New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How to avoid ghosting by potential customers?

May 29, 2019 Hacker News No Comments

Ask HN: How to avoid ghosting by potential customers?
3 by ajeet_dhaliwal | 0 comments on Hacker News.
If you are involved with sales in anyway you have probably encountered ghosting - it's when you've been having (what seems) like a fruitful conversation about their problems, their interest in what you are selling and helping them through perhaps a trial or getting started, you've exchanged anywhere from 5 to 75 emails and then suddenly they are gone, you never hear from them ever again, despite following up, no reasons, just gone. To be clear I am not talking about someone never having responded ever, I'm talking about a situation where the conversation has begun, you may have exchanged potentially dozens of emails, perhaps even spoken on the phone, perhaps even written custom code or helped with integration. It looks like the term originally comes from online dating but I am talking about the business variety. The specific question I have is, assuming this is going to happen and accepting that there will be a subset of potential prospects that do this, has anyone found any ways to avoid this from happening, seeing warning signs, or reducing the rate this happens? In particular interest, it seems clear they are no longer interested in the product or service, but were they ever interested? I'm reading about the psychology around why this happens too and from what I understand they were interested at some point, but then changed their mind, perhaps the product wasn't good enough, or didn't quite meet their needs, whatever the reason, you won't find out, but I am assuming they were interested at some point. Of course, the important thing is to quickly move on when you have realized this has happened but I think the rate of ghosting has crept up and hearing about other people's experience and thoughts on this might save me and others reading a lot of time.