How to turn 'no-shows' into sales

Hello and welcome to this Lead Forensics webinar. I am Brand Awareness Manager and webinar host, Joe Ducarreaux. Joining us for this webinar entitled, How To Turn ‘No Shows’ Into Sales are an expert panel of guests. We have Allison Edgar, MBE, author of SMASH IT, The Art of Getting What YOU Want and Chief Smasher at Smash-It training.

Hello Alison.

Alison: Hi

Joe: We are joined by Will Aitkin, in quite possibly the coolest room I’ve ever seen. Will is Head Sales Evangelist at Sales Feed. Hi, Will.

Will: Good day, Joe. Thank you.

Joe: We have Chris Murray, who is author of Five Point Prospecting and Selling With Ease and founder of Lucrum House Group.

Chris: Hi, guys.

Joe: And returning guest Tyler Witt, Sales Leader at Lead Forensics. Great to have you back, Tyler.

Tyler: Great to be here.

Joe: I think we’ll be using the questions function to take questions from the audience. This can be found at the top right of the screen. There are quite a few guests. You know, there’s going to be quite a lot of chatter on this one. I think it’s going to be a very, very popular topic. So we may not get time, but do pop them in anyway. If we’ve got some time at the end, we’ll jump onto those ones.

Joe: So let’s get started. I think we’ll go for a sort of round robin for the first question. So I’m going to start with you, Alison, if that’s OK. Do you think that the pandemic has affected no shows? And have you seen it increase or decrease with people feeling that Zoom fatigue at all?

Alison: I think the answer to the first question is yes. I think it is because I think if you look specifically at things like face to face meetings or actually having those conversations, it’s easier now to duck out…….and it’s easier for people to use COVID as an excuse to say ‘oh dear I was busy’. I’m not saying that it’s not a genuine excuse in a lot of cases but for a lot of people I think as soon as you use that c-word, then, you know, you give yourself a little bit of a leeway. You can’t really come down too hard on it. And then Zoom fatigue for sure…….. I mean, now I’m sort of back doing more stuff face to face but I think even during the pandemic where you would have done like a whole day face to face, you really couldn’t hold people’s attention for more than a couple of hours. So I think there was definitely a big shift, but I think the shift is coming back again to less Zooms. But I do think actually the Zoom style of selling and appointment making and conversation is great because it’s such a hybrid way of actually seeing someone face to face but without having to lose that travel time. So yeah, that’s my thoughts.

Joe: Absolutely I think you’re absolutely right on that. Yeah with certainly Zoom fatigue, I wasn’t in an office job at the time of the pandemic but even I at that point when it would get to the evening and someone would say ‘shall we do a Zoom quiz?’ ……. No, definitely not. That’s not what I want to do right now. Will, your thoughts? Has the pandemic affected no shows?

Will: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s certainly impacted them and there’s more ‘no shows’ for sure. Virtual sales is pretty much the norm now, especially where I’m based in North America……….And there’s very little accountability for someone to not show up to a meeting. In face to face, you normally might see that person again. There’s really no consequence to just cancelling the meeting if you don’t see the value in it or you’re too tired or something more important came up and it’s incredibly easy to do. So yes, I certainly would say there are a lot more no shows these days than there were before.

Joe: And Chris, a similar story for you, is it?

Chris: Yeah, I get the feeling that it’s very much like emails. An email being the easy option, it’s the easiest thing to delete, you know……..and over the course of the last two years because it became so, so normal and so easy that certainly happened with Zoom. Meeting etiquette went out of the window a wee bit. You can be 5 minutes late, it’s not unusual for a Zoom meeting, because people are just sort of like, well, you know, it’s just a Zoom meeting. I don’t know when that happened because when we first went into lockdown, everyone was like going, we can work from home! Look at this, this new technology, everybody jumped on it. I think in very much the same way that people can ignore your communication with regards to email so easily, that it’s very easy to cancel an online meeting because it doesn’t feel real.

Joe: And Tyler, thoughts on this one.

Tyler: Yeah I really like what Chris just said. That’s a good way to put it…..the etiquette went out the window! As somebody who’s basically been selling virtually for longer than I would like to say on this call, because I don’t want to age myself too much. I’ve been doing it for a while, I haven’t had face to face in probably a decade. I’ve been doing phone calls, virtual meetings, this, that and the other. I think that the biggest thing was that etiquette because before, people would kind of showcase the same mannerisms, politeness that they would face to face even over the phone. So they’d still would email you, ‘hey, I’m running a bit late’ or those kinds of things. Which you just do to be kind to another human being. With COVID, yeah, it just became the norm and when something becomes the norm, people don’t care about it as much. So you get a lot more people being late to meetings. I don’t think my bottom line……. the show rate hasn’t changed, but the behaviour of the people I’m speaking with have absolutely changed. Just like they don’t tell you when they’re going to be late, they’ll be all like eating lunches, that kind of stuff. You would have never seen that three or four years ago but you see it now all of the time. So it’s harder to grab people’s attention even once they’re there.

Joe: Absolutely! So Chris, to go back to something you were saying and you mentioned about being 5 minutes late, in the before times, it just wasn’t an accepted thing. So how long do you give it before you class an appointment as a ‘no show’? Is it a case of well, perhaps it’s 5 minutes late, no show? Or is it, here I am 30 minutes later, still waiting, still waiting. What’s your cut off, do you say?

Chris: Well, I’m going to flip to the other side, though………is that customers can be terribly rude! I agree completely with what you’re saying, nobody ever used to take a burrito into a live meeting. I don’t know when that happened ! but yeah, I find that 5 minutes late is common. 10 minutes late is fairly common. I remember way back in the day, sometime back in the 90s when I was presenting a brand new product …….. 5 minutes before my allotted time (inaudible) and then she said that she could talk to me in the foyer when she was on her way to lunch. I remember saying, you know, I could probably give you a really good rendition of the Old Testament in 5 minutes, but this product’s going to take a wee bit longer! People expect you to be able to do stuff like that online really quickly. Here’s the thing, though, because I’ve got to flip this. I think salespeople have got to take some responsibility and accountability. You know, there are ways of herding cats, there are ways of doing things so that things happen for you. I think you’ve got to understand what you’re responsible for as the salesperson in the room. It’s like being the parent of a five-year-old. If a five-year-old didn’t wake up in time to go to school, it wouldn’t be the five year old’s fault. There’s a responsible adult in charge, you know and I think if your meeting is either turning up or not, you should have put some things in place to recognize whether that’s going to happen or not. If you take that responsibility,…….complete no shows apart from anything else (and I’ll come on to this later on) are possibly a sign of a bad qualification process. But if somebody is worth pursuing and they need what you’ve got, then it’s your duty to make sure that they don’t forget, that they’ve remembered or they reschedule.

Joe: As soon as you said that, Chris…….. as soon as you said, oh, you know, it’s a bad qualification…… all of you were just ….ah hum hum ! so this is something that’s shared by everyone. Alison, can you speak a bit more on that one for us?

Alison: Yeah, I think it’s interesting because what I would see a lot of that time, is a bad qualification and I’ve got points to add later on about the age of buyers, as well. Decision makers are getting younger and how they interact with people and how they want to interact with people is completely different now than it was previously. So I think, you know, we need to look at the culture behind it. Let’s look at online dating…. not us! we’re not dating! …….. but if you look at things like Tinder and all the rest of it, you might speak to somebody a couple of times and then you ghost them. That’s where I think, again, that’s actually linked to poor qualification because actually as humans, we don’t really like to say ‘No’. We don’t really like to hurt somebody’s feelings and that’s what we see. Not that I am online dating. I have been married for 25 years, but you know, we see that a lot. Even things like, my young team…… they see a number that’s coming in… ‘don’t recognize that number. I won’t be answering it’. So again, that culture has changed and so has the age of a decision maker. So I think that a lot of the old school stuff that would go as the normal, isn’t the normal anymore because the age of the seller and the age of the buyer are like, its a different generation. So I think that back in the day you’d have had a really strong, qualified call, you would have had a really good calendar invite, you know, you would have already set the agenda for that, you’d have a 15 minute reminder. For me. I don’t even wait for 5 minutes, after 2 minutes and I’m emailing them, ‘have you got the link. OK?’, ‘everything OK?’ And I’m on that and literally that works. But I think the reason that I don’t have a huge no show rate is a) I’m selling myself, so I’ve already qualified it. I’m ready, so I pretty much I’m in there. But b) It’s tight. It’s really tight. And again, I think that comes back from old school specifically in field sales. We would call it the ‘blow out’ or the ‘no show’ and actually I very rarely had those even back in the day because it was really tight. Everybody had an agenda, they’d accepted the agenda. They knew what the purpose of the call was. They knew what the output for them was. They knew what the output for me was and they knew what the expectation was. So they were going into that call with full knowledge. Whereas, I think a lot of the times people don’t know and I’ll come on to this later, that I’ve got an example of something I didn’t ‘no show’ for, but I really wish that I had because it was so badly qualified and it was a half an hour of my life I cannot get back. So I think that’s where that sort of fits in, that a lot of that isn’t qualified properly.

Joe: So it’s almost a case of adapting to what the culture is doing. Actually something you mentioned there, as soon as you started saying, I knew exactly where it was going because, you know, Tyler, I don’t mind ageing myself. I’m nearly 30..

Tyler: I know if I was only nearly 30, I wouldn’t mind ageing myself either, let’s just say that. (laughter)

Joe: But to your point, Alison, there are people my age, people the same age as me who get scared when a phone rings.

Alison: Yeah!

Joe: ……..just answer it. What’s the worst that can happen? But yeah, I think it’s an excellent point you raise about that. So…

Alison: The worst that can happen Joe, it’s maybe even a salesperson trying to sell them something. Dammit! I have no app (inaudible) for that (laughter)

Joe: Oh no, it’s Lead Forensics on the phone again (laughter). So Will, as Alison was answering, you clasped your hands together in sort of a sage Jedi way, which is fitting for your background. What is your process on responding to no shows?

Will: Yeah, so ideally you’ve put in enough preventative measures and set a grey agenda……and we’ll get on to some of those things later to make sure the no show doesn’t happen. Even for the best meetings you’ll still just get no shows every now and again. So generally, I like to wait for 5 minutes, give a grace period. It’s very regular that people show up 5 minutes later for the meeting, as Chris said. Then, I’ll send them an email just like, ‘hey, here’s the link to join. Ready when you are’. Then in 10 minutes, I’ll typically give them a quick phone call and then I’ll just keep the meeting open on the right there on my computer. At around 25 minutes, I’ll send an email and generally it’ll just say ‘Hey, we didn’t get to connect’ and I don’t try and rebook that meeting because often if they’ve no showed that’s a sign. If they really want it, they’ll come get it. So I don’t often go, ‘hey, do you want to reschedule or try again?’ Because frankly, like you said, it’s a lack of etiquette that they completely ‘no showed’ you, ghosted you and no excuse. So I would just generally send an email saying, ‘It’s a shame, we didn’t get to connect today’ and then leave it at that. If they want it, they’ll come get it, generally. So email – 5 minutes. phone call – 10 minutes, 25 minutes in and I’m going to send a quick email which says goodbye, basically. If they want to come back, they will generally come back around.

Joe: I think that’s actually a very respectful way of responding to something that, you know, to somebody who’s not showing you respect to get in touch and be like, hey, I’m actually not going to be around or something like that. So, Tyler, is it a similar story for you or do you have a slightly different process.

Tyler: Yeah, like, obviously what Alison and Chris were saying, I think that’s the most important part. Right? People say yes to it because they’re interested but they show up because they’re excited. So its in that initial kind of booking, which can be really challenging. Everybody wants that in the inbound lead, the inbound. That can be hard because your marketing message is never going to do that. Your marketing message will always get them interested, right? It’ll always get them to say wow, that could be something. I have this problem, that could be a solution to it, etc, etc. But that’s only lukewarm at best, right? So getting them excited, that’s kind of where the salesperson comes in. So either SDR, salesperson, whatever it is, you need to be contacting them and having a good warm up conversation, sometimes that’s qualifying, sometimes that’s this, that or the other. But yeah, for me, if they’re not on……. if my meeting is at 10 and they’re not on at 10………….. I’ve already connected with them on LinkedIn. I’ve got their cell phone because of the way I booked it. I’m shooting them a text, I’m shooting them inmail, ‘hey, just want to confirm we’re still on’ or something quick like that and then I’m kind of a little different than Will. If they’re not there, I send an email, ‘hey, let me know if you want to reschedule’. If I don’t hear anything, you know, I will call. I will stalk them, until I get them on the phone. I do that just because, you know, if I put my time and effort into booking that meeting in the first place, they were qualified. I think there’s a good fit there and I’m confident that once I get them on, I can demonstrate that value. So yeah, for me it’s like at the time of the meeting they get a quick text or inmail, whatever. Then if I don’t see them in there usually in about 5 to 10 minutes, then I send them a quick email like, ‘hey, I assume something came up, let me know a better time that works for you’. Then I leave the ball in their court for a reasonable amount of time before I start my salesmanship kind of over the top, reach back.

Joe: So as you were saying that, I realised we did a webinar about a month ago, all about social selling. Tyler I think you were actually part of that and something just popped up on LinkedIn today on this very topic of ghosting and that sort of thing. It was Will Holden….. so in response to someone not showing up he has got these GIFs that he makes of people holding up whiteboards saying ‘hey, you ghosted, what’s going on?’ He sends a little GIF which is a friendly message and there were lots of people who sort of jumped on it ….. going, I don’t think this is the correct way of doing that. But to me, it seems like that’s much more personal, much more friendly, you know, just a better approach of attempting to get rescheduling in, I suppose. Is that an example of something that Alison was saying of changing, adapting your approach for the younger buyers, the younger decision makers, do you think? I’ll go back to Tyler for that one first.

Tyler: Yeah, I’m a big fan of obviously multiple approaches into how we kind of reach out and engage because you do have to meet people on their level, you know, to some extent. I don’t know that it’s necessarily age dependent because I think for some of the younger buyers the message needs to be quicker, more actionable, right. Whereas you give me a CEO that’s maybe a bit older, a CFO or something like that, I think they’re going to appreciate the novelty of something like that. And by the way, I do recommend the GIFs he does, they’re awesome. But yeah, for me, that’s what outreach is for. HubSpot used to put out some years ago and they may still do it, those kinds of ‘oh, you ghosted’, the pictures of the skeleton and all of these things which now have been used to death across sales teams. But there’s a purpose to it. What can you do when reaching out to get noticed? And that’s the same as booking the meeting in the first place or getting back a hold of somebody when they didn’t show up. And I think, yeah, taking multiple different approaches but not giving up I guess would be what my point was. If I spoke to them, booked in time and I committed to them like I’m going to keep that commitment. Obviously if they say, hey, I’ve given it some thought, it’s not right for me, great, I’ll take that no more gracefully than any other salesperson. But until I make that contact, I’m going to use multiple different approaches. And I do love the GIFs, by the way, anything that gets noticed. I’ve even seen, I will say it’s real quick because this one is one of my two favourites……… for me being targeted as a DM, I had somebody on LinkedIn do @Tyler Witt and then ‘hey, I thought we had a meeting today’. So put me on blast on LinkedIn and I appreciated it simply because of the sale. I don’t think that’ll work for a lot of people, but that one and then I literally had an email one time with a subject line was ‘are you really that damned busy?’ That was the subject line to me because something came up with one of my dogs. But those are probably examples of maybe too aggressive on the other side. But they did get noticed! And that to me is the big thing. When they don’t show up, how do you get noticed to get a response? Because that’s the real name of the game.

Joe: Yeah, perhaps you’re right. Yeah slightly too direct that one. But you’ve got to appreciate just the…… Yeah why not. Chris, we’ll come to you for the next one. Should no show rates be tracked?

Chris: Yeah well, without doubt, but for all the right reasons. Can I just pick up on a couple of points that we just talked about? They’re just very, very quick. Just because a couple of things that popped up. The word respect popped up and you said you’re coming up to thirty. I’ve actually been selling for more than 30 years now and nobody respected us 30 years ago. I keep seeing posts on LinkedIn saying ‘Oh my guy, he’s trying to make this phone call and this guy gave him a really hard time. Don’t they know we’ve got a job to do? And it’s like we’ve all been stuck on a phone with a salesperson who we didn’t want to talk to, who we couldn’t get rid of. You know, your love for humanity goes out the window when that’s gone on too long. So I think the respect thing……….you mentioned my book Selling with Ease earlier on and there’s four ways that we overcome the objections in that book.. One of them, we call them DAMS and the M stands for misunderstanding. You know, there’s been a problem. There’s been a misunderstanding. You didn’t turn up. I tried to chase you. With misunderstandings, the way to handle misunderstandings is to understand that nobody likes to be told they’ve got an ugly baby. You know, even people with ugly babies don’t like to be told they’ve got ugly babies. And so you take the blame and you re-explain. The email is, ‘I’m sorry we missed each other today. I don’t know how that could have happened. Listen, I left you a message. You clearly didn’t get it. But let’s get back together again’, you know. I think if you take the blame and re-explain…… just there comes a point…..Sorry, I’m going to be really brief about this, but there’s a story I tell about a blue whale. A blue whale needs 2 million Krill to eat, right? If it eats less than that, it doesn’t have the energy to open its mouth. And so, the energy it takes on isn’t enough energy to open its mouth again, it can’t eat when it gets to the big feeding ground. It’s starved to death and it sinks to the bottom of the sea and rots, yeah. So one of our big prospecting lines is you only open your mouth to the opportunities that will feed you, you know. So you don’t go chasing things that are never going to feed you. You’ve got to know when to have a blue whale reset, I get that. But at the same time, you know, take the blame, re-explain and move forward with that. By the way, maybe it’s a UK, US thing, but I come back to Alison’s dating thing. If you got stood up on a date and then on Saturday morning, you know, you went to the postbox and there’s a picture of your date in an envelope going ‘you ghosted me’ …….you’d be really freaked, just as a pointer, right. But anyway, your question: Process. Yeah, I think it should be counted because there’s something going wrong with the customer attraction side leading up to the meeting, coming off the qualification. I think the people who don’t count it have a lot of sales meetings where they go, yeah, we’ve got loads of meetings, but nobody turned up. How many sales have we made? Oh, we all got stood up. Oh no, what we’re going to do. So it’s a sales manager’s job to say you got stood up by everybody today? Jeez Wow. How did that happen? You know, let’s have a look at the process leading up to that. That’s why it should be counted…… for coaching purposes, not for disciplinary purposes because there’s culpability and capability. Culpability is I can’t be bothered, Capability is I can’t do it. If you’re giving me all the tools and I still can’t do it, I need my sales manager to coach me. So there’s something wrong there. Sorry, I extended my time there……So much to say.

Joe: No, you’re absolutely fine. I’m more than happy just to wind you up and watch you go, Chris ….no problem at all.

Chris: Loved the picture I got in the post of you, by the way.

Joe: I’m glad you got it OK, I was there for ages. Chris, I really, really enjoyed your analogy of your story of the blue whale. Alison, you mentioned you had a story to tell us about a time that you wish you had not shown up to me. Do you want to just regale us with that one?

Alison: Well, actually, it fits into that KPIs perspective of the no shows and it’s exactly as Chris said, it’s not for disciplinary but something if the process is not going correctly if everybody is ‘no showing’ and it’s to do with how you’re making those appointments. Are you really, you know, are you getting them excited or are you getting the need. I’m not naming the names, but it’s a CRM company, right. We’ve got a CRM, we use it. It’s all through our funnelling and everything else but we junk a lot so we did have a need that we would have this appointment. So I thought, right, OK, we’ll really give this person the time of day and it was just such a bad demo. I mean, the demo came before the fact find came. It hadn’t been qualified on how much we spend and then he wanted the second call. And honestly, I wouldn’t ghost because again, I think as a sales person, you know how that affects your morale and how hard it is when that’s happening to you. So I think we tend to give people specifically in sales that space to do their job, whether we want the product or service or not. I mean, they do say that salespeople are the easiest people to sell to. But in the second call, I didn’t like literally……and that’s where again if you look it’s another sort of sign even if it’s not a ‘no show’….it’s that maybe you’ve been dealing with the decision maker and then the in second one, the decision maker doesn’t attend and an influencer does. That’s another sign that the appointments haven’t been set correctly. At the end, he came on and said the price and it was something like 6,000% more than we were spending currently. But if you’d have qualified that at the beginning, then we wouldn’t have wasted that time. I think to me, the reason that those appointments were set was to tick the box for the KPIs. But ultimately you’re just kidding yourself, you’ve wasted your own time because you’re never going to convert. And ultimately know, the title is in the name, it’s about making sales. And we know that there were little parts of the KPIs that actually lead to that. But if you’re just ticking, keeping your eye on boxes without having great qualifications you are going to have no shows. You’re going to have decision makers that pass to influencers because it’s a waste of their time and you know that’s what that feeds through. But I see it does happen a lot.

Joe: Yeah, Yeah., I completely appreciate your point, that’s a really good one about KPIs, that sort of thing. We have had an audience question come in and Will, I’m going to direct this one to you, if that’s all right. So the question is, we normally speak or check in with candidates before meetings. Is that still recommended as best practice? Sometimes too much contact causes no shows and we don’t want to scare them off.

Will: So it sounds like we’re talking about a recruiter here but I’m going to apply the lesson to sales. It’s been a while since I was a recruiter. Yeah, I think you don’t want to overdo it. Like we mentioned earlier, there’s meeting reminders that you can send out and you don’t want to send out 10 because they’re just going to become annoying at some point. Generally, my process pre meeting will be; the meeting gets booked by myself or maybe someone on my SDR team. That’s a cold call or an SDR has booked or has come inbound. Generally, the first thing you want to do is send out a recap email saying this is what I heard, this is what we agreed to, this is the next step, this is what is happening and this is the agenda. Then the meeting invite goes out. A big indicator to me is when people don’t accept that invite, that’s a big red flag. So what I’ll often do if I see they haven’t accepted is add the words ‘please confirm’ to the start and send out the update to everyone. And then in between the meeting happening and when it gets booked, I like to send them a quick video just explaining and going over the agenda again. But also for the same reasons that we mentioned earlier, why people are ‘no showing’ these days, that’s because there’s no emotional consequence with showing up to a stranger in some cases. So I send a video, introduce myself, set that agenda again, make sure it has clear value for them, so they know exactly why they are showing up. Offer them to edit that agenda in any way and then there’s just the auto-reminders. For a candidate – If I was a recruiter, I might want to prep them if I was on the agency side. But I wouldn’t see a need to change the process from what I just mentioned. Which is meeting booked, step in between a video or an email, just reconfirming or even a call and then the standard reminders that go out by most automated systems these days.

Joe: And so Yeah. So that amount of contact hopefully doesn’t scare people away. Guys, has anyone got any more on that one? Checking in with clients before meetings?

Alison: Can I jump on that? Because again, I don’t come from a recruitment background but I know from the statistics that I’ve seen there’s been a lot of candidates not turning up for interviews. And I think again a lot of that is in that fact find. On why they’re looking to change the job you know, what’s the likelihood and what would happen if their current employer were to offer them, what would be the process if they were offered and weren’t going to turn up, what would they think would be a good process to contact a recruiter, you know. I think, again, it’s the qualification but with good fact finding questions so that somebody would feel comfortable to say, you know what, I’ve been offered something else or that I’ve been offered another 10 grand at my current job or I’ve been offered this or that. And I think, again, ultimately sales and recruitment, people buy people. So if you’ve got that really good relationship with the person that you are actually placing or if you’ve got a great relationship with the employer or whatever it is, then they’re more likely to be able to just have that conversation and tell you what’s going on and be honest. And you know, it’s been really interesting with the ghosting and not turning up. Honestly, I think that people have to just women up and be honest. So many people are just, you know, they’re scared. And I think a lot of the reason for their ghosting is fear. Fear of being sold to, fear of being, you know, your people moving into objection handling ‘but we could do this, but we can do that’. I think a lot of that comes back to, you know, traditionally sales gets a bad name and it gets a bad name because it’s done by people who do not actually know how to sell. And that, you know, that affects us all. It’s a historical thing. If you look at a younger buyer………I’m not, you know, I’m the same as Chris, I think I’ve been selling for 30 years……… And I think that a lot of that comes from again, a lot of younger people haven’t had the same interaction face to face. A lot of them, you know, the phone is just for texting or SMS and it’s not actually for having those conversations. So when it comes to having to have a difficult conversation, a lot of the time, you know, they’ve never been exposed to that. So when it comes to saying, no, I’m not going to turn up for this. Yes, sometimes people are rude and they’ve not got manners. And again, you know, I think a lot of that is it comes through, like we were talking about this today and even in my business when I started in 2014, some of the standards were like my team weren’t allowed to have facial piercings, they weren’t allowed to have tattoos on show because it reflected on the company. Now, I just think, again, things have evolved the way people deal has evolved. I think it is acceptable to eat your burrito at lunch. I think that it has changed. I think fighting against change doesn’t do you any good. So I think if you look at, you know, what is acceptable. But I think that standards have actually changed, you know. Just say no, don’t ghost people, just turn around to say it’s not for you, this is not my cup of tea. Thank you so much for your time. And then that honesty allows salespeople to move on. Because I think until you get that, no, people cling on to false hopes that I’ll just put that on my figures, I’ll just do that. They’re clinging on to something that will never happen, you know the way that we tend to do this. I’m selling every day as well. So I’m speaking at events and we’re getting leads coming in. Coming back to that respect, I sold yellow pages for 15 years. There was no internet. It was the only place that people got leads. And they still treated me like a piece of dirt on the bottom of the shoe. And I’m like, well, without leads you wouldn’t have a business! Treat me with respect, r-e-s-p-e-c-t and it never came. You know, you have to generate your own respect. So for me, we do like to get to that point, really to test that intention. I call it the Kenny Rogers – the gambler strategy. You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away and know when to run. So when we’ve tried all the angles, tried the calls, just like literally it’s not happening. we send them a quick email, you know, thank you so much, this has happened. You’ve got three options. Option one is, that you’ve found somebody for your event and you don’t need a speaker. Option two is, you’re still interested? When do you want to book a call? Option three, the event is cancelled. So again, I do feel that people should be, if they were just more honest at the start and ‘womaned’ up it would make our life a lot easier. But they don’t because their time is more precious than anybody else’s and you can never get that. You know, you’ve got to gain respect. People don’t just dish it out like McDonald’s Happy toy…..although they don’t do that anymore because it’s bad for the environment.

Joe: A couple of points to pick up on that one. One, I’ve only ever heard one other person use the phrase woman up and that’s my Mum. So you get mad respect from me for that. Amazing musical renditions. I think we’ll all agree. But no, absolutely, it does come back to it just seems to be a cultural sort of lack of manners. And you know, sometimes no is a difficult word to say to people, but not even as a salesperson or anything but as an adult. You just have to be OK with going, you know what, at this time? No and that’s just the answer. So, yeah, guys this has been an absolutely fantastic discussion and I’m going to have to challenge you now because you’ve all given so much valuable input into this. So the big final question is if there’s one key takeaway that you’d want everybody watching here and everybody who’s going to watch this in the future on catch up. What is the one key thing you want them to take away from this? Tyler, let’s start with you.

Tyler: Oh, I got to go first. It’s good. That’s good. Yeah look, the number one thing, you know, I think everybody said it, but, you know, Chris and Alison put it well, like it’s the coaching. It’s on you. If somebody didn’t show up, like it comes down and that’s what you have to own, I guess. If people don’t show up, it’s on you. So on the KPI thing, I remember I worked for a couple of SaaS companies and we ran about a 50% show rate. So we did volume 50%, then came to Lead Forensics…….we now coach for an 85% 90% show rate, like that’s what our KPI is. Again because we have Lead Forensics, so they are really good leads…..it always starts with the leads. But the other side of it is, it’s the training, it’s the salesperson, it’s and that’s what you have to own. One thing I wanted to add was basically it’s just it’s easy a lot to say. Yep, things have changed, yep people are different, yep Zoom fatigue, this, that and the other, buyer behavior this. There’s all of these reasons but at the end of the day, if people don’t buy, if people don’t show up, it’s the sales person. It’s something you did in your process and the moment you own that, right, then you can start making changes and you can improve upon it. So that to me is, you know, I’m more than happy if anybody wants to reach out or follow up…. more than happy to give you some tips and tricks along that. But my one thing is own it! It’s not because everything’s changed, its not because of Zoom fatigue, it’s not this, that and the other. It’s nothing. It’s just because people don’t want to show up to your demo….. your demo, not your Company’s demo, not your product……..your appointment. So my one thing is ….own it

Joe: Accountability. That’s something that we spoke about a lot in our previous webinar as well. Tyler, so yeah, excellent point there. Jedi master Will, let’s come to you for your final takeaway.

Will: Yeah, I kind of alluded to earlier. But while working (inaudible) our inbound hold rate was 70%, we implemented one thing into our process and that was sending that video along between when the meeting gets booked and when it actually gets held which it just affirms the agenda, puts a face to the name of whoever’s holding the meeting. If it’s booked by a cold call, email or an SDR booked it, they still haven’t seen what you look like. Send a 30 second video setting the agenda and offering up the opportunity for them to adjust that agenda. And that one thing improved our hold rate by 20%. So I’d highly recommend people jump on whatever video platform you use and shoot off that video because it is much more…… let them know you and that will make it harder for them to not show up on you.

Joe: I think it’s an excellent point you make because we have this…….I make videos for Lead Forensics as well and we were talking about YouTube thumbnails and the discussion came up. But actually I think you are so much more likely to click on a video if there is a person, if you can see someone. That’s it. That’s exactly it. If you got the moneymaker, you know, in the shot. So I think a video is an excellent way of getting that sort of initial, it’s a minor one, but an emotional connection. I think you’re absolutely right. Will, it’s a fantastic point and I think that’s a great thing to implement in your communications. Chris, if I can challenge you to keep to one key takeaway.

Chris: Absolutely and it’s something that Will mentioned a little while ago and you just touched on as well. It’s the emotion thing, OK. You know, doctors have no shows but ill people turn up. When you realise, you know, people with bleeding necks show up to bandage demos, there are ways of connecting and making sure that the reason that someone………. It’s customer attraction techniques that we talk about a lot in our business development masterclasses. The bringing people towards you rather than selling at and then recognizing the blue whale…… Is this worth opening my mouth for? And if you’ve got those two things aligned, everything will work out for you.

Joe: Again, it’s a fantastic analogy. I really, really do enjoy that one. Alison then the final point, the final takeaway of the webinar, what have you got for us?

Alison: So sales is all about having a growth mindset and when somebody doesn’t turn up, we cannot help but take that rejection personally. They don’t like us, they don’t want us and it puts us into that fear mode. And when we’re in that fear mode, we see things through negative eyes. Ah the customer’s an idiot, ah our product’s rubbish, ah the SDR didn’t set the appointment right and we’re looking for somebody to blame. But actually, when somebody doesn’t turn up you should be going alleluia! Because actually that means there is something that I can learn and every single day is a school day: whether it’s not been qualified right, whether you’ve not followed the process correctly, whether you’ve not done it. You should welcome the fact that there are new things that you can learn to improve your performance using a growth mindset.

Joe: Absolutely and I think, yeah. You mentioned sort of taking the rejection personally and feeling that sort of discomfort. I saw something the other day saying that growth only happens when you’re outside your comfort zone. So I think that there….. all of your points have been fantastic and salient guys. So thank you ever so much for joining me to discuss turning no shows into sales. Thank you to everybody who showed up to the webinar. The panels’ contact information is on the screen for you now (39.21 on video), if you want to check out what they’re all about on LinkedIn and yeah, hopefully we’ll have you all on again for another panel. Thank you all so much for joining.

Chris: Thanks for having me.
Alison: Thanks for having us.
Tyler :Thank you so much.
Will: Bye