How to get a prospect to commit after months of sitting on the fence
be tenacious
First of all, you must be tenacious. You have to be able to follow someone until they specifically say “no, I don’t want to” or start being rude to you.
If they start to get rude, you don’t want the prospect on your team anyway, they wouldn’t be a good fit, and they would start causing problems within your team.
Treat your team like you would your family
Treat your team like you would your family. If you are happy to spend Christmas with your team member or have dinner with your team member, they are a good choice. You want to have positive team members, don’t let negativity seep into your team. Negativity will promote a poor work ethic and, in turn, lead to poor results.
Instantly disqualify a potential customer if they become negative or rude.
If they’re anything but negative or rude, follow up with them and don’t stop until you’ve checked them in.
Now you might be thinking “I don’t want to have to chase hundreds of people every day” and that’s totally fine, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not chasing, we’re not begging people to join and we’re certainly not annoying people.
Measure the level of interest of your prospect
With each failed follow up, spend less time tracking down. A failed follow-up isn’t just someone saying “call me on Thursday”, that’s quite a positive from some perspectives. However, if they told me to call me on Thursday and then didn’t return the call on Thursday, that’s a failed follow-up and you need to check your follow-up efforts.
By monitoring your follow-up efforts, I’m not saying don’t call someone on a certain day if that’s what they’ve asked for, I’m saying instead of checking in with them every week, move it to every other week and then if you still don’t have success, check every month.
By using this strategy, you ensure that you are not wasting all your time with people who are just cheating on you and are too polite to say no. Stay busy and don’t spend too much time on each conversation. No one wants to sit on the phone for 2 hours talking about whether or not they want to sign up to join your team. Create a short, snappy, engaging pitch that you can use to easily gauge the interest of each prospect. This will help you determine how much time to spend on each lead.
Be honest and give people a way out.
Some people really can’t just say no. They are too polite and feel that saying no might hurt your feelings.
You have to be honest and somewhat direct when you suspect that someone is not that interested and is trying to put the conversation off until another day.
People are happy to offer a little white lie to keep the peace instead of tackling the problem head-on and simply saying they’re not interested.
An example of this is if you have a lead on a call or 1-2-1 session and they say something like “Yeah, let’s talk Monday” after asking if they’re interested or not. not. You have to go back and push a little bit, you have to make sure they don’t waste your time.
Reply with something like “Are you sure? You’re not just trying to hang up on me, are you? It’s totally fine if you’re not interested in joining, I’m busy and I’m sure they are. I’ll get back to you if you’re serious and “You’re going to move on, but I don’t want to waste our time. We can still be friends if you don’t want to move on.” This gives the prospect an out if they’re not that interested and aren’t actually going to buy. You also stay on good terms with the prospect, so you can follow up with them in a few months to see if they’ve changed their minds.
Always keep the door open to work together in the future.
If they come back and say they want to work together now, great. If they’ve done this before and haven’t joined yet, don’t go into ‘cool, let me do it all for you right now’ mode. You need to play hard to get it. Send something like “Okay, great, I’m about to make another call, but here’s the link if you want to join. If you don’t, that’s fine. I know you’ve changed your mind a few times before. Anyway, I have to leave, I have another call in five minutes, I’ll get back to you later.”
Now, because you haven’t fallen head over heels when they said they’d join and called them the few times before that they said they’d join but didn’t, they’ll be more determined to join. and you will want to prove your mistake. They will sign up even if they didn’t plan to just to avoid getting called again.