The only prospects worth emailing this quarter
Most lost deals were never deals. They were people who agreed the problem was real, took the meeting, and then went back to the two things their job actually depends on.
Here is a pattern every founder-led sales motion produces eventually. You build a good list. The fit is genuinely there. You get meetings — a decent rate of them. People are warm on the call, they say the problem is real, some of them even try the product. And then nothing happens, over and over, and the pipeline reads as a series of deals that are almost moving.
The usual diagnosis is that the pitch needs work. Usually it doesn't. Here is Jason Cohen describing the actual mechanism, in a teardown of a company with exactly this shape of pipeline:
There's usually just a couple of things at a time that a person at an enterprise has — where if they drop that, that's their job. Now, when you're one of those, you get the attention. If it's not one of those top one, two, maybe three things that's on their plate right now, they take the sales meeting, they take the demo, they might even try it, and then they don't buy.
Jason Cohen
Read that again, because it reframes the whole funnel. The behaviour you are seeing — interest, engagement, evaporation — is not a symptom of a weak pitch. It is the exact symptom of pitching someone who is not activated. A person with two critical priorities this quarter will happily agree that your thing is a good idea. Agreeing costs them nothing. Buying costs them attention they have already committed elsewhere.
Could-want versus activated
Almost every ICP definition in circulation describes could-want: industry, headcount, tech stack, revenue band, job title. All of it real, all of it necessary, and none of it predictive of whether anyone buys this quarter.
The missing axis is whether there is a person inside that company whose current quarter depends on solving this. Cohen's phrasing:
Not just people who could want it, but this is right now what they're activated on.
Jason Cohen
That is a different question, it is answerable from public information, and almost nobody scores for it.
What activation actually looks like from outside
You cannot see someone's OKRs. You can see the artefacts of them, and they are surprisingly legible:
- A recent hire into the owning role. Somebody hired a Head of Partnerships eleven weeks ago. That person has a first-quarter plan and needs it to work. This is the single strongest activation signal available publicly, and it has a short half-life.
- An announced push into a new market or segment. A launch page, a press note, a careers page suddenly listing three roles in one region. Someone owns that announcement.
- A competitor's move they have to answer. If their nearest rival shipped the thing six weeks ago, an internal conversation is already happening.
- A public commitment. Anything said on an earnings call, a conference stage or a launch post becomes somebody's deliverable.
- A funding round, but only in a narrow sense — not because they now have money, but because a round comes with a plan they told investors about.
Contrast that with the signals most lists sort on — headcount, industry code, funding total, tech stack. Those describe a company's shape. None of them describes anybody's week.
Two diagnoses that look identical and are opposites
When a deal dies, there is one forensic question worth asking, and most teams never ask it. Cohen again:
They didn't buy from you. Now my question is, did they buy from someone else? If the answer is yes, then the problem is — no, they did buy, but not from you. On the other hand, if they just had a no-buy, then it's not a question of how you're different from the competition. It's that you didn't find people where this is in their priority list.
Jason Cohen
Two outcomes that look the same in a CRM, and they demand opposite responses:
| What happened | What it means | What to change |
|---|---|---|
| Lost to a competitor | They were activated. Your targeting was right. | Positioning, proof, pricing — the sales conversation |
| No decision | They were never activated. | The list. The pitch was never the problem. |
If you are mostly losing to competitors, congratulations — you have found the market and you have a differentiation problem, which is tractable. If you are mostly getting no-decisions, the pitch is fine and the list is wrong, and every hour spent rewriting email copy is an hour spent on the wrong end of the problem.
Most CRMs record "Closed Lost" for both.
Three disqualifiers worth applying early
The free test. Ask, honestly, on the prospect's behalf: if this appeared, fully working, at zero cost — and zero cost includes their time — would they want it? Cohen's observation is that the answer is astonishingly often still no. When it is, that is not a slow deal. It is a no, and it will consume six weeks pretending otherwise.
Are they already doing it manually, with people whose job it is? This does not disqualify them, but it changes everything. You are no longer selling into a gap; you are selling past internal opposition, because the people currently doing the work will be asked to evaluate the thing that changes their work. The pitch has to move from replace to let your people do the part only people can do — and you need a sponsor above the affected team.
Nobody takes a meeting to be sold to. Cohen, describing his own inbox: "I get cold emails every day for crap. I don't take the meeting. I only take sales calls if I'm in the market to buy it." Your reply-rate ceiling is set by what share of your list is in-market — not by your subject line. If reply rates are bad, the list is the first suspect.
What this changes on Monday
- Add an activation column to your list. Not a score — a link. The job posting, the launch page, the announcement. If the cell is empty, the row is not ready to email; it is ready to monitor.
- Split "Closed Lost" in two. Lost-to-competitor and no-decision. Do it now, retroactively if you can. Within a quarter you will know which problem you have.
- Re-sequence rather than re-write. A no-decision prospect is not a bad prospect. They are a prospect with the wrong timing — which means the correct action is a trigger to watch, not a fifth follow-up.
- Judge the list on reply rate, and the pitch on win rate. They fail differently and they are fixed differently. Averaging them together is how teams spend a quarter improving the wrong one.
The uncomfortable implication is that a well-written email to an unactivated buyer performs about as well as a badly written one, and both look like a copywriting problem. They are a targeting problem wearing a copywriting costume.
Keep reading
- Personalisation that works, and personalisation that costs you trust Using someone's first name is not personalisation — and the people you most want to reach read it as proof that a machine sent the email. Here is the line between the two.
- What to say when everyone already knows the problem Naming a pain your prospect discusses openly proves nothing — they hear it from every vendor in the category. There are two deeper levels, and the third one is where deals are actually won.
- How to size a market in four minutes Most growth plans die on arithmetic nobody did. Four crude numbers, multiplied on the back of an envelope, will tell you whether a segment can produce your target at all — before you spend a quarter finding out.