You will be able to explain why prospecting needs several touches and plan them in advance.
You send a careful, personalised email to a founder who fits your profile perfectly. Nothing comes back. A week later you assume she is not interested and move on. Two months after that, you see on LinkedIn that she hired a competitor of yours, around the time your email arrived.
She probably did not read your email and decide against you. More likely it arrived on the day a supplier let her down, or she meant to reply and it sank under forty other messages, or she was overseas. One message gave her one chance to notice you, on one day, and that day was the wrong one.
When a prospect does not reply to a first message, the easy conclusion is "not interested". Most of the time it is something else. People are busy. Messages get read on a phone in a lift and forgotten by the time the doors open. The problem you solve may be real but not urgent this week. Your email may be sitting in a promotions tab.
You cannot tell these apart from silence. A clear "no thanks" is information. Silence is just silence. So treating it as a rejection means you will drop many people who would have been glad to hear from you a week later.
This also explains why the triggers from lesson 1.3, Trigger events tell you when to reach out, matter so much. A trigger tells you the timing might be right. Several touches spread over a few weeks give you several chances to land on the right day even when you do not know which day that is.
A sequence is a planned set of touches with one prospect, across one or more channels, decided before you send the first. "Touch" just means any contact: an email, a call, a LinkedIn message, a comment on their post, a WhatsApp message where module 5 allows it.
The word that matters is planned. Most sellers already follow up, but they decide each step on the day, based on mood. A sequence decides the steps in advance: what each touch says, which channel it uses and how long to wait before the next one. Lesson 6.2, Cadence: spacing touches without nagging, covers the timing. This lesson is about why you plan and what each touch should contain.
The weakest follow-up there is reads: "Just bumping this to the top of your inbox." It adds nothing. It reminds the buyer you exist, while also reminding them that you have nothing new to say, and it quietly suggests they owe you a reply.
Each touch in a good sequence gives the buyer a fresh reason to respond. There are three reliable ways to do that.
A different angle. If your first email was about the new outlet, the second might be about the problem from the other persona's view, such as what the co-founder who signs off the money worries about.
A useful resource. A short checklist, an article you did not write, a one-line tip they can use whether or not they ever buy. Mei sends founders a short list of the documents banks commonly ask for when a business applies for a loan, because founders opening new outlets often need financing. It costs her nothing and says she understands their month.
A simpler ask. If "worth a short call?" got no reply, the next ask can be smaller: "Is month-end something you handle yourself, or is someone else looking after it?" A question that takes five seconds to answer is easier to reply to than one that needs a diary check.
Darren's sequence for a new parent introduced by a friend works the same way: a first message, then a follow-up with a plain-language explanation of a question many new parents ask, then a call at a time the parent suggested, then a short last message.
Without a plan, sellers fall into one of two traps.
The first is stopping after one try. It feels polite, and it means most of the people who would have replied never get the chance. Your profile, your research and your first message did all the hard work, and then the effort ends at the moment it was most likely to pay off.
The second is chasing forever. Some sellers, once they have decided someone is a good fit, keep sending messages for months with no end point. That turns a fine prospect into someone who dreads your name, and it uses time that should go to new prospects.
A planned sequence avoids both. You know there will be several touches, so the first silence does not discourage you. And you know there is a final one, so you stop cleanly and move the prospect to a later list instead of nagging. The plan also makes the work easier on a busy day: you are not deciding what to say, only sending the next touch that is already written.
In the activity below you will map the touches you make with a new prospect today, honestly, and mark where you usually stop and why.
Map the touches you currently make with a new prospect and note where you usually stop and why.
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