Yesterday at 3:26 pm, on the shore of Lake Champlain staring at the dark side of the moon during totality, I found something truly worthy to share. What kept repeating in my head was. "Tell them to start looking at it from the other side." On this side of one's career, there’s a certain clarity about what has ultimately mattered, what and who have withstood the tests of time and circumstance.
Once your would-be customer has vanished into the mist, it may be too late to do anything about it. They’ve likely disappeared because they either weren’t serious about your offer in the first place, or for some reason no longer are. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get closure. And it certainly doesn’t mean you couldn’t have prevented this from happening in the first place.
To be a seller is to advance a sale, not to go through safe, predictable motions. To visit a customer only hoping to be Top of Mind for some future hypothetical buy is to suffer the subtle bigotry of low expectations.