Patience or Avoidance? How to Know Which One Is Running Your Outreach
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → Quietly Disruptive Podcast
I want to start with a confession. I have tried every version of outreach you can think of and I have done it spectacularly wrong more times than I have done it right. What I am sharing today is not theory, it is hard won. In the last post I talked about the founder who came back after months of silence and why the most common reason outreach fails is that people give up before the relationship has had time to form. Today I am answering the question I know every founder is sitting with after reading that. How do I know the difference between patience and avoidance? How do I know whether to trust the timing or change the approach?
Cold Outreach Is About You. Curious Outreach Is About Them.
Before we get into the three questions, I want to touch on something that underpins the whole answer. Cold outreach is all about you. Your offer, your pitch, your need to get a response. It leads with what you want and the person on the receiving end can feel that immediately, even if you have wrapped it up in friendly language. Curious outreach is the opposite. It is about them. Their work, their thinking, what they are building, what they care about. It is being interested before being interesting. It is starting a conversation rather than opening a pitch. And when you do it from that place, from genuine curiosity rather than agenda, people feel the difference.
2) A Transition Ritual That Signals the Working Day Is Done
My second non negotiable surprises people. It is cooking. Proper cooking, from scratch, at the end of the working day. For me it acts as a transition, tI Have Been Ghosted More Times Than I Can Count
One of the things I know stops founders from reaching out to anyone is the fear of rejection, and for a former people pleaser like me it is one I overcame the hard way. My first proper ghosting was not just an ignored message. It started with a message that led to an in person coffee, two hours of real genuine conversation where we dived into her business, talked numbers, talked about how we could work together, finished our coffees and said goodbye with plans to move things forward. And then absolutely nothing. Complete silence.
That first ghosting floored me. The second one hurt a lot too, and the third. But somewhere around the fourth, something shifted. I stopped taking it as a reflection of my worth and started seeing it for what it actually was, which was the other person’s story, not mine. Someone who cannot find the manners to send a graceful no thank you is missing something that has nothing to do with you. A simple, honest, kind no is one of the most respectful things one founder can offer another. The silence says more about them than it ever says about you.
Not doing outreach because you are afraid of being ghosted is avoidance dressed up as politeness. The cost of not reaching out is always higher than the discomfort of a message that did not get answered, because what if the person you have always wanted to work with is one conversation away? You only find out what is on the other side of the what ifs if you take part.
Three Questions to Tell the Difference Between Patience and Avoidance
Avoidance shows up in two ways. Not starting, which is the message you never send because you do not want to impose, and stopping too soon, which is trying outreach, not seeing results quickly enough and abandoning it while telling yourself you will come back to it one day. Both feel like reasonable decisions in the moment but they cost you more than you realise over time. So how do you actually know which one is running your outreach? Three questions, asked together.
First, are you still moving? Avoidance is passive. It looks like waiting but nothing is actually happening. You have stopped doing things while telling yourself you are giving it time. Patience is active. You are still reaching out, still having conversations, still creating, but the results are building in the background. If you have stopped everything and you are hoping something comes back to life on its own, that is avoidance.
Second, are you moving in the right direction? It is easy to be busy on the wrong things and mistake that for progress. A founder using cold outreach, gritting their teeth, sending message after message, telling themselves it is just a matter of volume, is being busy on the wrong thing. If you are hating every minute of what you are doing, that is a signal that something needs to change.
Third, are there any signals that what you are doing is landing? And this is where it matters what you are actually measuring, because most founders are tracking the wrong things. Likes, reach and impressions are meaningless. The signals that matter are simpler and tell you far more. How many people are responding to your messages? How many are asking questions back? How many are suggesting a coffee or a call? Those are the signals worth tracking because they show you whether real relationships might be forming.
If the answer to all three is yes, trust the timing. The relationship might need more room than you have given it. If the answer to any of them is no, that is the moment to get a fresh perspective and work out what needs to change. The founder who booked a call with me this week had been watching since January. She came back when she was ready because something I had been doing consistently over those months had been landing, even in the silence. That is what patient, curious outreach looks like when it is given enough room to breathe.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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