because”, but changing the reason after the “because”. Compliance went back up over 90%.So use the word “because” like this.
Appeal to their sense of decency. Ultimately, a prospect who simply will not engage is avoiding you for their own purposes. Frankly, it’s rude. It would only them take about 20 seconds to quickly fire off an update email to you. So ask them to do you the simple courtesy of letting you know what’s happened. Bringing the whole thing back down to a more ‘real’, human level with this kind of appeal to common decency can be effective.
“Fred, help me out here. We were moving along well – with plenty of dialogue. It’s such a surprise that I haven’t heard from you. Please do me the courtesy of letting me know what happened.”
If you still have no response, then it’s time to call a halt to proceedings and move on with a clear conscience. Tell the prospect that’s what happening. Explain that you are assuming they have other more important priorities right now, and that you are also very busy with other keen customers.
It’s a reality that buyers will go cold on you. We can’t win them all. But we can at least operate with clear, commercial thinking: no-one needs a pipeline full of hope, devoid of information. It’s much better to get a negative decision, than no decision at all. So, once you’ve done all you can, move the time-wasters out of your field of vision and get on with finding new opportunities.