We’ve all been there. The emails, texts, and calls just stop from a promising business lead. We’ve been professionally “ghosted.” How can we cope and how can we prevent it from happening again?
The solo business life is a lot like the solo dating life.
We get a lot of our leads through the internet. There’s a lot of back and forth before we set up a date. We go on a lot of blind lunches and dinners.
We also get ghosted.
Ghosting is the act of a relationship partner – whether new or established – doing a “disappearing” act without prompt or explanation. They simply stop responding to texts, emails, or phone calls. They end the relationship by simply removing themselves from it completely.
Businesses do it too.
We get a promising lead in. We share an encouraging conversation, maybe even set up a meeting. Feeling good about the prospect, we send out a proposal, quote, or invoice. Days pass. Weeks pass. We send an email nudge.
Nothing.
After weeks or months of reminder emails and a polite phone call or two, we just never hear from them again.
We’ve been “professionally ghosted.”
Amelia Twiss, Executive Coach and Registered Psychologist at the Twiss Psychology Group defines business or professional ghosting when:
“Someone deliberately stops communicating with another person in a professional context, despite having an active relationship with that person, and without letting the other person know.”
Professional ghosting doesn’t mean we’re dealing with serial, skilled veteran ghosters. (Though in some cases, we very well might be.)
We’re being ghosted by businesspeople; those we’d usually call colleagues and contacts.
But why do they do it?