Get a Response & Get the Truth from your prospects

In the last week, I have received a number of emails from clients that have had success with what I call the “I’m going away” email. I have written about this before, and I think its worth bringing up again.

I assume you have experienced talking to a prospect that has shown some interest and then at some point in time they stopped responding to you. At that point you don’t know where things stand. You don’t know if:

• They have just been really busy and actually are still interested.
• They decided not to move forward with the project.
• They chose to work with someone else.

Left to wonder, your brain can make up all kinds of stories about what’s going on for your prospect. This is a waste of your valuable time and energy. So, what do you do? First thing is to remember that when communicating with prospects, you have two goals:

Get a response & Get the truth.

If you appear too needy and pushy, you can easily scare your prospect away. It is especially easy to fall into this trap if a prospect has shown some initial interest. You get excited about the possibilities and then get frustrated by their lack of response. You might even take it personally. It’s not personal. Keep in mind that your prospect has a lot of other things going on in their business. Be patient. If you have not heard back from them, give them FIVE business days to respond to you. Don’t hound them. Give them some space.

It’s like the beginning of any relationship. After you have reached out to them a couple of times via email or phone and have not heard back, you have a decision to make. You have three choices:

1. Continue emailing or calling with the same message.
2. Stop contacting them altogether and move on.
3. Send them what I call the “I’m going away” email.

When I first suggest this to new workshop participants they often get terrified. They are afraid this means they have to go away forever and never contact the prospect again. It's not forever it’s just for right now.  Here are two real-world examples I received this week from clients that got a response within a few minutes of sending after weeks of no response. Sometimes you have to risk going away (respectfully) if you want to get a prospect re-engaged.

“I left a message for my contact after having a productive conversation about their needs and asked that he call me back so I could ask a couple of follow up questions before sending some kind of proposal.  I then followed up with an email articulating the same message. Two weeks and no response later, I sent another email with my questions and pricing ranges.  A week later we still had not heard back and I was beginning to think that the prospect was sticker-shocked, went with another vendor or scratched the project altogether. 

I then sent the following email.

Hi Joe,
I tried reaching out to you a couple of times and haven’t heard back. Unless you tell me otherwise, I will assume that you are all set for the September study. If at any time you want to resume conversations about us helping you with one or all of your projects, certainly feel free to call me.
Warm regards.  Stacey

I got a phone call within 5 minutes of sending the email. He apologized profusely about not calling me back. We scheduled our next conference call, and I moved on with my day. Now I know where he stands, and we have a clear next step. I also have a sense that my final email helped reinforced his desire to work with us.”

Here is another real-world example that a client sent recently. This is a prospect with multi-million dollar potential that showed some initial interest and then became unresponsive.

Stuart:
I do hate to bug you. Since I have not heard back from you, I will assume that you are not interested in a discussion. That is fine. I do wish you the best success moving forward.
Sincerely,  Deborah

The prospect immediately sent a note back apologizing, mentioned there is some interest and that he had been on vacation as well as dealing with some internal company issues. He suggested a date and location for a face:face meeting to talk further.

In order to pull this off, you have to be willing to hear the truth. Sometimes the truth is they are not interested or timing just isn’t right. You have to be willing to go away and not pursue them further, at least for now. As a professional responsible for developing new business your job is to move prospects into and out of your new client engagement process. The quicker you are able to move them in or out, the more effective you will be. This takes discipline and patience.

Be bold. Risk hearing the truth. Be willing to (respectfully) walk away.

Tom Batchelder,
Founding Partner

Monday, August 13, 2007  | Permalink |  Comments (0)