Ask HN: How do you handle customer “ghosting”?
To provide some context, I am the founder of an enterprise SaaS company. We have had quite a few customers - after expressing gushing delight over our offering - just go silent. No responses to emails or phone calls. How do you handle such situations?
7 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 25.4 ms ] threadSome will tell you to stop emailing, some will never respond and some will eventually respond.
Make sure you are prospecting well. Do not let time sinks take away from filling your pipe.
Then, send them a "let us not waste one another's time" email or two.
Basically ask whether they want, need contact. No pressure, just want to make sure the activity makes sense for everyone.
This often works. When it does, you get clarity on what makes sense, and often why.
When it doesn't, put those people on low rotation, a ping every few months. Include some news, thing of value and well wishes.
They either unsub, or respond eventually.
By this stage, it should be background activity. Not a time sink.
People get busy, initiatives change, management teams change, company gets bought... newbie shows up, gets excited. Anything can happen.
You just never know.
But, what you can know is your pipe. Build it always, have a simple, honest process for managing who goes through it.
What you can also know is people really do buy from who they like too. Those long term, "thought they were gone" sales came in, and many of them cited the news, well wishes and friendly engagement as factors.
They remember who took the time to both understand them and treat them like humans.
Honest approaches can really help. The sales process is not a bad thing. Letting people know it is OK to navigate it, communicate, etc... means more of them will.
Where that happens, your time is spent more efficiently, and that leads to more deals / person.
People are where they are. It is actually rare to "drive revenue" without ugly tradeoffs like devaluing the product, or turning people off.
In almost every case where revenue is driven this way, one could qualify people better, handle them in an honest way process wise, and a bigger pipe outcome is the same or more revenue wise.
Sometimes it's just not top priority for the customer or they get distracted. Sometimes, like taxes, it's on their to do list, but they procrastinate on it until it's a bigger problem. Sometimes they've nearly maxed their budget and chose to buy something else.