The second outreach email has been sitting unanswered for ten days.
I know what ten days means in someone else’s inbox. It means nothing. People are busy. The email landed on a bad week, or it’s in the folder that every professional over forty has and doesn’t check consistently. Life does not organize itself around the response windows we invent for it. I know all of this. I have told myself all of this approximately every morning since June 13. I still check the outreach inbox before I check my work email, which is probably a data point I should look at more carefully.
In twenty-four years I have sent follow-up emails I couldn’t count. Renewal follow-ups, proposal follow-ups, the quiet nudge on a Thursday when a decision was supposed to happen by Wednesday and didn’t. A good follow-up removes friction, assumes good intent, asks for one thing, and does not make the other person feel chased. You are staying in contact like a professional.
I explained this to a junior account manager two years ago. Twelve minutes. She sent me a thank-you note the next day.
Yesterday afternoon I sent a follow-up on a renewal I’ve been managing. Three sentences, sent without rereading. Hit send. The client responded in four hours.
It took me three days longer to send my own follow-up than it would have taken me to send that one.
The reason, I think, is the layer.
When I follow up for a client, a no belongs to the client. I bring them the information, they figure out what’s next. I am invested in the outcome, sometimes genuinely, but I am not the outcome. There is a clear line between me and the result, and it makes the professional mechanics easy. I have operated behind that line my entire career without noticing it was there.
That line is gone here. The second contact either wants to talk or she doesn’t. If she responds and it goes well, that is mine. If she doesn’t respond, or says she doesn’t see how this would work, that is also mine. Twenty-four years of writing follow-ups on someone else’s behalf, and then I sat for three days staring at forty-three words that were only for mine.
I want to say I’m not afraid of rejection. I almost wrote that. What I mean is something more specific: it isn’t rejection I’m sitting with, it’s the directness of it. Every professional no I’ve absorbed in twenty-four years arrived wrapped in something: budget constraints, timing, executive turnover, the incumbent vendor. There’s always been a narrative that distributed the weight of the outcome across reasons, circumstances, forces outside anyone’s control. There is no distribution here. She either wants to talk to me or she doesn’t. I have no badge, no company letterhead, no institutional anything between me and the response.
I sent it this morning. Forty-three words. No attachment. I said I didn’t want to let it fall through, asked if she’d had a chance to look at my earlier note, and whether she’d be open to a short call.
I did not write “just following up.” I never write “just following up.” It apologizes for the email before the other person has read it, and I have less patience for that now than I used to.
The email is sent. I’ll either hear back or I won’t.
I’ve said that exact thing to clients in the window between a follow-up and a response. It always sounded right. It was professionally accurate. What it wasn’t, usually, was actually fine.
I’m working on actually fine.