The waiting IS the hardest part

We've been putting together a lot of proposals and pitches for prospective clients. All this activity has been exciting and energizing--frankly, we love what we do, and its fun to talk to people about it. What's not so fun is that in all of these conversations, we're still waiting to see if we get the projects.

The time between pitching and being awarded a project (or not) is brutal. There's not much you can do. You don't want to check in too much and be annoying, but there's also something to be said for a post-pitch follow up. Unless you have an inside track, most of the decision-making on the client side is a bit of a mystery.

All of this is made more difficult by a couple obvious characteristics of Tandem: we're only about a year old, and we're talking about solutions that are relatively new in enterprise learning. People might be interested in the ideas that we have (good!) but nervous about trying something new (bad!). And at the end of the day, their propensity to work with a smaller, agile company with innovative ideas may be trumped by the idea of going with a traditional solution.

The funny thing is, all of this is just speculation, until you hear back from the client. Until then, try to keep busy working on the next presentation...