Your manager can't rescue the deal (and charity request!)

I have lost track of the number of occasions where somebody has said to me “my contact is ghosting me, what can I do to get them to re-engage?”. Quite frankly, if they are ghosting you, it’s probably too late. They may just be super busy or on holiday or dealing with a family emergency, in which case they will come back. But most likely they simply don’t think that you or your product are important enough to invest time in right now. Yes, they should be polite and they should communicate that to you, but human beings are not always perfect.

The main thing you can do to prevent this happening is ensure that you have uncovered a serious pain that they have, to the extent that they really feel the frustration of now and the opportunity of working with you. This is all about Discovery – early stage and throughout the process – which I have written about more than once and will undoubtedly come back to.

However, there is another important angle. If you are single threaded in your account – you have a single contact there – then you have the danger that they may at some point become too busy to engage, or it may be that they don’t feel the pain or opportunity as intensely as others in their organisation. Therefore, in any B2B sale of any significant value you need to develop multiple threads of communication.

* The AE should absolutely speak to as many people as possible/relevant, but there are many others in the business who can help. Assuming you have a Solution Engineer (SE - person who helps with the technical side of sales), they should be speaking with their more technical counterparts.

* Make sure that your VP, CEO or otherwise is engaged with the Economic Buyer/Decision Maker.

* The AE should be coordinating these relationships. Ensuring that the messages are consistent, that we are focusing on the prospect’s pain or opportunity, and showing how we can give each individual significant benefit.

Too often, AEs ask their manager to make a cold contact with senior staff at the prospect in order to rescue a dying relationship. It’s just not going work. You need your manager engage with the senior staff/Economic Buyer early. Build the relationship as soon as you can. Don’t assume it’ll be fine. Don’t feel that it is somehow a negative reflection on yourself if you have your manager engaged. Great salespeople use all their resources. In enterprise, that means multilevel, multithreaded selling. Make those introductions happen.