One of the most annoying periods of your appointment setting campaigns is to get in touch with a business prospect, begin a promising sales leads nurturing process and then, out the blue, they no longer talk to you. And no matter how much you try to contact them, try to get their business, they are no longer responsive to your inquiries. This sure is an irritating period of uncertainty, one that is not helped by the prospect’s unresponsiveness. What could those reasons be?
Well, we could blame it to at least four factors:
1. You have been played – the prospective B2B leads were already dealing a different provider and used your business as a way to extract a concession from them. Once they got what they wanted, they no longer needed you, so they walk away and leave you hanging.
2. They have an internal problem – this is normal in situations where the focus is on getting one thing done, like surviving a restructuring, a boardroom revolt, or a shareholders discussion. When that happens, you just simply slipped off their radar.
3. Your contact has some personal issues – the person your telemarketing team has been corresponding with may have been fired, gotten sick, gone on vacation, changed jobs, etc. making them unable or unauthorized anymore to deal with you.
4. Bureaucratic red tape – this can happen (and this is often) in large companies. They have so many people running the business that reaching a consensus about using your services can take forever. Sometimes, it can be so slow that it seems like they are no longer responding to you anymore. At worst, your incessant emails or calls may be seen as impatient, something that their normally slow decision-making process may not like.
Yes, these are a few of the reasons why prospects no longer respond. But in the event that these do occur to your business, we really cannot do anything except hope that your calls would be replied to. But there is also another way to deal with such prospects. Let us assume that they are too busy to deal with you. In any case, you need to know what their plans are. You can solve that by sending them an email or a voice message (preferably a week after the last discussion you made with them), explaining to them that you are worried that something happened to them. Let them know that you would be willing to help, and all you need is for them to call you back. You see, you are appealing to their sense of decency as people and their sense of identity as a ‘good person’.
In most cases, these prospects would reply. They really have no reason not to respond to you. But in case they do not reply, well, there is nothing we can do about it. When that happens, you have to look for another point of contact to the company you wish to deal with. You need to move forward with your lead generation campaign.
