The Anti-ghosting method

INTRODUCTION

“Whatever power kings have, they are but human: they can err as readily as other men.”
Pierre Corneille, Le Cid.

It was primarily as an entrepreneur that I ran into my first brick walls. There’s no doubt about that. Before embarking on my business adventure, I was cozily working for large French and multi- national corporations that spoon-fed us ready-to- use work processes that did not need to be ques- tioned nor improved since others were paid to do that. If we failed to reach our goals after following the procedures in place, well, surely the problem was not ours… it most likely stemmed from that guy in charge of marketing or the one in sales…

Okay… but then I started wearing my own business hat, so all of a sudden it became harder to hide behind the corporate ladder. If I failed to turn a lead into a client, my revenues quickly reduced to virtually nothing, which defeats the whole purpose of running a business, right? Besides, I hated it when my reply to an inbound inquiry from a potential prospect fell on deaf ears and remained unanswered. I was convinced that if a couple took the time to engage with me, regardless of the rather disinterested tone of their initial message, they were surely sending out a strong buying signal.

In any event, back in 2000, the act of being ignored by a potential client did not really have a name to go by. In more recent years, this phe- nomenon was coined as “ghosting”. In plain English, ghosting is when the person you’ve been in contact with suddenly falls off the radar, stops responding to your proposal and simply disap- pears into the ether. This of course makes no sense since they are the ones who reached out to you in the first place clearly in search of a service you can provide them.

So I had to take a step back and put my think- ing cap on. What I had to do before anything else was to put some systems and processes in place. That’s my nature. To organize and take the necessary steps that lead to success.

Let’s be honest, as a former high-level athlete (albeit at amateur level), I never particularly stood out for my talent. However, I managed to reach my goals thanks to my ability to sustain repetition until the techniques I had put in place came to fruition. If a particular method didn’t work, I would simply change it; until I found the one that led to success.

Once embedded in me, I reproduced it tirelessly, even to the point where I took great pleas- ure out of it.

That’s how – among other things – I became an entrepreneur. I needed to create my own proc- esses and my own methods to avoid repeating mistakes when a prospect contacted me.

And I made it. No more ghosting! Surely if it worked for me, it had to work for others.

It’s only later on, when meeting in my academy with a great many wedding professionals from across the country -most of them wedding planners- that I realized the following: too often, professionals faced failure from the very first contact with their prospective client because of recurring mistakes, a fact that over than 85% of them were completely unaware of.

While expanding my business, I had the oppor- tunity to work on other continents, with different cultures by becoming a conference speaker -always in the wedding industry – specializing in destination weddings. Just to spice things up a bit.

And you know what? The mistakes that we tend to make with the prospects who contact us are exactly the same whether we are American, European, Indian or Emirati entrepreneurs.

So in 2014, I decided to write a white paper very en vogue back then- in which I defined my own personal added value, my seal, namely my expertise and wholehearted commitment in get- ting a contract signed with almost every single prospect who contacted me.

In the space of three years, from 2014 to 2017, you were 6,681 wedding industry professionals to download my white paper, “7 mistakes not to make when a prospect contacts you”.

That’s a success I had, of course, hoped for but I have to say that to this day, it still gives me a bit of a high when I think that this publication was initially intended for wedding-planners only.

When I wrote it, I dared to hope that it would become the backbone of my academy’s blog at the time “Succeed in the Wedding Industry©” #RDLM (acronym based on its original name in French “Réussir dans le Mariage©”). It was the very expres- sion of the fact that I could offer relevant advice that would become useful to many colleagues.

To date, #RDLM remains unrivaled in its field. Undoubtedly, the book of the “7 mistakes” has much to do with that success.

We are now in 2021, and after two years of recess, I decided to resuscitate this book.

At a time when social networks make it every time easier for potential customers to find and connect with you, while dealing with an increasing number of professionals on the market, it became apparent to me the need to fill the gap by providing new, powerful, and efficient solutions, readily accessible to most.

As a result of that, three new common mistakes have been added to the original seven sins. Mistakes that I encounter regularly during my training sessions; mistakes directly linked to the world we live in.

So, in short, what exactly can you expect to find in this book?

An anti-ghosting method.

You are about to have direct access to a tested and approved method. Tested and approved by me, obviously, but also by a wide array of fellow wed- ding planners who have put into practice the advice and methods provided in this book.

So if you’re fed up with receiving requests for quotes from prospects via email or through a referral platform, that are not followed through, then this book is for you!

First of all, after helping you define your own work environment (leads, prospects, buying sig- nals, social media etc.), this book will highlight the 10 mistakes to avoid whenever you are being contacted. We will then cover case by case the basis the art of selling, how and when to follow- up, only to end with a glorious selection of the worst emails I ever received, even though they all eventually led to the signature of a contract.

You got it: I take great joy in helping my peers. I take great joy in helping you.

This book #anti-ghosting has one sole objective: to enable you to grow your business and maximize your income. If you apply these meth- ods, you will be guaranteed to radically change your future as an entrepreneur.

Shall we start then?

Let’s go… ghosting is dead!