With Halloween approaching this weekend, sales leaders are being encouraged to examine their pipelines for ghosts and zombies that may be skewing forecasts. According to research by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna for The JOLT Effect, somewhere between 40 percent and 60 percent of lost deals end in no decision, meaning the buyer simply chooses to do nothing rather than selecting a competitor.
Every sales leader knows the feeling of a deal that looked promising months ago but has gone quiet. Emails go unanswered, and champions who were once keen in meetings have stopped returning calls. The opportunity remains in the CRM with a close date at the end of the quarter, still contributing to the forecast, yet nobody wants to be the one to declare it dead.
Research indicates that ghosts are made, not born, and are usually formed early in the sales cycle when a salesperson mistakes interest for commitment. A ghost is defined as a buyer who has gone silent, with signs including unanswered emails, meetings cancelled without a new date, and contacts who used to reply within hours but now reply within weeks or not at all.
Zombies are considered more dangerous because they appear alive. They still take calls, attend demos, and ask for revised proposals, but nothing actually moves forward. Salespeople usually recognize a zombie by a combination of these behaviors, as the seller’s hope is what keeps these deals alive.
Ghosts are at least visible, as their silence forces the difficult question. Zombies hide in the forecast, consume the team’s time, and give everyone a reason to avoid asking tough questions. With a ghost, experts recommend resisting the urge to send another “just checking in” email instead sending one honest, direct message that gives the buyer permission to say no.
If the main contact has gone silent, other stakeholders may know why. If there are no other stakeholders to contact, that indicates the deal was single-threaded and always vulnerable. A quick look at LinkedIn can often explain sudden silence, as a contact who has changed role or left the business is a frequent reason for this occurrence.
Zombies are harder to deal with because the cure requires requalifying the deal against evidence rather than optimism. Salespeople are asked to request a commitment from the buyer that a properly qualified opportunity would happily make, such as a meeting with the Economic Buyer, agreement to a decision timeline, or access to people who will need to sign off the purchase. A jointly agreed plan to a decision is one of the most useful tests; if the buyer won’t help build one, or keeps postponing the conversation, the team learns how much the project really matters to them.
Sales leaders play a part in this dynamic. If salespeople are criticized every time their pipeline shrinks, they will keep undead deals on the books. Instead, honest disqualification should be rewarded, and deals that end in no decision should be recorded as such and reviewed so the team can learn why they stalled. Pipeline reviews should ask what has changed since the last review and what evidence supports it, rather than how the salesperson feels about the deal.
Most ghosts and zombies can be traced back to a gap in the early stages of the sales cycle. The two most common gaps are the first two questions in the Outcome-Centric Selling framework: “why act” and “why now.” If the buyer cannot explain why they need to change and why that change has to happen by a particular date, it probably is not a qualified opportunity. The JOLT research adds that many buyers who end up doing nothing actually set off thinking they need to change, but stalled because they were afraid of making the wrong decision. That is where the other two Outcome-Centric questions – “why choose us” and “why trust us” come in, as the buyer needs to feel confident enough in their choice to defend it internally.
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Originally reported by CustomerThink.
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