Ask HN: How to avoid ghosting by potential customers?

The likelihood when you've already exchanged quite a few emails and suddenly all communication ceases is what you've said - they were interested but something changed and now they're not. Coming up with an excuse and 'closing down' a conversation with a salesperson so that they don't come back to you has in my experience been... tricky. It usually takes a bit of back and forth even to do that ("yes, I'm really sure I'm not interested, thanks" x3).

Because email is very low social pressure, it's probably just people avoiding the awkwardness / time & effort of doing that.

If you want feedback on why they're not interested any more, probably the best way is a phone call, or failing that an email which makes the very clear upfront assumption that the sale is not going to happen, and just asking for a quick reason why they changed their mind (just assume they have upfront as well - 90% of the time you'll be right). I think most people would be happy to do this if they are confident the conversation is really going to end there.

In my experience ghosting from prospects happen when what they have told you is incongruent with what they are now thinking, and they can’t explain why. Often shifting priorities can cause it.

Asking directly for feedback as to why they aren’t responding sometimes works, and otherwise I’ve found the best way to respond is just to let them know you’re available should they want to get back in touch, and follow up in 6 months.

Be aware that as a sales guy, you are a nuisance to the people you are talking to. In the best case, I'll remember your proposal if a use case comes up, but I have neither time nor motivation to give feedback on your failed attempt to sell me something.

That really depends on the industry, the type of product, the type of buyer, and the relationship between the buyer and the sales rep.

Personally, as a buyer I don’t treat sales reps as a nuisance, I treat them as a resource.

You were probably talking to the wrong person: either through research or chat you need to ensure you are talking to someone who has the authority to pay you.

Also hidden in your text is "perhaps even written custom code"... could it be that they got what they actually wanted from you and no longer need you?

Finally - sorry if this sounds harsh - if you've exchanged 75 emails and not made a sale, you need to learn to sell better.

Read "Demonstrating to win" (cheesy title but absolute gold for enterprise solution sales), and "Start with No" by Jim Camp (fantastically logical and easy to use way of negotiating that will appeal to techies)

Good luck!

I can see the first two points being something that could easily happen but I don't think they apply in my case. Thanks for the book references, do you think 'Demonstrating to Win' applies to modern SaaS type apps too or more Enterprise/high touch/on site sales?

What’s the practical difference between “Enterprise/high touch/on site sales” and B2B SAAS? Either way, you’re asking a company to pay you for a service that plays a part in their business process that will cost them money in terms of up front costs, training, and probably changing some of their business process.

Enterprise/high-touch/on-site sales assumes you go and see everyone involved in the decision, understand every element of their business process and design a solution to fit that, obviously using a massive pre-sales budget to do so. And yes, you probably do end up exchanging 75 emails as well as an awful lot more minutes of time, but if the sale fails after that you know why.

Lower-cost B2B SaaS means the solution already exists, and you've got to understand how/if their business process will adapt well enough to it to make it worth the money to them based on a lot less information. You'll miss a lot more, and get 'ghosted' a lot more as a result. But you do get to speak to a lot more prospective buyers.

I worked for a company involving HIPAA compliant messaging for health systems. Everything was hosted by us from the server side and the mobile apps were in the app store -- not provisioned via MDM. We still had to have onsite "implementation managers" to train employees.

Throwaway, wanted to weight in a bit: we sell a complex software package to medical institutions. After the initial sales, customers become extremely interested in the topic, yet they ghost us for 3-4 months before coming back.

This took some doing, but suspected cause is Epic. Customer, once aware that a high-pain problem exist, asks Epic what/whether they have a solution to this already (almost all large hospitals are on Epic in the US). Epic runs a strategy where they answer "yes" to every single one of these questions. Customer waits patiently for 3-4 months for a solution to materialize, which fails to do so. Only after this do they turn back to us to actually deliver.

Looking at your product, it is not inconcievable, that during procurement, one of the stakeholders bring up "why don't we just use X?", and this turns the conversation from purchasing your specific stuff to "how can we solve Y problem?". If this is so, you might want to have a larger picture during your sales pitch, which shows benefit matrix across competitors in the space, clearly marking you as a winner & sent to the stakeholders so as for this not to derail purchasing process.

From my solely experience as a freelancer/entrepeneur what I've found out about potential customers ghosting is that these potential customers are so close to the Crocodile Brain (or Lizard Brain) [0] that you may have to treat them like so. My secret sauce is to shorten conversations and always think about the next thing to reply before even starting a conversation:

1. build a diagram for a single conversation

2. draw branches for every positive and negative potential customer replies

3. optimize your diagram to shorten negative conversations (so "wrong" customers won't feel chained to your interactions and are able to leave at will)

4. try to visualize the Happy Path [1] to conversion from potential to customer and fragment it into a couple of conversations with clear start-finish-accomplishment marks so you can gradually build every potential customer profile and really know whether they're really interested (coming back spontaneously) or not (leaving while replying, so you know the reason)

Make sure your potential customers can always get out of conversations at will (showing they're not who you're looking for) and remember sometimes conversations get awkward enough that people just won't know how to get out of it and just do it anyway - leaving without a reply

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6bZG7vTUNM

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_path

Especially in bigger companies, decisions to buy a product take a lot of time. Department A likes your product and starts asking detailed questions. Department B gets wind of that and feels that A is trying to get on B's turf. Department C knows that A will be reorganized soon and will no longer need your product, but can't say that openly yet. Heated internal meetings ensue. Management gets involved. During all this time, you will get slower and more vague responses. Maybe some budget cut strikes. Managers fight about the prioritization of projects. This can take weeks.

Close faster. Don't do any of this "custom code or helped with integration" bullshit unless they're paying you for it. Develop intuition.

That's about all you can do. 75 emails is... A lot without making a sale. Fwiw I'll usually get 1-3 emails asking what client wants, hopefully a phone call, I write a proposal and send it over, I wait a few days and follow up asking what they think. Maybe the want to negotiate terms or whatever, that's 1-3 more emails and maybe another call. All in all <10 emails, 2 calls max, and I either have a sale or I say thanks and feel free to contact me in the future if they're interested in this or other work.

I never work for free without getting paid for something first. I won't do coding tests, I won't write code, I won't figure out a problem. I will give them expert advice if I can and if it will help them see the value of my work. However say I've had a client pay for a job before and they have a small ask - I'll probably do it for free if it's 2 or less hours one time.

And intuition - I mean that's hard but you gotta be able to read people. Know when they're kicking tires, know when they're in over their head or out of their element, know when they don't have the Auth to get a request filled.

YMMV, but I've experienced lots of this in my current role (engineering manager at tech support in $EngineeringCompany.)

Customers keep asking for info on upgrades, specs, try to trick us into doing detailed engineering - then suddenly boom, they are dead quiet at best or at worst stalling - replying to your requests, but only non-committing.

I've since made it a checklist item that we notify our customers right away during first contact that IF they lose interest for any reason whatsoever - just let us know so that we may put the matter to rest, no hard feelings.

Stalling until we give up is not kinder than just being brutally honest.

I've found that quite a few customers appreciate us stating it so bluntly, as it gives them, too, an easy way out of the otherwise awkward situation of us spending time and effort providing solutions (or gathering a response!) and them from spending same trying to let the matter drop without expressly stating they are doing so.

It does not prevent us from spending time on projects which never come to fruition, but it does help us cut our losses as the time between customer losing interest and us being able to close the matter is decreased.

I will ghost any software sales person that asks me more questions than they answer, so I recommend noting your potential customers' initial questions and making sure that those get answered before continuing to develop the lead.

I’m interested in this question too, but here’s what’s worked for me. Mostly it’s about being completely up front and honest about what you want with clear deadlines for the next step from them for you to keep them around in your sales pipeline.

- be explicit about your strong desire to work together, but it’s ok if the other side doesn’t share the feeling

- ask the potential client early on to let you know ASAP if it’s no longer worth it for you to

- give clear timelines to keep a commitment on an engagement. If they don’t make progress by X date you’re moving on to other engagements

- if they disappear send a firm “thanks for your interest, sounds like the timing won’t work right now, we’re moving on...” email

The latter two points in particular sounds like you think you're doing them a favour by allowing them to contemplate being your customer. There's a chance that might be the case if you're proposing exclusive partnerships or keeping loads of dev time free for them, but for the more standard case of selling a product, they don't care whether they're in your pipeline or not and they'll cheerfully ignore the deadlines you set for a commitment whether they're interested in buying the product or not. And whilst sending the "thanks for your interest, but we've got other customers out there" email might be cathartic, it's even less likely to elicit useful information than a "just wondering if you have a decision yet?" email, and more likely to put them off a purchase they were delaying over. Unless you're actually seeking an answer, you don't need to have the last word.

In general, if you want a better chance of an answer, pick up the phone. Sure, they might not answer and you might get in "a few months maybe". But you also might get a reason why it's no, a date they might be interested in it again, or the person that's taken over the job from the person that showed the initial interest.

I'm guilty of being one of these ghosts. Perhaps it's bad conduct, but when I've decided to move on from the solution that the sales person was providing I generally don't get back to them. As such, I'll list some reasons as to why below to maybe make up for bad karma build-up...

The reasoning behind it stems from one of three things; I've found a solution to my problem so I don't need your service/product any longer, the problem I was having has been superseded by something else so I've shelved it for the foreseeable future, or I've discussed your product/service with the upper-management and they've got back to me with a big red 'denied'.

I suppose the solutions to the above would be as follows:

1. Ask whether the buyer is considering other options in the same market of the service/product you're providing. As the buyer, I'll be messaging up to 20 different sales-people at any one time to see what they can offer me compared to their counterparts. There's nothing more frustrating for me than a sales-person who beats around the bush - so even if their offer might be better, it's not worth my time to organise meetings, discuss price, email back and forth, and do other busy-work with them when I have another sales-person that is transparent with what they are offering from day 1. Succinctly put, find out who you're competing against quickly and close the deal before they can offer something better.

2. Again, this is in the realm of closing the deal quickly. I often get jobs that crop-up mid way through negotiations, that supersede said negotiations. There's not much you as a sales-person can do in this case other than close quickly, or be persistent with contact so when the job does come back onto my radar I've still got your contact at the back of my mind.

3. Discuss whether the buyer is at the whims of a 'upper-management sign-off'. If they are, you can discuss with them as to how to make it easier for them to get that sign-off. I recently had to buy a new CAD package. There ended up being some contention between myself and the uppers due to integration with our current systems, but one of the sales-people and I talked through the issues I was having with management and rectified it, going as far as writing some new code to help with the integration before we even started to talk about price. The other sales-persons basically said "Hope you get it sorted. Lets us know how it goes" and that was that. Obviously we went with the prior package, almost entirely due to the service.

At the end of the day, there are 101 other reasons, but those are the top 1, 2 and 3 I can think of currently. I hope that helps somewhat!

I think I can provide some context. When I was working as engineer in an R&D group for a large corporation, I typically have to email a lot of vendors and buy a sample to test it out for solving some internal. Ghosting usually happens when:

1. Your product doesn't meet the spec and/or doesn't work as advertised

2. Your product is good but I wasn't able to get the budget cleared to actually move forward.

3. There is budget now but stuck internally in political/procurement hell after my handover to the project manager or procurement person.

4. All good, but project cancelled.

TLDR - Moby Dick theory of enterprise procurement. [1]

I try my best to let the salesperson know whats up but after the handover I lose contact.

[1] https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part5.html

Your response is quite good, and I’ve tried to mimic this as well. I don’t think it happens often enough (I know I certainly have missed providing a courtesy response), unfortunately. As people just get bombarded so often with sales emails, general courtesy is lost in the transaction.

Given your pricing you should ask folks to pay for one or more targets and 30 days of storage if you are writing custom code or helping with an integration. If someone pays you $25-$100 for an eval they are far more likely to be serious. You have priced for easy trialability and should ask prospects to put a little skin in the game.

There is a way but it requires you to think one conversation ahead at each conversation. 50% of your objective in the initial conversations should be to generate the next conversation. That means you can’t just add “ok, next steps” at the end of a “good chat”.

It has to be the bulk of the conversation that makes it inevitable and desirable.

Do you try to avoid coming across as high pressure though when you do this or do you embrace that and think if they can't handle the high pressure they wouldn't be interested anyway?

Pressure has nothing to do with it. Have at T the sort of conversation that requires another at T+1.

Any suggested reading on this? Sounds like a good sales tactic.

Often enough, people change jobs -- quit, or get fired. Their e-mail becomes a black hole for at least a month, until somebody in IT gets around to turning it off, if ever.

Some people are so bored at work they pretend interest just to have someone to talk to. Then maybe they get busy, or fired. Sales is rough.