Sitting on a big pile of almost

The call goes great and then you never hear from them again.

I'm building SippySpaces, real-time community data for coworking spaces and events, and I'm at the stage where I'm doing a lot of the outreach myself, so I've had a lot of these demo calls lately. The good ones are the ones that mess with your head the most. Someone leans in, tells you the problem you're describing is exactly the one they have, says the thing every founder is secretly desperate to hear, which is some version of this is great, and you come off the call certain that one's going to land. And then it just doesn't. No reply, no booking, no actual no, just a kind of quiet that you sit there refreshing your inbox against.

For a long time I read that silence as a verdict on me. I went back over the call in my head, what did I say wrong, was it the price, was it the way I explained it, was it me. And occasionally maybe it was. But mostly I've come to think it's two much more boring things that happen to stack on top of each other.

The first is that they meant it when they said they liked it, but liking something has never once moved it onto anyone's list for the week. Nothing actually changed for them the day after our call. The problem they have was annoying before we spoke and it's exactly as annoying now, which is to say annoying enough to nod along about on a call and not annoying enough to do anything about on a Tuesday. Interest and urgency feel like the same thing in the room and they are completely different animals, and a good call is weirdly good at hiding which one you've actually got.

The second is that the person sitting across from me getting excited is very often not the person who can actually say yes. In coworking it tends to be the community manager, the one who lives the problem every day, who feels it the most, who lights up when someone finally describes it back to them. They are exactly the right person to be excited and almost never the person who signs the cheque. So the enthusiasm is real, it just runs straight into some internal wall I never get to see, and then they go quiet: 'I loved it but I can't get my boss to care' isn't an easy thing to type.

And when you put those two together you get the thing I think most people building something early know in their gut, which is that a pipeline can look busy and feel warm and still be sitting on a big pile of almost.

I haven't solved this, but I've stopped trusting how a call feels and started watching what people do after it, because whether someone sends the thing they promised to send, or replies to a boring logistics question within a day, tells you about a hundred times more than how warm the conversation was. And I've stopped pitching to the person who already loves it, because they don't need another pitch, they need help selling it to someone else in the building, and that's a totally different thing to hand them, and I was getting it wrong for months without noticing.

Curious if other people read the post-call silence the same way, and of course any advice is very welcome.