Your Best Prospect Might Still Ghost You
Ivona Namjesnik
Business Development
One minute you’re on a promising call with a prospect. The next, you’re sending your third follow-up email into the void.
No reply. No explanation. Just... silence.
If you run or sell for an agency, you’ve probably been ghosted.
More than once. Maybe more than once this month.
They reach out, seem excited…and vanish.
You send a thoughtful follow-up to a great intro call…and nothing.
They ask for a proposal, confirm they received it…and go dark.
Sometimes, they even say “We’re ready to move forward”… and still disappear.
It stings. And it happens way more often than most founders talk about.
Is Ghosting Just Part of the Game?
At Barrel Holdings, we haven’t tracked ghosting across all our agencies. But if we had to guess, it’s safe to say some version of it happens every single month.
Here’s the truth: we don’t think it’s personal.
And we don’t think it’s worth spiraling over.
People are busy. The person evaluating your agency is probably also:
Managing internal politics
Wrangling budgets
Answering to a boss who hasn’t even read the proposal
Sometimes the project loses urgency. Sometimes a competitor gets picked and no one wants to break the news to the other six shops. Sometimes your champion leaves the company and the thread dies with them.
Would it be great if everyone sent a quick “Thanks but we’re going in a different direction” email? Of course.
But expecting it to be standard behavior sets you up for frustration.
Instead, we’ve learned to treat ghosting as a cost of doing business, not a character flaw - on your part or theirs.
What You Can Control
Rather than ruminate, we systemize.
Here’s what helped us, and might help you, too:
Don’t take it personally.
Even the most promising lead can go cold.
The key is to stay emotionally neutral. It’s not a reflection of your value or how well you ran the sales process. Most of the time, it’s not even about you.
Set up a follow-up system.
No one wants to be the “just circling back” person, but consistent, low-lift follow-ups work. We’ve had prospects go quiet for 12 weeks… and then sign. So don’t wing it. Create a process:
Every week for 10 weeks
Then monthly for 12 months
One click, minimal mental load.
Simple and steady.
Build a real pipeline.
It’s a lot easier to absorb the silence when you’re not waiting on a single “yes.”
Ghosting only feels devastating when the pipeline is thin.
A steady stream of qualified leads turns silence into a shrug instead of a setback. And if one of those old “ghosts” reappears? Great. But you didn’t need them to hit your goals.
Final Thought: Don’t Take Silence Personally
In this business, silence is rarely about you.
It’s about timing, pressure, bandwidth, or internal chaos you’ll never see.
So build systems that assume silence is normal.
Build a pipeline that makes silence survivable.
And build a mindset that sees silence as a signal to keep going, not a reason to stop.
