Want to cut down on dark drop-offs? Go through your own buying process.

Dan Martin
May 29
7 min read

Updated: Jun 9

TLDR: Business owners and organization leaders are spending too much time trying to track and generate granular data on every interaction and not enough time taking steps to prevent drop-offs throughout their buying process. The simplest way to get started? Walk through your own process as a customer to get the answers to 7 critically important questions.

If you’re trying to get someone to buy something, there’s a good chance you’re experiencing what I call dark drop-offs. It could even be happening right this moment.

While it sounds like a weird show you find after scrolling through Netflix search for a half hour, dark drop-offs is my term for the people who choose to jettison themselves out of your buying process at any point.

Someone fills out the contact form on your website and makes it clear that they need help urgently…then doesn’t respond when you call or email them.
You have a great discovery call, then receive a (hopefully) nice email thanking you for your time (and nothing else).
You get all the way past scoping a project and sending a detailed proposal and either don’t win the business or don’t hear back at all.
Someone in your ideal customer profile engages with every piece of content you create, including taking actions you never see, but never converts into a customer

But isn’t that called “ghosting?”

Sometimes, but not always. For all of you advocates of non-corporeal terminology, “ghosting” is too whimsical a term for something that’s so important, and it doesn’t cover every scenario in the way “dark drop-offs” does. Don’t @ me.

However you choose to name it, it’s one of the most insidious challenges many organizations face precisely because most of these interactions are “dark.” In this case, “dark” means both that the true reason or reasons for the drop-off is a mystery and that the attributes of the drop-off are nearly impossible to track and measure.

But I already do win/loss analysis...

That’s never a bad thing. I’d recommend you be careful what you do with the data and analysis, though.

Yes, win/loss analysis can provide you with a window into some of the reasons why you may be losing people.

It’s also generally a small sample size and the answers are often dripping with bias. Further, the information you get is more directional in nature and doesn't often get deep enough into the real reasons why your organization isn't winning business or keeping clients.

So, if I can’t measure it, how do I solve the problem?

Dark drop-offs are a fact of life. You’re extremely unlikely to have a 100% close rate, and that’s not what you’re aiming for anyway. You control how you show up to buyers at every stage, but they’re the ones who control when and how they choose to interact with you.

Eliminating every drop-off is borderline impossible, and I’ve watched too many organizations whip themselves into a frenzy trying to engineer a way to have hard drop-off data coming in from every interaction.

The question at that point is, then what? Is that data truly telling you something you don’t know? Can you even really trust it?

Instead, assume that drop-offs are happening, and focus your efforts on preventative measures. What are the “right now,” “next month” and “later this year” changes that will make it easier to buy from you?

If you strip everything else away, that’s the goal.

Make it as easy as possible for prospective customers to understand what you’re offering, how to find the information they need through your core channels, get in touch with you if and when they want or need to, and how to make a purchase.

I’ve found this reframing to be helpful in inspiring me to take action and in deflecting the constant noise of new products, features and best practices attempting to complicate something that can and should be simple.

What you can do today or this week: try to buy your own stuff

The simplest and potentially most impactful way (which is what this newsletter is all about) you can start taking steps to limit drop-offs is to walk through the entire process of buying your own product or service.

Here’s how I do this for my own business and for clients:

First, go through your buying process using a customer lens, but as yourself

What is this, Inception? Here’s what I mean. Conventional wisdom says to take yourself entirely out of the equation for these types of exercises and put yourself fully in the shoes of your customer. (Why is it always only just shoes? Shouldn’t it be their entire outfit?)

The problem? Most people can’t do that, so they bring their inherent biases into it anyway. I’ve also found that it allows us to create a fantastical version of the “ideal customer” in our heads, who then behaves in a way that no person ever has (ensuring that the exercise brings us very little value).

I always recommend you take the first pass as yourself. How do you prefer to buy products or services?

Sure, everyone goes about buying things differently, and that may not be how you do it. That said, you’re still a human being, and if you’re truly trying to look at these interactions without bias, there are things you’ll find in your review that would benefit every other human being. Here’s an example – the headline on your home page.

If it doesn’t quickly say what you do and who you do it for, it’s not helping anyone, and there’s not a specific group of people who benefit from vague corporate-speak. You’ll feel most comfortable being yourself, and that will lead to better outcomes.

Before you dive in, on a notepad or your favorite software, create a simple template for each interaction in the process: what you want to call the interaction, your notes on what you experienced (including anything that made you react positively or negatively or feel completely neutral), and what you believe(d) the next interaction would be.

The goal here isn’t to create a linear journey – that’s a useful exercise, but it can also trick us into thinking that’s how people actually buy products. It’s to identify how well your organization is executing each specific interaction and how that interaction could be improved.

The section for the next interaction is to help you identify how some of the interactions may be interdependent, and where you might be seeing gaps (a big reason for dark drop-offs).

Because every organization is different, it’s best if you come up with the interactions on your own (you may even identify ones that don’t exist yet that need to be added). Here are a few prompts to get you started:

How might you begin researching options after you’ve identified a problem you can’t fix
Where might you go to get recommendations on options that you’re most likely to act upon
How might you research your organization’s capabilities from the customer’s perspective?
What objections might you have about your product or service and how might you dig deeper into each of these areas?
How would you expect to go through the process of contacting an organization when you need more information or are interested in things like pricing, deliverables, etc.?
What would you expect to happen if you decided at every/any interaction to stop looking for now?
What might you expect in the payment process and what happens after (for this portion, unless you have a special login that allows you to simulate a purchase, you may need to make some guesses)?

Set aside the time to do this in one sitting, if possible, as it can help you make the connections between different interactions.

If this takes you an extremely long time, then you've already identified that your process is too complex.

Now, do it again as a customer with a different mindset than your own

The process will go a lot faster this time since you know what you’re looking for. The point of doing it again is to identify opportunities that arise from approaching the buying process with a completely different mindset.

If you have great customer research and you can pull from that, use that data and analysis to form the idea of the person you’re pretending to be. If you don’t have any of that, make sure your “persona,” for lack of a better term, is fundamentally different from yours in tangible ways.

If you prefer to go straight to a review site for your research, have this persona use Google as their starting point. If you’re not a fan of using AI at all, have your persona be someone who would ask ChatGPT for tips on how to boil water. If you like a soft serve vanilla cone, be someone who goes for a double scoop of pistachio and red chile in a novelty waffle cone.

The point being, you’re focusing on how different people behave and buy things instead of on trying to pinpoint exactly how your “ideal customer profile” will follow the same linear process to become your customer. While they will certainly have other similarities, everyone buys differently, and your experience should be set up to accommodate that.

Will this get you as much detail and granularity as a $100,000 ICP and segmentation project? It will not.

Will it give you a list of valuable adjustments that will make your buying process easier for prospective customers? Absolutely.

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Thank you for reading! If you want my bonus thoughts on why you should focus on limiting dark drop-offs over almost any other area of your organization, send me a message and I’ll get those over to you.

If you think this information can help someone you know, please share! My favorite thing about having my own consulting business is the opportunity to talk to a lot of interesting people.

I'd love to chat with you - email me at dan@heliosmarketingllc.com or send me a message here.

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