How to Overcome Clients Ghosting You
How to Overcome Clients Ghosting You
I was talking to a fellow consultant, Lauren, the other day. She told me she’d sent out three proposals in the previous week and hadn’t heard back, even after countless email follow-ups. She said, ‘All three prospects just ghosted me. Total silence. Even when I tried to follow up, they didn’t respond at all!’
As anyone would, Lauren found this extremely frustrating. Quoting takes time and energy—time that she could have spent working for her current clients. The radio silence made her feel that she was doing something wrong or that something in her business was out of whack.
Of course, it is hugely frustrating when you have a potential client whom you’ve spoken to, spent time with, and given a quote to, and then they suddenly go quiet, even when you keep following up.
But the ghosting isn’t really the problem.
The real problem is not having enough potential clients in the pipeline. This leads to a scarcity mindset that can make you question everything you do in your practice.
How to overcome clients ghosting you
There’s no way to completely stop clients from ghosting you. This habit of cutting and running when someone doesn’t want to deal with something has also found itself in the business world.
Unfortunately, that means that some people simply go silent when they don’t want to proceed with working with you. It might not be the most professional way to handle a situation, but there’s not much we can do about it. Even if they told you they would find a budget or come back to you next week and they didn’t get back to you, the real issue is that we’re attached. We feel like we now have a commitment to the next step.
And here’s the reality…
Things change.
Maybe the CEO has been away, and they’ve been swamped with other pressures and are not even able to think about it again.
Maybe they hit a crisis in their team, or their budget was totally cut, and they’re trying to think of another way. Or other priorities have taken over.
Maybe your timeline vs their timeline is different and that wasn’t quite clear when you spoke.
So, the real issue is that we’re attached.
Attached to what they said, the next steps and the sale going through. The attachment and therefore the frustration becomes amplified when they are the only deals in your pipeline. Imagine if you had another 100 deals in your pipeline to follow up. Would you be worried about those three that ghosted you?
Probably not.
So the real question is, ‘How do we become detached and without expectation?’
What we can do is adjust our focus. Instead of focusing on the clients we don’t have, we need to start working on moving more leads into our sales pipeline. So the real issue you have is not having a process in place to grow your leads.
Keeping prospects in your sales pipeline
Women in consulting often tell me they’re afraid of too many deals in their pipeline. They’re worried that if they all came off that, they couldn’t possibly service them all, so they undermarket themselves and their programs and, therefore, create undue emotional pressure.
Brian Tracy, Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specialising in the training and development of individuals and organisations, has a great quote about your sales pipeline. He says:
‘Keep your sales pipeline full by prospecting continuously. Always have more people to see than you have time to see them.’
Obviously, having prospects in your sales pipeline is good for your revenue building and growth. But it’s also good for your mindset. It helps you to keep ghosting clients in perspective. Rather than an emotional response, you’ll be able to keep calm and recognise that sometimes these things happen. Better, you’ll be able to move on to the next opportunity without wasting more time and energy.
It also gives you the mental space to take a step back and assess why this particular client might have ghosted you. Generally, it’s as simple as they didn’t want to proceed with the work. Maybe the pricing was too high. Maybe they didn’t find you to be the right fit. Or maybe their plans changed.
Sometimes, if you can figure out why a client ghosted you, it can help you tailor your offerings in the future. But sometimes, it just doesn’t matter. Not every client is going to be the right fit, and you can’t make yourself work for everyone.
Check your pricing
If you find that you’re being ghosted by clients a lot, it’s probably worth checking your pricing. When your pricing is off, you might struggle more. If you’re priced too high – or, more importantly, aren’t sharing your value well enough – clients might find it difficult to justify working with you.
If you’re priced too low, clients might assume that you can’t deliver at the level they need. Particularly if you’re offering a premium service to premium clients, you need to price yourself at a premium level to be taken seriously.
And when you’re priced correctly, you’ll find that you aren’t as worried about the clients that ghost you. You know your value, and you know your pricing reflects that.
Action steps when a client has ghosted you
If you’ve been ghosted by a client, I’d suggest taking the following steps:
Don’t panic. These things happen, and having action steps to take will give you back a feeling of control.
Respond in a calm, measured and professional way. Emotionally charged communications will only add to your feelings of unease and could give you the wrong reputation in your industry. Send your follow-up messages, and you can even say, “I don't want to keep following up if it’s annoying, but if it’s helpful, I’m happy to so it stays on your radar”. You might be surprised that they say “yes!”
Move on. If you don’t receive a response, just move on. You might like to reach out to them again in a few weeks or a month to check-in.
Review your pricing. If you find that you’re getting ghosted often, check your pricing. It might be that you’re not adding enough value, or more likely, sharing that value, or that your pricing is making it hard to buy.
Work on your sales pipeline. Finally, build out your sales pipeline by focusing on your list, focusing on your relationships with existing customers, and developing your sales and marketing techniques.
I’d love to hear your thoughts…