That tumbleweed moment.
You have done everything correctly.
You have researched your market. You have written stellar pieces of content to demonstrate your expertise; to show your people what you do, how you do it, and why you do it. You have sent out your promotional materials.
After a few days, has anything happened? Has anyone come back to you?
Perhaps not.
If you have been in business for any length of time, you know this moment. The silence after the outbound messaging. The absence of response that feels, in the immediate aftermath, like indifference or rejection. The tumbleweed rolling through the space where engagement was supposed to be.
Here is what that silence almost certainly isn’t: evidence that nobody is interested.
What the silence means #
Gartner research has found that B2B buyers are on average 70% through their purchase evaluation before they ever engage directly with a sales representative. They are reading, researching, comparing, and forming views and they are doing almost all of it without telling anyone. The silent phase, as it has come to be called in sales psychology, is not the absence of activity. It is the presence of private activity that your messaging alone cannot identify.
The Sopro 2026 outreach report found that the average B2B buyer receives over 120 sales-related emails every week. That is roughly 25 per business day. Your carefully crafted message arrived in an inbox competing with two dozen others, all claiming similar things, all asking for attention from people with very little spare of it.
The tumbleweed is not a signal. It is a condition. And the response to it is not more email. It is a different kind of contact entirely.
What comes next #
You need to follow up. Call them. Engage on a personal basis. Share your experiences. Ask some meaningful questions.
Seek a Zoom call or a face-to-face meeting, so you can get to know each other better.
This is the step that separates the businesses that build genuine pipelines from those that send materials into silence and then wonder why nothing came of them. Not because the materials were wrong, but because materials alone were never going to be enough.
Consider the Maserati principle. When someone buys a commodity; a box of pens, a standard office supply, the transaction is simple and digital is perfectly adequate. But if someone is considering a Maserati, they want to feel the leather, understand the options, explore what is possible. They need a guide who can translate their vision into reality. The human contact isn’t just helpful; it is essential to the entire value proposition.
Your product or service is high quality, high margin, and high value. Everything about your proposition is high. So why not call them and say Hi?
That wordplay carries a genuine point. The higher the value and margin of what you offer, the more crucial early human engagement becomes. A relationship of that significance: one where you will potentially be working closely with someone for a long time, deserves to begin with a conversation rather than a series of automated messages.
The distinction between presence and persistence #
There is a version of following up that builds resentment and a version that builds trust. The difference lies not in how many times you make contact but in what you bring to each contact.
A touch is what you do. A connection is what the other person genuinely experiences. You can send seven emails and create zero connections – the recipient scans the first line, recognises the pattern, and moves on. Nothing registers. Nothing is remembered.
Conversely, a single well-timed, genuinely curious phone call; one that references something specific from your previous interaction, asks a meaningful question about where they currently are, and makes no immediate ask, can create more familiarity and trust than a month of automated follow-up sequences.
Before each contact, ask yourself one honest question: if I received this from someone I barely knew, would it make my day even slightly better? If the answer is no, wait until you have something worth saying.
The honest answer to the harder question #
Did I say this engagement process is easy? No.
Is it easy? No.
Is it worthwhile? Yes. Absolutely.
The discomfort of making the call; the mild anxiety before picking up the phone, the uncertainty about whether this is the right moment, the risk of interrupting someone who is genuinely too busy right now, is real and it is felt by almost everyone who does this work. It doesn’t disappear with experience. It simply becomes easier to move through.
What is on the other side of that discomfort is a conversation. And conversations, as we have established elsewhere in this Hub, do something that no amount of content and email can replicate: they surface the information that tells you where a prospect actually is, what they are genuinely thinking about and whether there is something you can usefully help them with right now or in the near future.
Positive results from actively following up are just the best thing.
Lead Generation + Relationship Building = Sales Progression.
The practical answer is clear. But if the hesitation before making that call feels larger than it should, there is a companion piece to this one: https://www.newerafi.co.uk/docs/tumbleweed-sequel-follow-up/ which addresses exactly that moment: the reframe that makes going forth feel possible rather than effortful.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
