You had a great conversation. Got excited about the new business. It all seemed like it was going to happen. Then they ghosted you. So how do you get these leads going again without seeming like a second hand car sales person?
When the lead goes quiet, we often take the silence to mean they’re not interested. Whereas what they’re really saying is not yet. Your challenge is how do you stay in touch, so that when they are ready to restart the conversation, they pick up with you. The best rainmakers are brilliant at staying in touch with prospects until they are finally ready to buy.
I’m Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner & Still Have a Life. I’m the leading global expert in what it takes to move from senior fee earner to partner . Here are 5 ways to work with me.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
- Why the buyer controls the speed of the sales process, and how to handle this
- The three questions to ask at the end of a conversation, and how they give you permission in your own mind to follow up
- What to send a lead once you have moved them to long lead status
- The signals that tell you a “not yet” is warming up again, and what to do when you spot one
If you find this episode useful, don’t forget to like it and then subscribe so you don’t miss another episode.
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
You had a great conversation. Got excited about the new business. It all seemed like it was going to happen.
Then they ghosted you.
The question is how can you get these leads going again without seeming like a second hand car sales person?
This is the focus for today’s episode. How to restart stalled leads that have gone quiet on you. It was also the topic of a group coaching call I did with some lawyers across the world who were on one of our how to make partner programmes.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend. The author of Poised for Partnership, and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life. In this podcast, I will be highlighting some of the great stuff in our Progress To Partner Academy.
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Right. Let’s talk about what to do when a lead goes quiet.
The first thing to say is that selling is a process, and in any one conversation you are only trying to move someone one step along it.
In Chapter 6 of Poised for Partnership (I’ve put a link to the book in the shownotes) I set out the five stages a buyer goes through before they actually buy. It runs from everything is fine, through knowing they have a problem, deciding what they need to do about that problem, finding the people who could help, and then taking the decision to buy.
Your job in a first conversation is to work out which stage your Prospective Client is at, and move them to the next one. You are not trying to get from a nice chat to a piece of signed off business in one meeting.
When it comes to sales, the buyer controls the speed at which they go through the sales process. Whereas often in our heads, we think that we can control the process. We believe in the myth of this ultimate salesperson: that we can put them in any conversation and they’ll come away having one work. This person just doesn’t exist.
When the lead goes quiet, we often take the silence to mean that they’re not interested. Whereas actually what they’re really saying is not yet. For example, their priorities may have changed. Maybe there was a budget freeze. Maybe they moved into a new financial year and things have changed.
What they haven’t said is no, and if there’s a real need there at some point, they will need your services. Your challenge is how do you stay in touch so that when they are already to restart the conversation, they pick up with you.
Which brings me to the second place this goes wrong, and it happens before the lead has gone quiet at all.
At the end of a good conversation, most people say something like, “leave it with me and I’ll send something over.” And then they wait.
What you want to be asking instead is this.
What do you think is the right next step from this conversation? When do you want to hear from me if I haven’t heard from you? When should I follow up? And what’s the best way to do this?
That last one changes what happens next. It turns your follow-up into something they have asked you to do. So when you ring in three weeks, you are following the instruction they gave you. It also hands you their preferred channel, which is often not the email address on their business card.
It gives you the permission in your mind to get in touch with them. After all, they have asked you to follow up.
Ask those three questions and whilst it may not stop clients stalling on potential new pieces of work, it does at least keep you in control. It means when they’re ready to restart, you’re already talking to them
By the way, if you struggle with the sales conversation, there is an on-demand course inside our Progress to Partner Academy called How to Go from Coffees to Instructions. I’ll come back to it at the end.
Now, you can do all of that and the lead still goes quiet. It happens to me and it will happen to you.
The first thing to take on board is that it is not personal. When someone stops replying it almost always means their priorities have moved. My biggest client actually took two years for me to go from the first inquiry to the first bit of work actually happening.
For me, in this instance, it was that they needed to get internal firm buy-in to do the project properly, which is why it took the time. For you, it could be that maybe they got busy with another project, maybe a decision maker left, maybe a budget got pushed into the next financial year.
Despite what your brain may be thinking, it’s very rare that they don’t want to work with you, and it’s a hard no.
So your aim is not to close down the lead and mark it as lost. It is to keep a conversation going with them until they are ready.
Good ways of doing this are:
- Connect with them on social media, LinkedIn at a minimum.
- Get a mobile number, so you have a direct line rather than a switchboard. I like sending text messages to my contacts to stay in touch with them.
- And get an email address they will read, rather than a generic info address that lands in a shared inbox nobody owns.
While the lead still feels live, gentle nudges are fine. I send emails that say, “just checking in, has anything moved on this, do we need to talk?” And My email is often that short and that direct to the point.
After a while those emails stop doing anything, and that is where most people give up altogether. It is also where I start doing a different strategy.
For me I move them to in my head ‘long lead status’. This means I start thinking about What could I send this person that they would find valuable?
Here is a live example from my own business. I quoted for a piece of work earlier this year and we are three months past the point where I expected to hear back. This week I am sending that client a H2MP podcast episode.
I’ve chosen my episode because it covers a part of the work she was thinking about commissioning, with a note asking how she approaches that bit at the moment. I am not asking her what happened to the work. All I am doing is keeping Visible, sending her something useful and credentialising myself. If there is work to be had with this person, they will get in touch with me.
The other part of restarting stalled leads is learning to spot when a stalled lead is warming up again.
The signals are there if know what to look for. For example: They will reply promptly to your emails. They are likely to look at your LinkedIn profile. They may start commenting on your posts on social media. If your firm gives you the data, you may be able to see that they have opened an email.
We had a live lead go quiet in April this year, after they had been ready to sign up as a client. What I noticed was that they had looked at my LinkedIn profile, so I dropped them a note asking how they were doing. They came straight back, and we started chatting via LinkedIn. A while later I noticed they were opening my emails. They are now back in the diary and have told me verbally that they are going to commit to becoming a client. None of that would have happened if I had not spotted the two signals when they showed me they were still interested.
When you are thinking of approaching them when they have gone quiet you could: Invite them to an event your firm is running See if they are open to having a coffee? See if they are going to any industry events you are going to, and whether they are up for a coffee at the event?
The people your firm describes as rainmakers are rarely the ones who are brilliant at landing work the first time somebody expresses an interest. They are the ones who stay in touch, respectfully and without pestering, until the client is ready to buy. Leads go quiet on everyone, and the person who stays in touch with their ‘not yets’ always has warm prospects all year round.
Now, if you’re thinking, “I do not want to be the person who keeps chasing”, that’s exactly what our How to Go from Coffees to Instructions course is designed for. Its module on sales takes you through what happens between that first conversation and the signed instruction, so that following up becomes just part of your business development activity. Rather than something you need to psyche yourself up for.
I’ve popped a link to our Progress To Partner Academy – which contains our coffees to instructions course – directly in the show notes for this episode. Also in the show notes, you’ll find links to my books, Poised for Partnership and How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life, so you can easily find them on Amazon. And as a thank you for listening, there’s also a link for a 10% discount on annual membership for our Progress To Partner Academy using the code PODCAST10.
That’s all for this episode of the How to Make Partner podcast. What’s your action for this week? Look at your pipeline of leads that has gone quiet. Send that one lead something they would find valuable, connected to the work they were considering.
If you have enjoyed this episode please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. This helps us get the word out to others who may need this advice too. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode.
Thanks for listening!
I’m Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner & Still Have a Life. I’m the leading global expert in what it takes to move from senior fee earner to partner – and when you get there, stay there. Here are 5 ways to work with me.
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The course to start with is How to Create a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner. This on-demand course takes you step by step through:
- Building a Business Plan for your practice using the STAGe model
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- 9 Differences of a Lateral Hire Partner Business Case
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These resources will help you:
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If the Partnership Admissions Process is what is in front of you, this section of Progress to Partner will help you go into it prepared rather than hoping.
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Books mentioned
Poised for Partnership by Heather Townsend – https://amzn.to/3ETEYk3
How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life by Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie – https://amzn.to/4iLxugM
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