On this episode of #AskJeb, Becca asks: “When a prospect hangs up on me during a prospecting call, what is a best practice for reaching out again?”
Rejection Hurts— Here’s What To Do Next
It always hurts just a little bit when someone hangs up on you during a prospecting call. That click can be a little bit painful.
When someone hangs up on me, what I do is call back and say, “It sounds like we just got disconnected.”
Then I just go back to what I was already saying. Now that doesn’t always end very well. In a lot of cases, they hang up again or they tell me to go away or give me an objection, but it’s better than just a click.
Get Back on The Phone
And it’s basically what I learned as a young kid when I was riding horses. When I fell off, my mom made me get back on the horse. And so when I’m on a prospecting call, when I fall off, I just call back again.
Sometimes they’ll talk to me or we legitimately got disconnected. Now, if the hangup is someone’s screaming at you, “Hey, I’m not interested.” *Click*
Then calling back is probably not going to solve your problem. It’s not going to get them to re-engage. If they say “I’m not interested,” “It’s a bad time,” “I don’t want to talk to you,” and they hang up, that’s telling you that calling them again is probably not going to be a good idea, and it’s going to sound more like stalking.
So what you want to do from that point is put them on a nurturing campaign. I might bring them back around in 90 days and start calling again or I might put them in a different sequence. At least I know they’re real and I know that they’re not interested at the moment.
It’s About Them, It’s Not About You
What I don’t really know is what’s happening on their end of the phone. I have no idea whether or not they’re having a bad day or whether, for example, their boss just walked in and yelled at them. And the one thing that you have to realize when people hang up on you is it’s really not about you. It’s about them.
Call Them Back And You Might Get A Yes
Not too long ago, I was working with the sales team calling a list of prospects for an upcoming Fanatical Prospecting Bootcamp. So I had a list of prospects. And the third prospect I called was really, really mean and ugly.
She yelled at me and hung up and she did it in a way that was bothering me enough that 13 dials later, I was like, “I gotta call this person back again.”
So I did, I just picked the phone up, I called her back, and I did exactly the same thing that I did on the previous call. And she set the appointment with me.
And that just tells you that most people, when you call and they hang up or you call and they’re mean, or they’re ugly to you, they don’t even really remember days later that you were even a person, they have no idea.
Don’t Be A Stalker, But Don’t Be Afraid To Call Them Again
Their reaction had to do with something that was happening in their world. So there’s no harm, no foul in calling back later.
I don’t want to come across like a stalker, but I’m not going to take them off my list and I’m not going to avoid calling them in the future.
If they hang up on me, if they say they’re not interested, I’m just going to recycle them on my list at an appropriate point in the future and I’m going to call back.
You’ll be surprised at how often when you call back, the result is exactly what you wanted. You get a yes, you set the appointment, and eventually you close the deal.