I messed up this week

A couple days ago, I had a prospect call with a young founder out of SF. He was raising a seed round, and was looking for help refining the pitch. We had a great call (or so I thought), and agreed to meet today to iron out the final details and get to work.

About forty minutes before the call, I get the dreaded message, the message that I knew in my heart I was going to get for this one: “We're gonna hit pause on this for right now. Would love to touch base in the new year.”

For those who don't sell or get sold to often, this is a way of saying “no” that people use when they're uncomfortable saying “no”.

Needless to say, I was gutted. It's tough to lose a prospect, especially one that you thought you could close. But I knew, I knew that something had been off. I didn't know what, but something niggled in the back of my mind all day today that told me he was going to cancel the call.

So I used AI for what I think it's really good for—seeing blind spots. I uploaded my call into it and asked it to break it down. It dutifully performed the task, but didn't give me any glaring mistakes. So I pushed it: “There was an emotional mismatch, wasn't there. What happened emotionally?”

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That's where the real material came in. He had made a couple more vulnerable notes on the call, and instead of paying attention to them and responding, I bulldozed. It's difficult to look at your failures starkly there on the page, black and white, especially when you purport to be a communications expert! But there it was.“I've sat on calls, and the rest of my team, they're just more technical, so I don't really depend on them. So it's fully me at the end of the day. So that's where I think is our hill that I think I need to overcome.”

A full-throated admission of vulnerability from our founder-hero. He's shouldering all the burden for pitching, all the failure resting on his shoulders. [God this is embarassing] What did I respond?“And in terms of conversations in January, you have those booked out yet?”

Logistics.

I took his emotional bid out back and shot it in the head.

If I'm being honest, it's probably there that I lost the call.

So what went wrong? Am I a cold-hearted son-of-a-gun who doesn't care about other people's emotions? Well, sometimes maybe, but no, I don't think so. As I reflected on what happened (and that's part of what I'm doing here so you don't make the same mistakes in your relationships), I think that I was too caught up in myself.

It's a common theme, that, being too caught up in myself, my own worries, my own experience of the world.

The other way of being, the proper way of being, would have been to be other-focused. Or even better, service-focused. My mission is to help people communicate better because we all have dreams inside of us that deserve to be heard and actualised, and often communication is the barrier to that. It's a mission of service, of helping others.

But in that moment, to my shame, I was focused on myself. On closing the deal. On finding the problem I could solve. Solipsism 101. And the irony is that were I less focused on me and more on him, had I honoured and acknowledged his burden, I might have actually done what I set out to do—closed the sale.

My own need for validation and money torpedoed my mission. Go figure.