Everything Changed When I Stopped Giving Excuses And Started Selling More

What decades of being sold to finally taught me about selling

For a long time, I was very busy being wrong about why my sales pipeline was quiet.

It was summer. Then, it’s back-to-school season. Then the holidays. Then January resets. Then a reorg, someone mentioned on LinkedIn. Then, an economic slowdown, I read about in a headline. Then another summer. I had a seasonal excuse for every quarter and a market condition for every month. The calendar became a very sophisticated alibi for the thing I wasn’t doing.

By year three, I had developed a comprehensive meteorological theory of business development that explained everything except why I wasn’t picking up the phone.

Here’s what made it worse. I wasn’t a rookie. I had spent decades on the buyer side. I had awarded more contracts than I could count. I knew exactly how agencies got work. I knew it was relationships, maintained consistently, over long periods of time. I had watched agencies win work from me because they had stayed present in my world long enough that when a project arrived, they were already there.

I knew all of this. I just couldn’t apply it to myself.

When The Credential Stops Working

For the first year or two, the phone rang because of what I used to be.

Former Chief Creative Officer with decades of experience in major media. The resume opened doors before I opened my mouth. Meetings happened because people remembered the title, or knew someone who did, or wanted to hang out with someone who had operated at that level. The credibility was real, and the gravity was borrowed. I was still trading on the institutional weight of a chair I no longer sat in.

I didn’t notice when it started to fade. The emails just took a little longer to return. The introductions required a little more context. The pitch that used to start with a handshake and end with a yes started requiring a deck, then a proposal, then a follow-up, then another follow-up, and yet another follow-up. You get the idea.

At some point, I realized the playing field had leveled. I was no longer a C-suite executive that agencies wanted to impress. I was another creative agency owner trying to get a meeting. The credential that used to be the whole conversation had become one line in a longer one.

I was not prepared for that loss. You leave a big job to build something of your own. The work we did was always solid, often great. The relationships were still legit. But the automatic authority that came with the title was gone, and I hadn’t built anything to replace it yet.

So I invented seasons.

Summer slowness. Back-to-school slowness. Holiday slowness. January resets. Q4 planning. Reorg season. Economic headwinds. There was always a reason the silence wasn’t my fault, always a calendar event plausible enough to believe for another six weeks.

I became an expert meteorologist of my own avoidance.

The Confession

Nobody fired me. Nobody chose a competitor. The business just got slow, and I got more creative about why. That’s a type of failure I couldn’t have planned for or predicted. The quiet time looks like a slow season until you add up all the slow seasons and realize they add up to years.

The truth I kept avoiding was simple and frankly embarrassing: I had never actually learned to sell.

For years, the title, the relationships, and the institution did it for me. Work arrived because of what I represented, not because of anything I had built to generate it. When the title stopped opening doors, and the institutional gravitas ran dry, I was standing there with a full resume and no system for what came next. I had never needed one before. That’s just the truth of how the buyer side works. When you’re the one awarding contracts, nobody asks you to pitch.

The Memory That Saved Me

I had been on the receiving end of hundreds of pitches. I had awarded contracts totaling over $100 million. And when I got honest about what actually drove those decisions, the answer is less flattering to the agencies I hired than they would want to hear.

I hired the people I could imagine spending time with outside of work. The ones where the friction felt low before we signed anything, which usually meant it would stay low after. The ones who felt like partners before they were partners. The quality of the work and the credentials mattered. But when two agencies were close, I went with the one where the relationship already felt like something I wanted to be in.

That’s not a small thing. It’s the whole game.

And standing on the other side, trying to win work, I realized I had been sending decks when I should have been building that feeling. I had been pitching credentials when I should have been maintaining presence. The agencies that used to win from me weren’t also the top award-winning ones. They were the ones who had stayed in my world long enough that choosing them felt easy, comfortable, and the low-risk thing to do.

The answer wasn’t a new skill. It was a memory I had been ignoring.

The Sleeping Giants

When I finally stopped blaming the calendar and started looking at who I already knew, the picture changed.

Past clients, people who almost hired me, colleagues who had moved into positions of authority and real budgets, people who remembered the work we did together. I called them Sleeping Giants. Dormant relationships that still carried familiarity, history, and the most valuable thing in business development: they already trusted me.

I built a list across three categories: past clients, near misses, and connectors. I picked ten names. I sent ten messages. Short, direct, and human. A sincere reach out that said: I was thinking about you, here’s where I am now, I’d love to hear what you’re working on.

The cringe was real. I sent them anyway.

Most of them wrote back. Hello stranger. Long time no see. How’s it going? Two or three words that proved the relationship was still there, warm and intact, completely unbothered by the silence I had been catastrophizing about for months.

The thing I had built into something terrifying turned out to be nothing more than an old friend saying hello.

Some of those conversations became clients again. Some referred work. Some just reminded me that the relationship was still there, waiting for me to remember it existed. The work came back because I stopped waiting for the phone to ring and picked it up myself.

What The Excuses Were Really About

The seasonal alibis were protection.

Blaming the calendar kept the real question at a safe distance: had I built something durable, or had I built something that depended entirely on novelty, reputation, and the goodwill of people I hadn’t spoken to in months?

The answer, when I finally stopped avoiding it, was the second one.

That’s not a comfortable thing to discover about a business you’ve bet your identity and bank account on. But it’s the discovery that actually changes things. You can’t fix what you won’t acknowledge.

It is not their job to remember you. It is your job to remind them.