Name the common reasons a buyer goes quiet and say what each one needs from you.
Open your messages and find the last buyer who stopped replying after a meeting that seemed to go well. Keep that person in mind as you read. What you do next depends on why they went quiet, and the real reason is usually not the one you fear.
Nearly everyone who sells has had a week like this one. You have a good meeting on Tuesday. The buyer is engaged, asks about pricing and says, "Send me the details." You send them that evening. There's no reply on Wednesday and none on Friday. By the following Tuesday you have checked your phone many times. You've started to tell yourself a story: they lost interest, they found someone cheaper, or something you said went wrong. Silence after a meeting like that is hard to read, so most sellers fill the gap with the worst explanation they can think of.
Silence after a promising meeting usually has one of four causes.
The first is competing priorities. Your product still matters to the buyer, but other things matter more this week, such as a work deadline, a sick parent, a child's exams or a holiday. Your message has been buried under everything else. This buyer needs patience from you, and a reply that is easy to send when they resurface.
The second is an unspoken concern. Something bothered the buyer during or after the meeting and they haven't said it. It might be the price, a doubt about whether it will work for them, or something they read online. This buyer needs a gentle way to raise it, such as a question that makes the concern safe to say. Lesson 5.2, "When the buyer says I need to think about it", listed the usual unspoken concerns buyers have.
The third is a third party. Someone else has to agree, such as a spouse, a business partner, the finance team or parents. The buyer may be waiting for a chance to bring it up. They may also have brought it up already and met resistance they don't want to tell you about. This buyer needs help explaining your product to the other person.
The fourth is lost interest. The problem turned out smaller than they thought, they solved it another way, or they chose someone else. This buyer needs a clean, respectful way to tell you so, and Lesson 6.3 covers how to give them one.
The first three reasons are far more fixable than the fourth. From your side, all four look exactly the same, so you have no grounds for assuming the worst. Some buyers who have decided against you do go quiet instead of saying no, because saying no feels awkward. Many quiet buyers have not decided anything. They are busy, unsure or waiting on someone, and for them silence means "not yet" or "not now".
Siti sells corporate training to HR managers. She had a promising call with an HR manager at a logistics firm in Jurong, and then the manager went quiet for three weeks. Siti assumed the deal was lost. The manager eventually replied and apologised. The firm had been in its annual budget cycle, and the manager couldn't commit to anything until the budget was approved. The silence came from competing priorities and an internal approval that was still pending. It had nothing to do with rejection.
If you treat silence as rejection, you will usually make one of two mistakes. The first is stopping after one unanswered message because you're afraid of bothering the buyer. That abandons the buyers who were simply busy. The second is panicking and chasing with frequent, increasingly anxious messages, such as three messages in four days. That turns a busy buyer into an annoyed one.
Both mistakes have the same root. You are reading the silence as a verdict on you, and it usually isn't one. When a buyer goes quiet, consider all four reasons before you decide what to send.
The best time to deal with silence is before it happens, in the meeting itself. A meeting that ends with a dated next step makes silence much less likely. A dated next step is a specific next action with a date that both sides have agreed. Lesson 5.3, "Ask for a next step every time", showed how to end a meeting with one.
Once a step is agreed, getting in touch doesn't count as chasing, because you are turning up to something you both agreed to. If the buyer goes quiet anyway, the date gives you a natural reason to make contact. Say you agreed on a call on Monday (an invented example) and Monday passes without a word. You could write, "We'd said we'd talk Monday, does later this week work better?" It refers to what you agreed and offers a new time. That makes it far stronger than "Just following up on our chat."
Each follow-up should take the buyer less effort to answer than the one before it. A long message with three questions, a recap of everything you discussed and a request for a decision takes effort to answer. A busy buyer saves it for later, and later never comes. A short message with one easy question can be answered in about ten seconds (an estimate), for example while the buyer waits for a lift. Lesson 6.2 covers what these short messages should contain. Two examples:
"Would it help if I sent a shorter version of the comparison?" "Is this still on your list, or should I check back next month?"
Whatever the reason for the buyer's silence, questions like these give them an easy way back in. They don't need to explain why they went quiet before they answer.
Before you start the activity, think about the buyers who have gone quiet on you recently. Include the ones you quietly gave up on. Look at each one again with the four reasons in mind, and resist the urge to assume the worst.
List three buyers who have gone quiet on you. Next to each, write which of the four reasons is most likely.
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