You just got a new lead. You are excited, ready to help, and you call them immediately. But they don’t answer. You call again later—silence. Why do interested prospects suddenly vanish the moment you reach out?
In this episode of Fix My Business, Scott answers a question from Jennifer, whose leads are ghosting her despite her fast response time. Scott reveals why your “speed to lead” might actually be scaring your customers away and introduces a psychological approach to sales that will stop the ghosting.
The Core Problem: The “Pounce” Reflex When a customer hits “submit” on a lead form, they often feel immediate doubt or fear. When you call them instantly with high energy, you aren’t “serving” them—you are accidentally cornering them.
The Solution: Coax the Cat Scott explains that skeptical buyers are like scared cats. If you run at them, they bolt. If you move slowly, lower your energy, and let them come to you, they will eventually eat out of your hand.
Key Takeaways:
- De-escalate the First Interaction: Stop asking for a phone call in the first email. Instead, ask low-stakes “curiosity” questions to lower their guard (e.g., “Are you just looking or ready to move?”).
- The “One Size Fits All” Trap: Why you cannot have a single rigid sales script for every person.
- Segment Your Follow-up: How to separate the “fast movers” from the “scared buyers” so you don’t annoy the former or frighten the latter.
- The 7-11 Rule: Why you need 7 to 11 interactions (touches) before a stranger trusts you enough to buy.
- Volume is King: Why ghosting often feels personal, but is actually just a numbers game.
Memorable Quote:
“If you’ve ever been around a cat or a scared dog, you gotta go in really, really slow. You can’t move too fast. And it’s the same way with buyers… Oftentimes, our energy, our excitement as sellers, we wanna pounce. But we have to meet them where they are.” — Scott Todd
Mentioned in This Episode:
- Submit Your Question: stuck in the “messy middle” of business? Submit your question at ScottTodd.net/ask to be featured on the show.
Full Transcript
Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you get unstuck so you can keep growing your business. And we do that by answering your questions that you’ve submitted. And today’s question comes from Jennifer, and Jennifer says, ” My sales are slow, and my leads keep ghosting me. I call them within 30 minutes of them submitting the lead, and it seems like the majority of them don’t return my call. Is there a cure for this? Jennifer.
First of all, we have to really get into the mind of the buyer. And this is not necessarily a lead problem, but more of a marketing or sales system problem. It’s a sales system problem. And what happens a lot of times is people will submit a lead, they’re interested in this, but then after they hit that submit button, they get scared. They get scared. So then you come back.
And you’re like, Hey, I’m Jennifer. I’m here to help you. Let me show you what I have. Let me help you solve this problem. And all of a sudden the people have pulled back and they don’t respond to you. And now all of a sudden you’re left with this trap, this, this instance where there’s a disconnect between where you’re coming from and the speed in which you’re coming from and where they are mentally at that time. So
here’s the way that I would rather do this. I’d rather build a system, a marketing system, really specifically a sales system, because once we have the lead, that’s a sales problem. And the sales system needs to really think about where we’re gonna meet that buyer, where they are in the process mentally. And what we really have to do is we have to figure out first, and the first step is how do we deescalate this interaction?
Instead of saying, hey, do you want to jump on a call so I can help you? Maybe the response says, hey, just curious, where are you in the process? Are you just looking or are you really serious right now? What’s your timeframe? You see, when you have that information or when you approach it from that level of curiosity, what happens is the buyer’s guard will come down.
And when the guard comes down, then they’re more likely to interact with you. Think about it as like coaxing the cat. Okay? If you’ve ever been around a cat or a scared dog, you gotta go in really, really slow. You can’t move too fast. And it’s the same way with buyers. And oftentimes, our energy, our excitement as sellers, we wanna pounce. We’re here to help. We want that lead. We wanna make the sale.
But after they’ve submitted, there’s lots of doubts and there’s lots of concerns that’s going through their mind. We have to meet them where they are. So step one is I want to figure out how I can deescalate that conversation, that first interaction with them to slow it down. And if they want to move faster, then I can catch up to them. But I need to figure out the least common denominator says that they’re going to be scared. I’m going to come to them very cautiously and slowly. Step number two.
What I’m gonna do then is I’m segregate, segment my audience, okay? And what I wanna do is I wanna say, hey, they’re not necessarily responding to me. So they’re gonna go down one track of that sales system. Maybe they’re gonna get an email cadence with a call from me in a couple days. And if you do text, I don’t do text in my business, but if you do text, then you have to figure out how that interacts with that whole sales journey, right?
Now, if they’re responding back to you faster, then they’re likely showing that they’re more engaged and more active, that I’m going to meet them where they are. My sales system is going to meet them where they are. So what happens is we oftentimes try to build a sales system where it’s one size fits all, and it’s never a one size fits all. Again, we have to look at the journey that they’re on. Some people are moving faster on that journey. Some people are moving slower on that journey.
I had somebody ask me once, said, Hey Scott, what does your seventh message to somebody look like in your sales conversation? And I said, there, there isn’t a standard seventh conversation. That’s not a thing, man. Like, what do you mean? Like, isn’t everything scripted out and, like sent out through email? No, because every sales interaction takes its own journey.
And if we try to do this and we try to build one journey and try to build one size fits all, it won’t work. They’re going to reject it. So step two is build the customer journey based on how they’re interacting with you. If they tend to ghost you, maybe they got scared. The other thing to think about too in the ghosting scenario is they don’t just inquire one person.
they’re probably inquiring at multiple stops, multiple people. So maybe they changed their mind on yours, but you know what? They’re still going on my customer journey. So step one, we have that one down. Step two, we have that one down. And step three, once I build that customer journey, guess what? I’m going to continue to have interactions with them. There are studies that basically say that somebody needs to hear from you seven to 11 times.
Okay, they need to hear from you seven to 11 times. Think about me. Think about this podcast. How many times do you need to hear it before you begin to trust me? Seven to 11 times. You need to see me or hear from me seven to 11 times. I’ve said that multiple times. So ultimately what you want to do is you want to build this system that will allow you to interact with them on their terms.
but yet you don’t stop. You keep bringing them new ideas. You keep bringing them new properties. And in the end, you have to understand that it’s really a numbers game. You just need lots and lots of leads. All right, so that’s how we’re gonna navigate through that situation. Jennifer, hopefully that helps you. If you have a question, if your business is stuck somewhere, you can go to scotttodd.net forward slash ask.
I’ll be happy to answer your question on this show. In the meantime, I will see you in our next episode. In between then, I want you to keep moving your feet.