Decision Purgatory (Part 1 of 2)
- May 18
- 2 min read
A friend of mine is organizing a local conference and has spent weeks reaching out to potential sponsors. Most conversations have gone well. Several businesses said yes, asked for information, seemed genuinely excited. And then, complete radio silence. Gone. Into what I call Decision Purgatory.
If you caught my post on LinkedIn last week, you already know the term. If not, Decision Purgatory is where proposals go to die a quiet, administrative death. Not personal. Not rude. Just stuck.
Here is what my friend, and most people who have ever sent a proposal, get wrong about that silence. They assume it means something bad. It is a no. Something went wrong. They changed their minds. And then they either freeze entirely or fire off a "just wanted to bump this to the top of your inbox" email and wait again.
But here is what is actually happening. The decision may not be the priority it was when you spoke. There may be two or three other people who need to weigh in and none of them have been looped in yet. The budget got complicated. Life got genuinely busy. Your proposal is sitting under 47 other things that also felt urgent. It might literally be in their junk folder.
None of that is about you. It is about where they are in their decision-making process.
And this is the part most people skip before the proposal ever goes out:
Do you actually know where your prospect is in their process?
Do they have budget available now, or do they need to pull it together?
Is there one decision maker or several?
If others are involved, have you made a plan to connect with them too?
These are not questions you ask after the silence starts. They are things you establish during the sales conversation, so you already have a map when things go quiet.
Real follow-up is not a bump email. It continues the conversation. It answers questions they might not have thought to ask yet. It reminds them of the problem they recognized they needed to solve. It prepares them for what comes next. A strong follow-up email does not say "did you make a decision?" It says something useful. It moves something forward. It gives them something to bring back to the other people in the room.
The fortune really is in the follow-up. But only when the follow-up is actually doing something.
Watch out for my next blog. I am sharing a simple follow-up toolkit, including what to actually put in those emails so they do the heavy lifting they are supposed to do.
And if you are sitting on a proposal right now wondering what that silence means, that is exactly the kind of thing I work through with clients. Not just the actions to take, but helping you interpret what is and is not happening in your pipeline.
Stay out of purgatory.
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