Just found out 40% of B2B buyers ghost vendors after the first call

Read a Gartner report last night that says 40% of buyers vanish after one sales call because the pitch was too generic, so I reworked our follow-up script to ask two specific questions per call, anyone else see that stat and change their process?

2 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

2 Comments

drew_jones312mo ago

Oh come on, that stat is just a fancy excuse for bad follow-up. Most buyers ghost because they were never serious in the first place, not because your pitch was too generic. I've sat in on plenty of calls where the prospect asked zero questions and then acted shocked when the deal went cold. Asking two questions per call won't fix that if the buyer is just shopping around or comparing prices with three other vendors. Plus, if you're wasting time on tire kickers, that 40% number is actually doing you a favor by filtering them out early. Focus on qualifying harder before the call, not changing your script after it.

2

hayden_craig952mo ago

Kinda wild how nobody's talking about the timing angle here. @drew_jones31, I get the tire kicker point, but what if the ghosting is actually about when the call happens, not just what's said? Like, I've seen buyers vanish because they got hit with our pitch on a Tuesday morning when they're buried, vs a Thursday afternoon when they're actually thinking about vendor swaps. We started tracking that split and our ghost rate dropped by like 12 points without touching the script. Maybe the 40% is partly a scheduling problem dressed up as a message problem.

2