What to do When Your Buyers Simply Don’t Answer

It’s one of the facts of sales life – buyers often don’t respond. They don’t pick up their phones, don’t respond emails or other various ways to get in touch. Two questions come to mind – 1) Why won’t they just answer? 2) What can you do about it?
Realize that the volume of communication is higher than ever before.
There’s a lot of great things about our digital age, including the multiple ways to instantly contact people literally around the world. But the downside is that there’s multiple ways to instantly contact people literally around the world.
What happens is that buyers are flooded with contacts from salespeople – sometimes dozens per day. It’s gotten to the point where if buyers responded to every single contact they received, they would have little time to attend to their actual daily work. So in trying to reaching your leads, realize that you’re just one drop of water in a great, crushing sea.
Don’t take it personally.
It can be all too easy to go into a frothy rage or depression when you send out a bevy of carefully crafted, personalized emails and are well-prepared to have a thoughtful, engaging discovery conversation only to be met by Unread/Read with no answer and voice respectively.
The reality is though, even in these instances, don’t take it personally. These radio silences aren’t a reflection of you personally – it’s just part of the larger fabric of our always online, hyper-communicative world today.
Frame the conversation as a chance for the buyer to talk about themselves.Most people enjoy talking about themselves and their situation, particularly if they have a problem in need of a solution. Shaping the discussion in that light will make them much more receptive to responding. If you have the opportunity to relate to something, use that to start fostering the relationship. Because everything is sales, sales, sales, a chance to have a connection that isn’t directly tied to sales can often be the way to wedge your foot in the door and build a relationship.
Categorize your leads with metrics and ranking systems such as opportunity and qualification scores.
A good way to cut down on the mass rejection is to do a little list pruning beforehand. If your CRM, marketing or sales automation software doesn’t already provide you with an actionable quality lead score, try to come up with a proprietary rankings system for the leads who are most likely to be willing to engage in conversation, based on the metrics that your sales leadership has provided for the formula to compute opportunity and qualification scores. It won’t completely eliminate the non-responses of course, but a ranking will allow you to target the most likely responses.
Be concise and personable in your communications – especially emails.
There’s enough thought pieces on generating quality touches to fill up several Gmail accounts. Essentially though, they all come down to three basic principles:


Be concise in your contacts. Buyers simply do not have the time to read a lengthy email or engage in a meandering conversation.
Have a legitimate purpose for communicating and provide a clear benefit for your contact to take the meeting with you.
Personalize everything. The quickest way to get ignored is to do a blast email/phone campaign. Sure, you can point to quantity of contact attempts, but without personalization, and the necessary buyer research that goes into sculpting a meaningful message, you’re going to be severely lacking in quality. Consequently, your conversion rates will plummet like Icarus into the sea of oblivion.

Make sure that you’re taking advantage of the opportunities voicemails present.
Tired of yet another voicemail? Change your mindset – it’s a wonderful opportunity to try and connect with a buyer. We won’t repeat ourselves here, but instead encourage you to go visit our blog post on the topic.

The endless oceans of silence can be a frustrating part of sales, leaving you feeling like you’re calling into a deep, endless void. But using these strategies will help reduce the impact of those fathomless depths and aid you in getting waves of answers back, upon which you can surf to sales success.

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