Why Prospective Clients Go Quiet And What You Should Do About It
If you don't get a quick yes, the project is probably a no.
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The Five Types Of Responses To Proposals
When you send through a proposal, one of five things will happen.
Approval. You get a yes and then you can begin drafting up a contract (or wait for the client to provide you with a contract).
Questions. You get questions about the specifics of the contract and proposal. This is usually a great sign, but you need to address these before moving to the contract stage.
Maybe. You get a maybe - but there is a delay due to an external factor.
Rejection. You get an outright rejection.
Silence. You get no response at all.
In my experience, these five responses can be categorised as just two responses.
The top two are a ‘yes’, and the bottom three are a ‘no’.
People Approve Quickly
When a project moves forward, it typically moves forward quickly. The longer the delay, the less likely it will proceed.
If you get questions about the scope of work on the proposal, that’s also a good sign. It means the fee is ok, but you just need to clarify a few details.
Generally speaking, if you quote a fee and there is agreement on the fee within a week or two, everything else will usually work out at the contract stage.
Rejections Are Great Opportunities
The bottom three responses (maybe, silences, and outright rejection) are more complex.
Let’s begin with the outright rejection.
In our experience, rejections are the least common response of the five. We will discuss why shortly.
Rejections are a great opportunity to learn. You want to discover why the proposal was rejected so you use the lessons later. You want to learn if the proposal was rejected because of the fee, scope, or trust in you.
If the fee is considered too high, you can do more to establish your unique value proposition.
If the scope isn’t right, that’s a listening problem.
If the trust isn’t there (or they went with another consultant), that’s a credibility and positioning problem.
All of which is useful to know.
The sad truth though is you’re very unlikely to receive a rejection. Most people will just ghost you.
Why People Ghost And What You Can Do About It
Rejection is the least common response I’ve received to proposals.
If you’ve undertaken many B2B sales, you will sometimes find a prospect who you’ve had a great rapport with will suddenly go dead quiet after you send a quote or proposal for your services.
This is obviously impolite, cowardly, and unprofessional, but also a widespread practice. It’s also frustrating for the consultant because you don’t know whether the proposal is moving forward or not.
As a general rule, if your contact goes quiet - the proposal has been rejected.
I typically follow up with a prospect once a week for three weeks. After that, I make the project as lost.
The truth is people find it very hard to say ‘no’ to people. Especially when they have taken up a considerable amount of your time to define the requirements. Instead of delivering the regrettable news, they prefer to give no response than risk their pain of rejecting you.
I hate it, you hate it, but it happens. If your contact goes quiet on you for over a week, the likelihood the proposal will be accepted is close to zero.
Maybe Means ‘No’
It’s the maybes which are the most complex.
For an extremely long time, I would get excited about maybe responses to a proposal. For example:
“We just need to get through the conference season and then we can focus on this”
Or...
“We love the idea, but we’re just going through a reorganisation right now. We will be in touch in a few months once it’s complete”
I would keep these prospects in the sales pipeline and look forward to working with them. I just needed to wait for the conditions to click!
I would often chase clients about the project and begin planning out the work in detail. Over time I began to realise the obvious. They weren’t saying maybe. They were saying ‘no’. They didn’t want to admit to themselves or to me, that it was a no. So they masked the no with a future possibility.
If a project isn’t going to proceed within the month, it almost certainly never will. I can count on two fingers the number of projects which were a maybe and eventually became a ‘yes’.
It simply doesn’t happen often enough to invest any time into the maybe group.
The problem with the ghosters and the maybes is you don’t get to learn why you were rejected and how you can improve next time. One approach we’ve had some success with here is letting the prospect off the hook so we can gather feedback.
Often an email such as the one below can help.
“Hi [xyz],
We haven’t heard from you in a couple of weeks, so I hope it’s ok to assume the project isn’t going forward. If things ever change, let me know. We would love to work with you at some point in the future.
If I can ask one favour, are you able to share the reason things are stalled here? No worries if you can’t, it would just be useful for us in future projects
Wishing you all the best with your [activity] efforts”.
Be Realistic About Your Sales Pipeline
The key lesson from this stage are you either get a yes (or clarifying questions) within the week or the project is very unlikely to proceed.
Be realistic about that in your sales pipeline. If you don’t get a quick yes, the project is almost always a no. That happens to even the best salespeople. So allocate your future time accordingly. If you get a sudden yes later, treat it as a lucky bonus.
Be kind to the people who don’t move forward with working with you - regardless of how much time you’ve invested in the project up until that point. You never know when the organisation will come around again (or whether the individual concerned will move to a new role and opt to bring in your support then).