Episode 70:What do you do if a prospect stops responding after you send a proposal?
In this episode, Kai and Nick discuss what to do if a prospect, lead, or client stops responding after you send a proposal and different systems and strategies to use to overcome this obstacle.
Summary
The episode is mostly about what to do when a prospect goes quiet after receiving a proposal or payment link. Nick and Kai both treat proposal writing as a last resort, preferring productized consulting that routes prospects straight to a payment decision. They walk through follow-up sequences, paid discovery sessions as an earlier qualification gate, and the ‘choice of yeses’ framing from Alan Weiss.
Highlights
- Nick writes proposals only when three conditions are all met: the work is new (never done for any client before), it’s work he wants to do more of, and the prospect has already completed at least one Draft Revise engagement with him. He wrote two proposals in the past year, both for the same person.
- Nick’s post-call process: send a follow-up email within 15 minutes using a pre-written template edited to include specific objections from the call, set a firm payment deadline, and make clear nothing goes on the calendar until payment hits his bank account.
- Kai recommends a paid discovery or road mapping session as the mandatory first step of any engagement. It forces a buy-or-pass decision before any proposal is written, and if the client pays, you go into follow-on work knowing their business far better than a free intake call would allow.
- Both use a ‘choice of yeses’ structure from consultant Alan Weiss: three tiers at different price and scope points. The client’s question shifts from ‘do I hire this person?’ to ‘which option fits me?’ Nick applies it mainly to research engagements; Kai uses it in outreach pitches too.
- Nick puts the probability of closing after a ghost at roughly 1%. His sequence is email, assistant follow-up, increasingly firm messages, then a final template he and Kai both call ‘the magic email.’ After that, he moves on and focuses on developing new leads.
- Kai sets a specific follow-up date inside the proposal itself so the prospect knows contact is coming. He’s found that silence often has a mundane explanation, like a scheduled vacation or an internal emergency, that a single follow-up call surfaces.
- Nick pushed hard on a podcast guest who went silent for six months, then learned they had been dealing with a serious health crisis. His takeaway: stay firm in follow-up cadence but keep the tone kind, because you rarely know what is happening on the other side.
Read the transcript
So we got three things under two record.
Idea of best buyers. How to write more as a consultant, and what to do when a prospect ghosts you after a proposal. Who are you going to call when somebody ghosts you after a proposal?
I usually just have Kelly do it. But who does she call?
She is the assistant.
She calls the person that ghosts me.
Excellent. So I think you nailed it right there. I mean. If you get ghosted after a proposal, follow-up be it over phone, which I think is preferred, or email, which is safer and easier to get started with. Is essential. And I think you do this, and I don’t. And correct me if I’m wrong, you don’t do this. But when you’re sending across a proposal Do you set expectations on the client side in terms of when you’ll be discussing the proposal with them, what the next steps are? What is that sort of proposal handoff delivery next step? function look like for draft?
I don’t really do proposals. I mean, I guess there’s like a little bit of that occasionally based on what Klein is happening. But like I’ll talk about draft revise because that’s most of my income. It’s I send along a time to talk on Skype or a calendarly link. We get on a phone call. This is if you’ve gotten past all the qualification steps. and you actually have the privilege of talking to me for 15 minutes on the phone, by that point I’m interested in working with you. And I make that pretty clear. And so the goal of the call is to get to conceptual agreement. And then I send along an email that says, here’s the pricing, here’s what we’re going to do, just to sum it up. You get until this date to let me know yes or no. And then if you do let me know and you pay by this date, then we’re going to start work on this date. Sounds good? Great. Day later, I email to make sure that they have received the proposal. If they say yes We’re going ahead. This is great. If not, a couple days later, I follow up. I usually give them like five business days. Like, I’ll send it along maybe on a Monday, and it’ll be due on a Friday or something like that. Or I send it only on a Friday and it’s due the next Friday. I don’t really care. I just pick a date that that seems to work. And then and it’s not a proposal. It’s we’re starting a draft revise engagement. There’s nothing legally binding in it until you pay me. Nothing happens until you pay me. And so if you go until Thursday to get to agreement with your own problems that you’re actually doing this, then you have 24 hours to get payment into my bank account. And that ain’t on me, man. That’s it.
I think there’s a larger meta thing here where you and I both practice and evangelize the concept of productized consulting, selling a consulting engagement. As if it’s an information product, or I like using the metaphor, like a can of candle soup. You buy it off the shelf, you know what you’re going to get. It’s going to have minestrone in it, it’s going to have A-B testing in it. And one of the benefits of selling a consulting engagement like a product in this way is you eliminate a lot of that proposal process from Your role as a consultant. Instead, I think it shifts the balance over to you in terms of qualification. Somebody comes to you, they look at your material, they look at your website, they sign up for your educational sequence. They decide to apply to work with you. Now you are in a position of power and able to review their application. Then you move forward to saying yes or no. You get to hold that decision. And go to a conversation with them, further qualify them. Send over the cool, you’re cool enough to work with me. Here’s the next step you need to pay me you’ve eliminated proposal writing from your process there. There still is the opportunity that they suddenly go silent. And I think we definitely should circle back to what to do if they go silent at that step. But there’s so much value in cutting that proposal step out. If you just have, even if it’s just a basic road mapping or an initial service offering to find on your website and say, okay, For every project I recommend or I advise or I require, we start with a trail map or a road map or this initial audit, just something to Figure out if they’re a good client or not. You have Draft Revise Express. I have road mapping services and marketing growth plans. It lets you assess how they are as a prospect. It lets you quickly say, here’s how to move forward. Here’s how to pay me. Here’s what the next step is. And it gets to that point of them saying, no, no, we can’t afford you. Oh, there’s this invisible stakeholder, something else. But I’m very much a fan of productized consulting because it eliminates that proposal writing step from my business. I’ve written, I think, four proposals in the last year and Each one of them was, oh, this is a really exciting opportunity where I’m willing to put in the work. Most of the time, when somebody contacts me, their call to action to me is, okay, send over a proposal. My typical response is, I don’t do that. Here are links to the three service offerings I have. I recommend number two. We should start here and then we could graduate to the next one. Let me know which one you want to move forward with. Very similar to your flow of a client.
Yeah, yeah. So with me, I write proposals, and I’ve been hacking out what the circumstances are that I actually do write proposals. Proposals, and there are two conditions that have to be met. Number one is it’s actually three: it’s new work that I haven’t done before for any client ever. So I have to write something new to describe it. It’s work that I want to be doing in my business more. And I have to have worked with you previously on at least a draft revise engagement. Period. Those are the three criteria by which I’m going to write a proposal. And as a result, I’ve written two proposals in the past year, right? And they were both for the same person. And they’ve both turned into various offerings. So like there is a you know, it’s lost work. It’s lost time and focus when you’re doing a proposal that du that you can’t reuse as sawdust for productized consulting offerings and the rest of the business. That’s kind of how I view it. And so if you’re okay wasting your time, write proposals.
It’s a very similar flow for me. When I write a proposal, I’m always thinking, well, how do I want this to fit into my larger scope of service offerings? Is this something that I can reuse? Is this something that I want to offer to other people? And if so, I’m a little more inclined to write a proposal because I view it less as, oh, I hope I get this project, and more as, hey, I’m going to write the first draft of a sales page. in conjunction with potentially working with this client. So it’s a very, very similar flow on my side. I mean, a lot of my initial versions of service offerings on my website came from proposals that I wrote. And then I wrote them a second time because a second person applied to work with me in that fashion. And then I said, hey, let me just jam this on a web page. Cool. Let me apply some copywriting principles. Make sure that’s the pain, the dream, the fix. Cool. And then it became a service offering. When somebody said that we want to work with you, I can point them directly to that page and say, does this meet your needs? If not, we can negotiate on scope, maybe drop one thing, add something in, to still have it be the same service offering. But not need to go through the whole proposal song and dance again and again and again. Yeah.
And I want to be abundantly clear with this. Like the reason you’re doing this is to save your time and also stamp out an offering that you can do Frequently, you can fulfill the work frequently and consistently. And that makes your job easier and it makes the terms of engagement much clearer for somebody. So, one thing that I’ve been fairly resistant to is the idea. Of coming up with a consistent process. Like, I would rather come up with a product and make that the offering. But most people, like, they hook on to processes that are named and legible. So there’s you know, if I can say, okay, this is this methodology is the expression of draft revise, then fine. So, yeah, I don’t know. It’s one of those things where It’s a form of focus and efficiency to be like, again, I’m going to continue hammering at that. And if you’re writing proposals, you are probably wasting time doing weird, bespoke work. that doesn’t aid your positioning or your focus.
So in either situation, we’re advocating for the dismissal of a proposal from the standard client prospect process. But you still get to a point where you’ve had a conversation with somebody, they’ve applied, you said, Yeah, you’re cool enough. They said, Hey, we like the cut of your jib. And You send that email and you’re like, here’s a payment link. And then they don’t pay you and nothing happens. Yeah, that happens.
Happens about a third of the time. I follow up. My assistant follows up. We get increasingly stern. We send the magic email and then fuck ‘em. So i if you get ghosted, it’s very much like dating. And you know a fair amount about dating. But what would happen if somebody ghosted you for like three months and then came back? What would the first thing you’ve lived that, right? So the first thing that comes up in your head is, where the fuck were you for the past three months? Explain yourself, right? Like there is automatically an elephant in the room. And do you want that to be the first impression that you get when you work with a client? No. If they’re gonna act that immaturely to you that they ghost you, now if they tell you like this isn’t a good fit, we’ll come back in three months They have taken the mature high road in the situation, and it’s sad, and you’re sad, and you don’t get the money, and you have to wait, and they’re probably never going to work with you. Because they peaked in enthusiasm the first call. And that’s fine. But I don’t. By the time they’ve ghosted you and stopped talking to you after you send whatever it is, proposal, email, wanting to start, payment link, whatever. Um, there is maybe a one percent chance the deal will ever close. Fuck’em! You get one life. Work on developing more leads and Talking to people who are actually interested in you and your work. Because people will cast you to the side if you let them, and you don’t want to be viewed as groveling.
I completely agree with that. I personally advocate and practice a longer follow-up cycle there just because I want to get a no out of them. And so it might be let’s say five or six touches and follow ups over a multi month or a multi week period where it and you’re absolutely right, tone is incredibly important. There’s a wonderful book on sales, I believe it’s Barking Up a Dead Horse, that talks about the concept of Pitching up or pitching down? Are you in a position of power and talking to somebody who wants to work with you? Or are you graveling for work from somebody who’s above you in power? I think that you definitely want to make a concerted effort to not be in the supplicant position in those types of conversations or those types of follow-up. But I think it’s also equally valuable to have a system that you define for yourself. Hey, after I send this proposal, If they don’t respond back, I’m going to follow up with email one, email two, call number one, email three, and then the magic email. And we’ll link to the magic email in the show notes. It’s an email Nick and I both use that Kurt Ouster. of Ethercycle Refine to get a response or uh elicit an emotional response from the recipient if they haven’t responded back yet. One thing that I’ve started doing in those cases where I do send across a proposal is I will state, okay, great, I’m going to follow up by phone or by email. On this date, usually plus three or plus five days from when I send that proposal or send that email, to discuss more, confirm which option makes the most sense for you. If in the meantime you decide one of these options makes the most sense, just reply back and let me know and we can move forward. But I try to establish on this date I will be contacting you to talk more about this thing. And just set that expectation there. I have a few colleagues who go as far as only delivering the proposal when they could have a face-to-face or a video chat meeting with that prospect. So they’re able to review the proposal in tandem, figure out what parts there are objections about, what parts there are questions about, triage those questions as they come up. and more quickly move towards closing the sale or iterating on that proposal or that proposal for a productized offering to get to fit with that client’s needs.
Yeah, I don’t know. I take a little bit of a different tack because I don’t want to waste oxygen on it and I don’t want to be viewed as Like if I have to try and grind a no out of you, we clearly shouldn’t be working together. And honestly, you can build maybe a robot that just emails them for you and then never think about it again. I suppose that’s one thing to do. But then you’re represented by a robot and that’s weird and you should try and I’m represented by a robot on a few limited scenarios, but like most of the time, you’re literally getting me. And frankly, when $14,000 or more of work are at stake. You should be getting me, right? You should be getting some approximation of me volitionally sending along these emails. And again, if you’re not. I should. I’m going to back up one moment and offer some actual advice and not just be redundant about this. You should do everything possible to. Ensure that you’re taking the high road with this. You can’t just send along an email and be like, great, here’s the payment link. Have fun. No, you have to set boundaries around it. What is the payment due date? When will work begin? What is going to happen when you do this? Conceptual agreement on the phone was not enough. You need to convey that. What matters is payment, actual physical payment in your bank account. And if you don’t get payment, you don’t get on the calendar, right? Like so you have to do what you can to try and express all of those terms of conditions. It’s on you to ensure that you’re doing that. Right. If you do do that and they don’t reply, then fuck them. But there’s a lot of things that you can do. Right after you get off the phone, that ensure that this is going to work well. One of them is to have a pre-written email before you get on the call. So assuming conceptual agreement goes well, which knock on wood, hope it does. That would be great. Then you should have an email to send along as quickly as humanly possible. Edit that email to include several details of things that were discussed in the call, especially around customer objections. client objections, whatever you want to call them, and then send it out. Usually I’m turning that email around in 15 minutes after the call. You should be booking time on your calendar to ensure that you are writing an email right after the call. And that way you’re showing that you’re prompt and that you’ve covered all your bases and that you don’t take crap. Because people love giving crap. They love it. They love acting immaturely or unprofessionally. Up to and including when they’ve begun working with you. So it’s another way of, I mean, I view it kind of as a smell test, right? Like if I send along the price and it’s too high. Either I’ve done a bad job controlling the conversation and conveying that there’s a solid ROI from you, which is my fault, or you simply don’t want to buy the thing, which is your fault.
Right, right. Now I agree with that. One thing that comes to mind on my side is there’s a lot of value as a consultant in Having these productized offers, again, circling back to that idea, because it removes you from needing to write these proposals and removes you from needing to chase down the client. I like getting to The proposal of them paying me money as soon as humanly possible. And that’s why I love something like a road mapping session or a trail map session where it says, Okay, great, to adequately diagnose the help you need. I can’t read minds, I can’t guess at it. We need to go through a structured process, and that structured process is this roadmapping session, and this is what the outcome, the deliverables, and the benefit to you is. And it’s this price. Is that a price you’re willing to pay? I want to get to that question and either get a no or a yes as soon as possible. Because if it’s a no, okay, you aren’t willing to invest in a paint discovery session so we can figure out what makes sense to help your business. We’re not a fit. Move on. If they say, Yes, excellent, great. Now we’re clients moving forward, we have to do a roadmap. But I advocate firmly: if any of the listeners are experiencing issues where they send off a proposal and they just don’t hear back from the client, they got ghosted. Well, consider adding a paid discovery session to your offerings and having that initial step for a client engagement be, hey, You need to go through this hour-long workshop, and the outcome will be me delivering this report with the five things that are most important, that will most move the needle. And associated with that will be a proposal or recommendations for services. It gets you to that buy-down decision on the buyer’s side. Earlier than anything else, and I want to accelerate the process to getting to that decision. Because if it’s a no, we aren’t willing to invest at this time It’s not worth me wasting my time. I won’t be able to get money out of that client. If the answer is yes, okay, great, that makes sense as a first step. That’s wonderful. That allows you to learn more. In a paid environment where you’re compensated for your time, now you understand their company at a much deeper level than you ever could have before, and now you know what service offerings to propose to them. Or if a proposal is necessary. Maybe you discover, oh, wow, this is an exciting company in a new industry or in my industry. I’d love to work on them. They need something a little more custom and bespoke. In this case, I will generate a unique proposal because it’s the type of service offering I could see there being more people buying, and then you move over to the proposal. But either way, starting with that pain discovery session I think is essential and very, very valuable.
I’ll talk about two more things. One of them is the choice of yeses. I mentioned that I send along a price and you can take it or leave it. That kind of works for A-B testing, and it definitely works for research because people love cutting research, and they can’t if they work with me contractually. I give you one price and you take it or leave it. But Alan Weiss is another consultant type. He recommends basically sending along like a three-tiered proposal where it’s not a question of, you know, do I work with this guy? But rather In what way do I work with this person? That makes it more like you’re crafting kind of a more custom bespoke thing for them. It works really well. That’s something that you can probably put together in any kind of proposal. Um I forgot what the second thing is. Oh my god, I’m the worst. Um yeah, that was probably not important. Yeah.
Choice of yeses now incredibly important.
Choice of yeses is super, super important.
Yeah, I apply the choice of yeses even in my outreach campaigns when I’m pitching somebody, and I mean, what’s a proposal, or hey, pay me money when they pitch. I don’t want it to be a yes-no decision on their part. I want it to be a, okay, these are, this is a range of options. This is the Cadillac option. This is the, I can’t think of a low price afford, this is the Honda Cytic option. This is the spectrum. They might come back and say, We want some from this, some from that, some for the other thing. Okay, great. We could massage those together to a service offering, but it’s much better to get that response from a client than. Here is the singular option you may choose from. We do not want that option. Okay, I guess we can’t work together. A choice of yeses, I think, is empowering both to you and the client because it shows: hey, there’s a range of different things we could do to reach that outcome. Some cost more but have more benefit. Some are more affordable but don’t deliver as many benefits. What makes the most sense for you? Having that choice of yeses is critical, and that might be. Here are three different versions of a roadmap, and here’s what you get more and above in each option. Or here’s a roadmap or the full service offering with the first two weeks spent on research. So, we get the benefit of their research alone or the research paired with the service offering, and now they’re able to choose, start with the smaller engagement, or do the smaller engagement with the full-on engagement at the end. So, there’s a lot of interesting ways you could use a concept like a choice of yeses there. Yeah, I think that’s very, very valuable when you think about proposals as a consultant.
Yeah, yeah.
I guess my final advice for the any listeners that are dealing with prospects ghosting them after they send a proposal, set those expectations add a road mapping or some paid discovery type engagement early on just so you could get to that yes or no. Be confident and assertive in your follow-up. Send that email, check in with them, follow up on the phone if you have their phone number. Have some procedure or some standard operating procedure you’ve defined where you or somebody else in your business is Contacting them to see what the issue is. I’ve definitely sent out proposals before, and there’s been like four weeks of silence. And I discovered that my contact had a vacation scheduled right after I sent over the proposal and they’re just now reviewing it, and they did not communicate that across to me. And okay, you’re on vacation, great, but updated proposal, new date that you have to decide by. Let’s move forward. Oftentimes, reaching out, you can discover: oh, they were on vacation or had a life event, or an emergency happened, or this was a priority, but then the company literally caught on fire, and priorities have shifted. Just by reaching out and asking, hey, I sent over that proposal or sent over those next steps, I haven’t heard back from you yet. What do you recommend as that next step can get you that necessary information?
Man, I tell you, I felt horrible this one time. This wasn’t quite the same as a proposal, but it’s very similar in terms of a follow-up process. I record a podcast episode with somebody. And it turned out amazing. And there was all this preparation for it, and it was really great. And then I’m like, okay, great. Well, in like a couple of weeks, I’ll follow up and see if it’s been posted and whatever have you. And then they ghost me. And and I’m obviously pretty irked, right? Like it’s um It’s a little bit frustrating, and I get increasingly hardball emails like, Are you actually going to post this? Should I just post an MP3 of it myself? etc. etc. etc. And no fewer than six months later, I get an email back. I’ve been dealing with a massive health crisis for the better part of a year. I’m so, so sorry. It’ll be out this week. I’m like. Oh, and it wasn’t even out that week. I was out in like three weeks. But then at that point, I’ve like feeling, well, I’m the jerk, you know? And that’s rare to encounter a situation like that, but like you need to still make sure you’re being sensitive and diplomatic, even as you’re trying to be. A little bit firm in your hand about it. And that was an important lesson for me to make sure that I’m actually approaching the situation with a measure of kindness and empathy, even as I can’t even tell you how many people have ghosted me on proposals. And I’ve gotten like to the point where they get me on a phone call and waste my time. And at that point, like, dead, you’re done. But, like, you know. It’s just very frustrating when that happens. And you need to make sure you’re still keeping your emotions in check and trying to approach it with kindness.
It occurs to me that a lot of what we’re talking about here, a lot of the issues that could come up with clients and proposals, are Addressed by a strong client intake process. And have we done an episode dedicated just to what our client intake application processes are like? We’ve done like four episodes. Oh, this cold is killing me. Which one am I? Am I neck?
You’re the curly-haired one. That doesn’t help. I’ve been waiting like at least a six months to make that joke.
I am so happy for you, my friend.
Thank you. We did it.