Episode #292: Be Bullet Proof Against Criticism Of Your Follow-up

The phrase “I was ghosted” is a new addition to the sales lexicon but the problem is ancient. You meet someone at a networking event, have a positive conversation and then you follow up with them. Your email goes nowhere and all you get is crickets. So you send it again as a forward, so that the previous one is there in the thread as a subtle shaming reminder “hey, I wrote to you, but you haven’t answered me yet”. More crickets. What do we do in these cases?

Being old school, I like the phone. I prefer to speak with people, but in the modern world, getting anyone on the phone, has become harder and harder. Also, I observe like some sort of amateur anthropologist, that the younger generation have become more text based. The reason for this is the low confrontation element through using text. It gives the other party the escape route of just not replying and ghosting you. No sales come from this approach though.

Also, I get a truckload of emails and messages on various social media everyday and so does everyone else. Sometimes my computer screen top right hand corner will whiz in a notification that so and so has contacted me and in two seconds it has gone and I have missed it, because I was concentrating on some work I was doing. Then begins the search for which social media platform that message came from, wasting an enormous amount of my time. I hate that.

Anyway, are they not replying because what they told me at the event was total crap and they are ghosting me? Or are they like me, drowning in a tsunami of information inputs from the different sources hammering us all day long? I always work on the assumption of the latter and I keep trying to make contact. The risk here is you become annoying and start to create flesh wounds to the brand. We get spam emails and notifications all the time, so we don’t like it and the temptation of the potential buyer is to see our correspondence as spam and start becoming upset about it.

In the second email, we need to be sensitive to their schedule and make an apology for adding to their inbox. We also need to restate the benefit we can bring to them and make that the justification for following up. We are duty bound to do our best to help them advance their business and that is why we are following up.

For the third email, I like another slightly different version of the same message maintaining that all of this effort we are making is to help them.

For the fourth email, I like the nine word formula used by Dean Jackson. Sending something very brief is unobtrusive, but makes the point. It might be something like, “Are you still interested in doing something with ….?”, and you can fill in the blank referencing your company, product or solution. I sent this to a suspected ghoster recently and was delighted to get an apologetic response, talking about how busy they were etc., etc.

We all get a lot of emails, so my email technique has two consistent themes. I always start my reply emails with the word, “Thanks….”. I do this because I am very outcome driven and I can be so focused on the point of the email, I forget the human element. I need to remind myself to start my message from that point of view. Left to my own devices I would be straight into the business point of the correspondence. If there has been a little time since the last correspondence, by using a trigger word like “thanks” I am able to remind myself to say something like, “Thanks, I hope all is going well”, before I get into the business at hand.

My second technique is to make their personal name the header. If they are a Japanese person, I will put it in polite form – Tanaka san or maybe Taro san, depending on how well I know them. However, if I write “Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo” in the header, that will give potential readers a headache. It signals there is a heavy duty message coming their way, which is going to suck up their time and they are already feeling put upon by the amount of work on their plate right now. We are all more likely to open an email addressed to us personally, so their name alone is the best guarantee of the email being looked at.

It has never happened so far, but if someone challenged me on this practice, I would just say, “My commitment is to help your business succeed and I want to make sure you will at least have the option to consider if what we have makes sense and putting your name in the header helps to elevate my email above the other hundreds of emails you are dealing with every day”.

I use this same basic reply whenever anyone ever challenges me about the amount of follow-up I do. I will also add, “I am sure you teach your sales team the importance of serving customers and that means doing the follow-up consistently and properly, so that is why you are hearing from me – we are here to help your business beat your rivals and do better”.

The reality is they know their own sales team are not doing enough follow-up and secretly they wish their people were more persistent and dedicated like us. The key take-away is we need to be ready beforehand for the pushback. There is no point trying to come up with an snappy answer on the spot – it is better to have prepared for this eventuality. We don’t want brand damage and to have people running around town saying “those people over there at XYZ are terrible, they keep pestering the hell out of me”.

Always allow the buyer to say “no” for themselves, without second guessing them by not following up. If however, you don’t get a reply and are ghosted after four follow-ups, then the answer is actually “no” and you and I need to move on and find a new buyer.