Let’s lead by example and all stop ghosting

OK, that’s it, everybody’s dead. That’s the only possible reason I’m reading so much on LinkedIn from colleagues and prospects in the PR industry about being ghosted; you put massive effort into a proposal and there’s just no response. You follow up politely and there’s equally no response.

My guess is that everybody has been eaten by a leopard. 

Only…

They probably haven’t. And I’ll tell you something else. Some of the people doing a lot of that complaining are themselves ghosting other people. It needs to stop and one way of reducing it is by example.

Let’s take a step back. I have a small media training company and as such I work alongside a lot of public relations organisations. Like all businesses we need sales so let’s start by dividing ‘ghosting’ into two categories. First there’s the “no time to reply to a cold email or other cold contact” sort of ghosting.

I see this complained about often on social media. A public relations person – one of our number – or sometimes a recruitment professional complains on LinkedIn. They did all the right things, they say, they followed the prospective customer, got to know their style a little, commented on a couple of posts, asked to connect and immediately they started pitching they were excommunicated.

Here's the news about that: a couple of friendly-seeming approaches don’t entitle us to muscle in and start the sales pitch. We might be lucky and find someone was already looking for a service like ours but if not, an approach we got out of a book can still seem intrusive. There’s no divine right to a response to a cold approach or even an under-warmed pitch. There are the others, though.

Speak first, sell later

If someone approaches me for media training I have a little method: try to avoid sending a quote out without speaking to someone, tailor a decent pitch document for my VA to send out, follow up politely in a week or two and drop a polite note a couple of weeks later if nothing’s come through. 

PR professionals, chasing larger chunks of business, will have a more intensive process often involving multiple sessions of in-person pitching and negotiating. It all involves resources.

Which is why it’s so frustrating when things just go dead. I’ve spoken to people based in the north who’ve made the journey to London to discuss an opportunity, spent time on their pitch and then been disregarded. 

I’ve had clients who’ve used me and a couple of members of my team, given great feedback and said their chief executive wants to go through the same thing, they’ve sent encouraging emails requesting dates and then suddenly gone quiet. 

I’ve had people accepting a proposal in principle, assuring me they just need to coordinate calendars (I am not underestimating how difficult that can be) and then after a few responses they just stop.

The thing is, we’re all adults. We know circumstances can be changed. Budgets can be rewritten. Paragraphs can have too many passives but that’s another story. The frustration is not being told.

There are people who don’t ghost. Replies like:

• The internal comms team has changed.
• The CEO has decided not to prioritise this.
• The PR budget’s been cut.

…and any other variation is something the recipient won’t enjoy but they’ll accept and understand. It will have the added benefit of taking the sender off the “follow up there may be some dosh available” list (more finessed names are available but we all know what it is) so other than the odd “how’s it going” message the hassle level for the sender and the work level for the recipient will both diminish.

Hold up a mirror

The reason I know so much about this, even as someone a step away from/supporting the PR world, is that frankly there are people in public relations who are as bad at this as anyone else. And they’re the first and most vehement to complain when someone does it to them.

So here’s an idea. Disregarding the cold callers (and including the “I’ve commented on two of your posts so you need to buy my services” merchants as ‘cold’), the PR industry is in a good place to start leading by example. We could adopt an informal code, something like “if we have solicited services and approached a supplier, when a clear answer is available we will let the supplier know rather than dodge it even when we don’t think they’re going to like it very much.”

Only then will we be in a position to complain when other people blank or ghost us, and it can only improve our reputations.

Now if you’ll excuse me, this reminds me of a couple of emails I have to send.

Guy Clapperton is owner of Clapperton Media Training.