Are your follow-ups accidentally making it easy for great prospects to disappear?
Ghosting can turn promising quotes and near-wins into frustrating lost opportunities. This episode shares practical ways to break through the usual pattern of emails and phone calls, re-engage customers, and give those 50–50 deals a better chance of moving forward.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to use pattern interrupts to capture the attention of customers who have gone quiet.
- Why getting face-to-face, sending a quick video, or using a voice message can re-engage prospects more effectively than another standard follow-up.
- How changing the timing and format of your follow-up can help you connect with busy customers and recover more potential sales.
Play this episode to discover simple, practical ways to re-engage ghosted prospects and turn more of those missed opportunities into closed deals.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
We all get customers that ghost us after we quote, even customers that we think are so likely to move forward, but thankfully there are some easy ways that we can win them back and we’re going to go through them right now.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host, Ben Wright and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s get started.
Ben Wright:
We spoke a few weeks ago around ghosting and how we often get a yes from a customer, but the paperwork just doesn’t flow through. And if you want to have a little bit more insight into this one, 254, episode 254 is a great one to flow back to.
But today, what we’re going to focus on is when a customer’s ghosted you, whether they’ve said yes, whether they’ve said no, right, but you’ve quoted them, they’ve got a great deal in front of them and you just simply cannot get back in touch with them, right, we’re going to focus on some things you can do to win them back. So, let’s jump straight into it. It’s a Friday fun one, short, sharp and punchy.
Okay, so across a macro level, right, that broad approach here, when we get ghosted by customers, the number one thing I recommend to every single one of my customers, me included as a salesperson, is you’ve got to roll with a pattern interrupt. So, what a pattern interrupt looks like is something that wouldn’t normally happen for that personal business. So, imagine that you’re driving down the road and you’re suddenly behind a pink car.
There aren’t many pink cars on the road and in my experience, most people are going to look at it. Certainly, my six-year-old, she goes, pink car, dad, pink car, pink car, right, she loves it. But the whole idea around that pink car analogy here is that you’re seeing something that you normally wouldn’t see and when it comes to sales, your white cars are emails, your black cars are phone calls, right, and I don’t know what the next most common car is, I’m going to roll with grey, right, your grey car is a quote in your hand, right, these are all things that people in buying patterns are used to seeing, phone calls, emails, quotes.
What they’re not used to seeing is pink cars. So, what’s our equivalent that we can roll out with our customers, particularly those that have ghosted us to get their attention because that’s what we’re trying to do here when we get a customer that’s ghosted us is to get their attention to want to engage again. Now, I will say before we get into this, we need to make sure that all of this has a focus around adding value.
So, around how we can make sure that whatever we’re talking to our customer about is that opportunity to take advantage of or that problem to fix and that value to create. So, what could they look like? Well, first one is for me is getting face-to-face, is finding a way to get back out in front of that customer, right, in trade businesses, it’s a simple drop buy, right, and these drop buys can look something like if you are in a product business for a home, hey, I’m going to drop a sample buy, hey, I’m just going to drop a sample buy at this time, please let me know if it’s not okay, right, same thing goes in a B2B space in fact, I’m just going to drop a sample buy, right, it’s essentially flagging that you’re going to be there with what you’re going to add value, sample might quote if it needs to be hand delivered, for example, a small gift to say thank you, something that you might have promised your customer you’d get to them, right, but wherever we can do a pattern interrupt that says, hey, I’m coming over at this time, I’m going to drop this buy. Now, we’re aiming for two things here, one, we’re hoping that they’re going to be there, right, and we can say a quick hello, but two really impactfully is we’re getting something in their hands to reignite that engagement.
So, the first pattern interrupt from a customer ghosting point of view is getting back face to face. I fully recognize though that’s not always possible, there’s geographic limitations, there’s simply the dollar value of a deal limitations, right, we don’t want to be spending that amount of time for a deal that’s only worth a certain amount of money or a certain margin, right, but by all means that’s the gold standard in terms of pattern interrupts is getting something in their hands face to face. Second option, right, video is all about using video to your advantage.
Every team I now work with has an appetite or at least an interest in doing more video. Why? Well, I’ve asked myself that a few times and for me I’m convinced it’s because we all deep down know that video is a fantastic pattern interrupt, right, be that video on an email, right, a video created and sent via email, I’m okay with that because from a pattern interrupt point of view, right, it’s something different. My favorite however though is a video on phone.
So, that is a video you record with your product, with your service out at a customer site showing off some work you’ve done in the warehouse, right, wherever it may be but something that engages a customer face to face. My experience says that a video or even a voice message on text, so a recorded voice message that gets delivered as a voice message, they get opened more than standard text messages. I was working with a customer recently, they were running at about 40% open rates when there was video involved compared to 7% without it.
So, we know video works, the biggest challenge I see for business owners and leaders is a lack of understanding around how to do it. Good news is there’s a great app out there, I’ve used it for years now called Loom, L-O-O-M, type Loom into Google, it’ll be quicker than going to show notes but we’ll put the link in there, right, and you can find your own video platform. Loom’s great, it has a mobile app and once you get good at it, you can be recording videos super quick.
I find with 90% of my videos, I don’t have to edit them, I can press go, record the video, send it as a text message and wow, do I get some great responses from my own personal sales activities. But when it comes to pattern interrupts, if we can’t be getting face to face, video for me is the next best thing. Okay, last but not least is all around timing.
I find that with most salespeople, they will do their follow-ups at certain times of the day or certain days of the week and it becomes quite mechanical, Tuesday mornings, Thursday mornings, right, every morning 9am. Where I see great pattern interrupts work is they’re prepared to try different times, mornings, afternoons, lunchtimes, using videos, using voice messages, using text messages across all of these times, different days, even weekends. I’ve seen used to great effect, particularly in the residential space, right, a text message or a video when we know people are not as busy generally, all right, as they are when they’re at work.
Yes, often family time, yes, you often might get fast responses on the weekend but for me, the pattern interrupts are most likely seen on the weekends, right, so they’re prepared to try different times and as you’re listening to this piece around preparing to try different times, generally, the response I get is, yeah, yeah, I do it. I just encourage you to sit back and have a look at the last week around when you’ve made your sales follow-up calls because my experience is that most salespeople have a pretty consistent pattern and when they look at the opportunities to pattern interrupt through different times, they actually start saying, hang on, I could do more early morning, I could do more in the day, I could, yeah, sure, I could do them on the weekend if I’m prepared to do that, right, and I could mix and match a little bit to make sure that I’m trying to get people at different times because often ghosting isn’t intentional. It’s just because someone’s so busy and when you’re trying to get to them is the wrong time, right, and certainly for me, I see a lot of buyers throw the onus on supplier’s contact to come from the supplier, i.e. they won’t return calls or they won’t return messages but if you get them at the right time, they’ll sit there and talk to you.
So there are three ways when it comes to ghosting that I see really effective movement in engaging more customers. What I will say here is it’s not about perfection. These three ways of pattern interrupting that ghosting type of process, they’re not foolproof but what we’re trying to do is move the dial here.
If we can take your close rates from 1 in 5 to 1 in 4, so winning 5 out of 20 instead of 4 out of 20, we’re really moving the dial and that’s the piece I’d be encouraging you to think about, how we can make small amounts of progress rather than perfection. So have a think about which ones are those you might like. If you’re not sure which one to jump on, I would encourage you to start with video, download Loom, throw that app onto your phone, start doing videos on your phone rough as fine and sending them across as text messages, right.
Have a look how well they work. For me, if you do want to be growing your business and these are the types of things you’re really interested in, spoiler alert, we’ve got some great programs launching in the coming months. They’re going to be running off a wait list and some of those are free.
If you want to make sure you get notified about these, you need to click on the link in the show notes. It will take you 30 seconds, well, it will probably take you 20 seconds, right. It’s so quick.
So jump on, leave your details and you’ll be notified when they come out. That’s it for today. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.
Bye for now.