Getting ghosted is an unfortunate fact of sales life nowadays. Every once in a while, the conversation with a prospect is going to die down and never pick back up — but you don't have to take those fizzle-outs lying down. There are some strategies you can leverage to give yourself a fighting chance at re-engaging a prospect who seems like a lost cause.

Your sales are down. You need an influx of new customers. Often the first step is segmenting your prospects into groups, whether by industry, product type, service type, or some other categorization. Then the marketing blitz begins. Maybe you create a special offer on a product. Or a discount for new customers. Or just put up some billboards to build general brand awareness. But the needle doesn’t move that significantly.

"Difficult prospects are a fact of sales life, and dealing with a difficult buyer who makes a sale harder than it needs to will always suck — and from time to time, you're bound to deal with an especially difficult buyer who makes a sale especially harder than it needs to be, and that experience will especially suck."

Prospects — the potential customers you want to sell to — are the fuel for the sales pipeline. Every prospect represents a possible deal. Growing your base of sales prospects and working to nurture them will grow your revenue. Even though sales prospecting is important, it may sometimes feel like you’re just wishing and hoping the right people will show up.

Choose the Best Time and Strategy for Cold Calling. Ultimately, picking the right time to make your sales calls is essential to sales success. While these six rules of thumb are a good place to start, you may find different strategies work better for your business. Test these approaches and adopt the ones that work for you. You might be surprised to find how many more prospects you can reach with a few simple tweaks.

When salespeople lose a deal, most prefer to move on rather than linger over the specifics of the loss. Similarly, when they win a deal, most are quick to celebrate. But very few take the time to assess why they won the business. In the authors’ experience leading and coaching sales teams, they see evidence that a brief, well-pointed sales retrospective, where you unpack the reasons behind a win or a loss, can significantly improve a team’s future win rate.

According to Hubspot Research, only 3% of people consider sales reps to be trustworthy. If you want prospects to consider buying from you, first, you need to overcome that skepticism and win their trust. That’s where sales rapport comes in. Building sales rapport is an essential part of the outbound sales process. If prospects don’t believe you’re telling the truth about your product, they’ll never convert into buyers.

My articles begin with analogies so we'll start by asking, has baseball changed? Games take longer, there is role specialization, starting pitchers rarely complete games, hitters are stronger, pitchers routinely throw in the mid 90's and there is a trend towards either hitting a home run or striking out. But it's still baseball. It is still played the same way. The changes are superficial.

And in the context of how it affects salespeople, has buying really changed?

Yesterday I watched a toad walk across the outdoor side of our kitchen window. Picture it! I wish I had video but it ran so counter to what I have observed toads doing over the past 65 years that I froze. I performed a google search and found exactly one image of a toad on a window. Please understand that the dirty window and sill are not mine - I found the image via a Google search.