You're here when: You've had a promising call but you're not sure if this prospect will actually close. You need to decide how much time to invest in follow-up.
The Heuristic
Look for commitment, not enthusiasm. Compliments are free. Commitments cost something. A real prospect gives you at least one of these:
- Time — they schedule a follow-up meeting with specific people (not "let's circle back sometime")
- Reputation — they introduce you to a decision-maker, a budget holder, or a colleague
- Money — a deposit, letter of intent, or verbal confirmation of budget
- Information — they share internal details about their buying process, timeline, or competing solutions
If the call ended with "that sounds great, keep me posted" and nothing else, you've collected a compliment, not a commitment. Deprioritize and move on.
Quick Example
A founder I know spent three months nurturing a VP of Marketing at a mid-market e-commerce company. The demo went perfectly. The VP loved the product, asked detailed questions, even said "this would save my team ten hours a week." The founder left that call glowing and moved the deal to 80% in his CRM. But he never asked who else needed to sign off, whether there was budget allocated, or what their buying timeline looked like. Turns out the VP had zero purchasing authority, their annual software budget was already locked, and the CFO had frozen all new vendor contracts for the quarter. Three months of follow-up emails, a custom integration spec, and a revised pricing deck, all for someone who genuinely liked the product but was never in a position to buy it.
The Anti-Pattern
The Pipeline Hoarder. Keeping every "interested" prospect in your pipeline because removing them feels like giving up. The result: a bloated pipeline that looks healthy but converts at 5%. You spend hours following up with people who were never going to buy, while real prospects get slower responses because your attention is spread too thin. A prospect without a scheduled next step is not a deal, it's a hope.
Written with ❤️ by a human (still)