Don't assume the worst when a prospect doesn't call you back

How do you deal with when you've had some positive interaction with a new prospect, but then they go quiet on you?

What do you do when someone ghosts you, and you're trying to contact them, whether it's email or phone calls, and you're not getting anything back?

Do you assume that the other person is not interested?

Do you feel that it's all too hard and that it's not worth continuing to chase?

A lot of people give up easily when this happens.

Or they keep on calling and calling with no real strategy.

What to think and what to do when you find yourself in this situation

Firstly, don’t assume the worst.

If you get concerned every time someone doesn't respond to your outreach, then you're going to have an unhappy, stressful, and anxiety-ridden time in commercial real estate!

Remember, a lot of what we have to do is chase people down to keep processes and projects moving forward.

Give people the benefit of the doubt. Whether they're busy with other things or they're having a bad day, try not to be too paranoid that you've done something wrong, and there's a reason for them ghosting you.

Instead, back yourself. If they haven't told you that they don't ever want to hear from you ever again, then assume that they do want to hear from you again!

It can take some time to get people to get back to you. Keep going until they tell you that they don't want to speak to you ever again.

Try some different approaches.

It might be email - phone call - email, or maybe you send an email, and you follow it up with a phone call, or you call first, then send an email.

There are some things that you can do which complement each other and draw people's attention to the fact that you're trying to contact them that will make them more likely to respond in their own time (or at least more likely to be open to speaking to you when the next time comes up.

Being persistent, without being a pest, is a balancing act.

Finding the right cadence to chase a prospect, without sounding desperate, is the key to keeping sales processes moving toward the next step.

Episode 54 of CRE Success: The Podcast shares a few ideas on how revenue-generating commercial real estate professionals can deal with being ‘ghosted’ by prospects.

Episode transcript:

If you've ever been ghosted by a prospect and thought to yourself that this person is trying to send me a message by not sending me a message, then this is going to be a great episode for you because I've got some other ideas.

Hi, and welcome to episode 54 of the show. I'm Darren Krakowiak.

I equip commercial real estate professionals with proven client attraction and retention systems so they can save time, earn more, and be top performers in their market.

It is awesome to have you with us. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Today's episode is brought to you by Re-Leased, a cloud based commercial property management platform, which centralizes portfolio data automates workflows and provides real time reporting for landlords and property managers.

Before we get into today's topic, I do have something for you. It's another 53 episodes, that is the back catalogue of CRE Success: The Podcast.

Of course, we did revamp the format from Episode 51 by recording each episode live and streaming it to YouTube and LinkedIn, just a couple of hours after that stream.

Thank you to my VA Mary, who helps me make all that happen very quickly.

But just because we've changed the podcast format, that doesn't mean there's not still tons of value in those previous episodes.

So, if you go back to season one, season two, you'll find 40 episodes of interviews, you'll also find some limited release episodes if you've got those in your feed.

Plus, there is a ton of bonus episodes as well. And I'd like to draw your attention right now to bonus episode number 5 from season 1, which is called 'the learn and grow' bonus episode.

And this one was released on December 31, 2020. And it's all about what you can do to continually improve yourself and strive for bigger and better.

I speak to five commercial real estate professionals about how they focus on learning and growth themselves in their personal and professional lives.

And I'm sure that you'll get a lot of ideas from what they do to help you learn and grow and continue to become even better.

So, go and check that out the learn and grow bonus episode. It's bonus episode 5 in season 1 of CRE Success: The Podcast.

Last week, we talked about how to get people to respond to emails.

And in particular, I was talking to you about how you can get clients to respond to timely emails that you need to get a response on to keep projects moving forward.

Well, today I want to cover how do you deal with it when you've had some positive interaction with a new prospect, but then they go quiet on you, they ghost you, and you're trying to contact them, whether it's email or phone calls, and you're not getting anything back.

And I know that this can really play on people's minds, a lot of insecurities can come up, when someone doesn't get back to you and you think to yourself that I did something wrong.

You might just assume that the other person is not interested. You might feel that it's all too hard, and that it's not worth continuing to chase.

And you know, I think a lot of people give up too easily when this happens. And I don't want you to do that.

At the same time, I don't want you to just keep on calling and calling until they tell you to rock off with no real strategy.

So, I want to talk to you about what to think and what to do when you find yourself in this situation.

And the first thing to do is to not assume anything. Who knows what the other person is thinking.

So, I don't think it's the right thing to just assume that because they haven't gotten back to you within the timeframe that you think is the right amount of time that they are not interested in speaking to you again.

If you've got a reason to believe that they would want to speak to you again, then I would assume that they do want to speak to you again.

Rather, the reason that they probably haven't gotten back to you yet is because it's not time sensitive for them.

It's not important enough for them yet, or you haven't made it important enough for them yet, or they just have some other priorities.

I think if you take it personally or if you get concerned every time someone doesn't respond to your outreach, then you're going to have a very unhappy, stressful and anxiety ridden time in commercial real estate because a lot of what we have to do is chase people down in order to keep processes and projects moving forward.

So, I wanted to share a couple of times where my persistence and may not make an assumption that somebody didn't want to speak to me actually worked in my favor.

And I've got one example from my commercial real estate agent days and one from my CRE Success days, and I'll tell you about the CRE Success story first.

And it's from earlier this year. So, it's pretty fresh in my mind.

And with this particular person, I had a warm referral into them. And I had lunch with them, and felt like the lunch went really well.

And it was pretty positive. But then, you know, I didn't really hear anything back after I'd followed up.

And that little voice inside my head said, "Maybe that lunch didn't go as well as you think it did."

But I thought, "No, I think it did." So, I continued to follow up. But I didn't just call him like a crazy person every three days.

I sent him I think one or two emails and one phone call in between, over a period of about two weeks.

But when he didn't get back to me, I didn't just think, "Okay, he doesn't want to speak to me ever again."

I thought, perhaps he's busy, perhaps now's not the right time. And I just made a note to call them again, in around a month.

And when I got back to him about a month later, and it was an email, actually, I sent him the email. And he got back to me very quickly to that email.

And from that email, big things started to happen in terms of another project, which led to other opportunities within his organization.

So, I'm so glad that I followed up, that I didn't make the assumption that he never wanted to hear from me ever again.

And I had a system also to follow up with him in a way which was still timely, but not too quick from when I hadn't received any replies to the responses, or any replies to the messages that I had sent him.

You know, I gave it some time, gave him some space. And then I came back to it.

And I was able to move that process forward as I wanted to.

The other example I can think of which comes to mind is, I had been referred to somebody.

Hadn't actually met this person, but certainly I'd spoken to them on the phone.

And by speaking to them on the phone, they had told me, this was a tenant rep potential client that a lease expired, that was coming up about 18 months from when we're having the conversation.

So, it was around the right time to be starting the conversation with them.

And in that case, he said to me, he needed to speak to his boss who was going to come in town, I think, next week or the week after.

So, let him have that conversation. And then I should give him a call back. And we'll talk about the next steps.

And so I did and I contacted him and contacted him and contacted him, I think three times.

And I felt that I had the right to do that, because he had told me to get in contact with him again.

And I felt that we'd had a good conversation. Now, he actually came back to me, after the third time I tried to speak, tried to call him.

And he was a little bit snarky with the fact that I was trying to chase him a lot.

But I don't think I did the wrong thing, because I felt like I had the right to be contacting him because we'd had the conversation about us having a future conversation, following him speaking to a relevant stakeholder.

And when he got a bit narky, I didn't bite back, I gave him some space. And I contacted him again next week.

And I don't know maybe he was having a bad day that day. Because when I got back to him, he didn't seem annoyed at all. And he was ready to take the next step.

So, I think we've just don't want to assume that when we're not getting responses that we're expecting, ee don't want to assume the worst.

Give people the benefit of the doubt whether it is that they're busy with other things, whether they're having a bad day.

Try not to be too paranoid that you've done something wrong, and there's a reason for them ghosting you.

Instead, back yourself if they haven't told you that they don't ever want to hear from you ever again, then I would assume that I do want to hear from you again.

And certainly, I would also assume or expect that if you have done enough to have earned the right to be told "No", then I would keep going until I hear the "No", with some caveats, though.

So, I wouldn't want to be getting into an email conversation with myself.

You know, when you see an email and someone's reply to that email, and then they've replied to that email, and it's just a threat of one-sided email communication.

Like I don't think that's particularly useful beyond perhaps one reply to all from the first email.

I think you want to try some different approaches. So, it might be email - phone call - email, or maybe you do an email and you follow it up with a phone call, or you call first and then you send an email.

So, there's some things that you can do which complement each other and draw people's attention to the fact that you're trying to contact them and perhaps that makes them more likely to respond in their own time or at least more likely to be open to speaking to you when the next time comes up.

I think that there's a difference as well in chasing a new prospect versus following up with an existing one.

So, with a prospect who you've already had some conversation or contact with, you should probably be a little bit more Dugard with your follow up.

Because again, they have expressed some interest by having a conversation with you, and not telling you that they never want to speak to you again.

If they've spoken to you, and any reasonable person would expect that there was going to be another conversation that should occur after that, then I will continue to follow them up.

But again, I might give some space if after two or three times I'm not really hearing anything back.

Okay, maybe this is not the right time to be following up with them, I'll come back to them again, in four weeks, six weeks, whatever the case might be.

And when I do come back to them, then I want to have something new to say to them, whether it's a new opportunity, whether something's changed, or whether it's just to note that, "Hey, last time we spoke, I know that this was important, some time has gone past that just wanted to check in and see if now's the right time to have that conversation."

I think it's important to not be seen as a pest. You want to be seen as somebody who is persistent, who's interested.

And also, is not deterred by the fact that perhaps they haven't given you any love, yet, you're showing that you're thick skinned and that you're confident, then that you're able to handle it, I guess.

So, look, don't take it personally, if someone doesn't respond to you, often, they're just busy.

Sometimes they're even expecting to be chaste a little bit if they're a busy person, or if maybe they work in sales, or they had worked in sales, and they think that somebody's got to earn the right to speak to them.

Don't make assumptions, it can take some time to get people to get back to you.

But if you think that you have earned the right to speak to them again, then don't assume that they don't want to speak to you. Keep going.

Because until they tell you that they don't want to speak to you ever again, you should you should continue to try to speak to them.

Okay, well, I hope that helps you when it comes to how it is that you should be following up with prospects that you've made contact with.

Time is almost up. But before we go, I wanted to quickly share CRE Success: Membership is going to be reopening to members later this year.

We have 46 members from eight different countries inside our membership.

We meet every single month, twice a month, in fact, to go through some skills training.

We've got a community of commercial real estate professionals around the world who support each other who gets support.

I in there, providing feedback acting as a sounding board, accountability.

There's lots of content also in the platform. I won't do the whole sales spiel right now.

But I do want to encourage you to go to cresuccess.co/membership and get on the waiting list.

Because we're going to be opening the doors later this year. And I would love for you to be one of the first to join us.

If this content is useful to you, then definitely being inside CRE Success: Membership will be of great benefit to you.

It's been great spending some time with you today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.