Handling Covid-19 posts by email

Do any of these email responses from prospects or clients sound familiar?

“Everything is on hold right now.”

“Due to the circumstances, we simply do not have the budget at this time.”

“We are not making any decisions at this time.”

“This is not a good time for us, I’m sure you will understand.”

What all of these answers have in common is that they are just common stalls. Oh sure, the circumstances may be new (the Covid-19 pandemic is certainly new!), But in essence these objections are the same kind of stalemate you usually have.

“This is not a good time”, “I do not have the budget”, “I am not making decisions at the moment” are responses that you receive during your normal sales process, are they not?

So how should you handle these positions now? Using the same best practice approach that you should always use: you should isolate these objections.

What do you really want to know in light of these obstacles or objections? You want to know:

“If you had the budget, is our product or service the one you would choose?” and,

“When the time is right to make these kinds of decisions again, would you seriously consider our solution?” and,

“When circumstances change, are you interested enough in our solution to choose us?”

This is how you should respond when you receive these types of blocked emails during this pandemic.

Of course, you’ll want to soften your response by showing empathy for what your prospect or client is going through.

Here are a couple of good all-purpose email responses that you can customize for each of the above situations:

Dear potential customer:

Thanks for your answer and don’t worry about the budget at this time.

We work with many companies like yours, and time should make sense, both in terms of budget and your current needs.

Quick question: Budgeting aside for a moment, I wonder if it makes sense to continue our conversation in the future based on what you know about how we work.

In other words, if the quote is available, is our (product or solution) something that you find enough value to talk about at another time?

Another example:

Dear potential customer,

Good to know that you are keeping well.

I understand that things may be on hold for now, but I was wondering: How do you feel about what we covered in our demo last week?

Do you feel that this had value to you?

Let me know so I can do a proper follow-up.

Thanks …

As you can see from these sample responses, what we are doing is avoiding their objection or deadlock so that you can determine if they have a genuine interest in your product or service.

Until you know that, you will only be chasing your tail.

And that doesn’t feel good in any sales climate …