Affiliate Moguls Blog
About Affiliate Moguls
Founded by Meghan Damico and Ryan Alarid, Affiliate Moguls is a consulting business that specializes in hiring, training, and optimizing affiliate and email media buying programs. 

With over 15 years of direct response marketing experience, they bring a wealth of experience and connections to each partnership.
How to Deal With Professional Ghosting
Written by Meghan Damico on October 10, 2022
When most of us hear the term “ghosted,” images of failed relationships from the online dating world immediately come to mind. But ghosting has crept into the workplace.

Which is what inspired me to write this blog post which is in response to a Facebook post I wrote a few weeks ago.

In case we’re not connected, here is my post:
I've been ghosted three times in the last 10 days. 

No, it's not the dating apps!

It's legitimate people in our industry who have just...stopped responding.
I get it. We all have busy lives and things pop up. But ghosting is disrespectful.

Here are four ways to respond instead of ghosting me — or anyone in business for that matter:

1. "I love the services you offer but we're just not in a place to work with you at this time. My commitment is with other things at the moment."
2. "Something popped up and we're going to have to reschedule our meeting. Here are 3 times I'm available next week to reconnect."
3. "Can you please circle back with me in October? We'll be in a better spot to work with you then."
4. "I already work with so-and-so on the same thing, but if things change I will let you know."

(Ironically you can repurpose some of these for your dating life)

Jokes aside, just be kind out there!
At the time of that post I was pretty angry. Since COVID and the WFH surge, we’ve lost the art of face-to-face connection, making it easier for people to “drop off” and not get back to us. 

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to reflect, I wanted to share my thoughts on how to move forward when you’ve been ghosted. 

Take a step back and access the situation
Sometimes people have emergencies and are unavailable for an extended period of time. They’re taking care of a loved one, themselves, or they’re not in a mental place to respond to you. You have to give people grace. 

I found out recently that one of the people who had ghosted me was going through massive layoffs, which had to have been a particularly stressful time for them.

Know when to move on
I had used our “polite persistence” method to follow up with these people. Still no response. I had to learn to stop spending time on activities that weren’t generating us revenue.

I also had to tell myself that it wasn’t personal. It was business. People get ghosted for a lot of reasons. There’s a good chance they forgot, are too busy, or wanted to avoid an awkward conversation of not being able to afford us.

Learn from the experience 
Every client has a different sense of urgency. If you know me, I operate at 100mph at all times. I’ve had to embrace this lesson and have reflected on how we can apply it to other business practices. 

For example, we have a 0% close rate if we don’t review our proposal with a potential client either in person or over the phone. And we have a similar lack of success when our initial fact finding call doesn’t include the ultimate decision maker. 

Knowing this, we don’t schedule a call without the decision maker’s attendance and we never send a proposal via email without discussing it first. 

In these cases, as well as the ghosting examples, we’ve had to turn our attention to something new. 

What’s next for our business? 

We engage in a bit of creative brainstorming and make a new action plan. 

And, most importantly, we don’t burn bridges. You never know when someone will circle back to you!

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