Buried Treasure: Why Not Following Up Is Leaving Money in the Ground
Written by Jamie May
Picture this. You are comfortably seated in your office, routine humming along, when a treasure hunter bursts through your door. Eyes gleaming, pockets emptied for the chance to possess Blackbeard’s legendary treasure map. The excitement is contagious and before you know it you are swept up in it entirely.
Together you forge a partnership built on the allure of untold riches. Blackbeard’s treasure, worth five billion dollars by today’s standards, is out there waiting. With hearts pounding you both dive in headfirst, pouring resources, time, and your life savings into a pursuit that spans years. The journey is epic. Countless hours crafting strategy, assembling the right crew, planning every detail, building a treasure fleet. You conquer treacherous seas, set foot on a distant desert island, traverse unforgiving terrain, navigate pitfalls and terrors that test every limit of your resolve.
And then you arrive. The map in hand. The X beneath your feet. Every sacrifice justified. Every hardship vindicated. You pick up the shovel and start to dig. Slowly the chest takes shape as you brush away more of the sand. Finally unearthing the fabled treasure chest, pick the lock, pry it open and you are dazzled by the gleam of gold and sparkle of diamonds.
And then you walk away. Treasure still in the ground. Untouched.
Absurd? Of course it is. And yet this is exactly what happens in sales pipelines across Australia every single day. Leads generated, conversations started, interest established, and then nothing. No follow-up. No next step. Nobody bothered to pick up the loot.
The Follow-Up Gap Is Costing You More Than You Think
The data on follow-up in sales is striking. Most buyers require between five and eight touch points before making a decision. Most salespeople give up between zero and two. The gap between those two numbers is where a significant portion of revenue quietly disappears.
This is not laziness, in most cases. It is a combination of things. Fear of being annoying. Uncertainty about what to say on the second or third contact. Busy work in earlier sales stages. A belief that if the buyer was interested they would have called back. A pipeline full of new leads that always feel more exciting than the ones already in progress. And a fundamental misunderstanding of how sales works.
Buyers are busy. They are managing competing priorities, internal approval processes, budget cycles, and the general noise of running a business. A prospect who does not respond to the first follow-up is not necessarily uninterested. They are often just occupied. The salesperson who stays present, professionally and without desperation, is the one who is there when the timing finally shifts.
What Good Follow-Up Actually Looks Like
Follow-up does not mean calling every two days to ask if they have made a decision yet. That is not persistence. That is pressure, and it damages the relationship faster than silence does.
Good follow-up is purposeful. Every contact should have a reason to exist beyond reminding the prospect that you are waiting for their answer. A relevant piece of information that addresses something they raised in the last conversation. A case study from a similar business that solved the same problem. A question that moves the thinking forward rather than just checking in on where they are.
The best follow-up often does not feel like follow-up to the buyer. It feels like value arriving at a useful moment. That is the standard worth aiming for. Not frequency for its own sake but relevance that earns the next conversation.
Timing matters too. Same day follow-up after an initial conversation while the details are fresh. A structured sequence in the days and weeks that follow. A longer-term nurture for prospects who are genuinely not ready yet but are worth staying connected with. These are not complicated disciplines but they require a system, not an instinct.
The Pipeline Discipline Problem
Most follow-up failures are not individual failures. They are system failures. A salesperson without a clear CRM, without documented next steps, without a defined sales process for moving prospects through the pipeline, is operating on memory and goodwill. Both run out.
The pipeline discipline question is straightforward. Does every prospect in your system have a next action attached to it? A specific follow-up date, a defined next step, a clear status that tells you exactly where that conversation sits and what needs to happen to move it forward? If the answer is no, you have buried treasure sitting in your pipeline right now, leads that cost you money to generate, conversations that took time to start, relationships that have genuine potential, all quietly going cold because nobody picked up the shovel.
A well-run sales pipeline does not rely on salespeople remembering to follow up. It makes following up the default behaviour by building the reminders, the sequences, and the accountability into the system itself.
When to Keep Digging and When to Move On
Not every prospect is worth indefinite follow-up. Part of good pipeline discipline is knowing when to keep digging and when to mark a lead as closed and redirect the energy elsewhere.
The test is simple. Has the prospect given you a reason to believe the timing will change? A budget cycle that resets in a quarter. A decision that is pending internal sign-off. A problem that is real but not yet urgent enough to act on. These are worth staying in contact with on a longer cycle. A prospect who has gone genuinely cold, who has stopped responding across multiple channels and given no indication of future interest, is a different conversation. Not now is not the same as I bought something else. Chasing them indefinitely is not persistence. It is a waste of resource that could be applied to a prospect who is actually moving.
The goal is not to follow up with everyone forever. It is to follow up with the right people, at the right frequency, with something worth saying, until the deal is genuinely done in either direction.
You Already Did the Hard Part
Here is the thing about the treasure map analogy that makes it particularly sharp. By the time you are standing on the X, the hardest work is behind you. The years of preparation. The journey across treacherous seas. The trek across the island. You did all of that. The digging is the easy part.
In sales, generating the lead, getting the first conversation, establishing the interest, having a meeting, doing a presentation, writing a proposal, that is the hard part. Following up is the easy last step. It requires a system, some discipline, and the willingness to stay present. The salesperson who does all the hard work to get a prospect into the pipeline and then fails to follow up has not just lost a deal. They have wasted everything that went into getting there.
The treasure is already in the ground. Pick up the shovel. Remember the best salespeople ‘Always work closest to the dollar’.
If your sales pipeline is full of leads that have gone cold, or your team is strong at opening conversations but losing momentum on the follow-through, that is exactly the kind of problem we work on at Outsold. You can read more about how we think about sales process, pipeline management, and outsourced sales in Australia at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
Jamie May is the Managing Director of Outsold, an Australian founder-led sales agency specialising in outsourced sales teams, fractional sales management, and B2B lead generation across Sydney, Melbourne, and nationally.
