When Someone Goes Radio Silent On You

Isn’t it frustrating when you’ve had a great conversation with a prospect where you receive all the buying and interest signals. Everything is clicking, connecting and aligning with their needs and your solution.  You capture the moment and progress to the next steps. Whether they ask you to put a proposal together or tell you they are going to speak with a few more people or schedule a meeting, things are moving along. You are satisfied, you forecast the deal, it’s a qualified opportunity, you feel good, your manager is happy.

The following week you try calling them, you follow-up with a quick email, you try to get them live. No response. Nothing. Nada. You try again a few days later, you poke around to see if they are out of town, you leave another message and shoot a quick one sentence email.. You get in super early and try to get them before they turn their office lights on. You call around to see if they are actually still in their office. You are tempted to call their cell phone but that’s too close to home for now. Still no response, absolutely no response.

We all know that feeling too well. What do we do? Give up? Let go? Apply more pressure? Get frantic? Become desperate? Take it personally? Start stalking them? That’s what going radio silent is all about. It’s about not knowing and wondering what happened. Salespeople never do well not knowing as it’s their job to know.

The truth is your prospect thinks about your solution, service or product about 1/300th of the time while you think about it 24/7. There are a trillion other things that occupy their time and mind and face it, you are just not top of mind.

Once we really know this, we can let go of some anxiety and also learn new ways to stay in front of our prospect while allowing them some time to be distant. That doesn’t mean letting go of the deal, quite the opposite, it means you keep re-qualifying the deal, verify the hierarchy and create a compelling event that helps create a timeframe around response.

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