Enthusiasm is not a buying signal
An architect who likes the product is genuinely valuable and also the most common way presales time disappears. The engagement feels productive because the conversations are good: deep questions, real architecture, someone who understands what you have built and enjoys talking about it. None of that is evidence that money exists, that a problem is urgent enough to fund, or that anyone senior has agreed to solve it this year.
The reason this matters more in presales than in sales is that the cost falls on your engineering time and your credibility with your own delivery organisation. Every hour spent here is an hour not spent on a deal with a funded sponsor, and the internal cost of asking colleagues to support environments and answer questionnaires for a deal that never had a buyer is paid the next time you ask them for something.
Three situations that look identical from outside
Before deciding what to do, work out which one you are in, because the moves are different and one of them is to stop.
There may be no project. Your contact has a technical interest, perhaps a genuine problem, and no budget cycle attached to it. He is doing research, and if he is honest about that he is useful — he will tell you how the organisation evaluates things and what they bought last time — but he cannot buy.
There may be a project owned by somebody else. This is the most frequently missed case. Your architect is not the route to the decision because the decision sits with a programme he is adjacent to and does not control, and continuing through him means you are working the periphery of a deal somebody else is running, possibly with a competitor who found the centre.
Or your champion may not be credible internally. He is enthusiastic, and his leadership does not act on his recommendations, sometimes for reasons that predate you. This is the hardest to see and the most expensive, because his behaviour is indistinguishable from that of a good champion right up to the point where nothing happens.
The way to tell them apart is to ask about the last comparable purchase. Who signed it, how long it took, what triggered the funding, what he recommended and whether it was followed. Somebody inside a live project answers with specifics and recent dates. Somebody researching answers in generalities. Somebody without standing answers with frustration, which is information rather than a complaint.
Make an ask that requires other people
The change of gear is to stop supplying more technical engagement and start asking for something your champion cannot deliver alone. Not "can I meet your director", which is a request for a favour and easy to refuse politely and indefinitely, but something with obvious value to him that happens to have a dependency on other people.
| What you ask for | A funded project produces | A research exercise produces |
|---|
| A working session with the team who own the current system | Two or three named people and a date | "Let me find out who that would be" |
| Their numbers for a business case you will help build | Actual volumes, costs and a deadline | Estimates he invents in the meeting |
| Half an hour with whoever asked for this | An introduction, or a clear reason why not | Nobody asked for it |
| A written summary you can send that he will circulate | A distribution list including his leadership | Silence, or "I will keep it for now" |
The right-hand column is not a reason to be rude to your contact. It is the qualification answer arriving without anyone having to be confronted, and it usually arrives within a fortnight.
The version of this that works best is helping him sell rather than asking him to arrange. Build the case in his organisation's terms — what the current approach costs, what changes, what evidence exists elsewhere — and hand it to him as something with his name on it. If he takes it upwards, you have a champion with standing. If it never moves, you have learned that too, and you have spent an afternoon rather than a quarter.
Multi-thread openly, not behind him
You will need other contacts, and the way you get them decides whether you keep the one you have. Going around a champion is remembered, and technical communities inside large organisations are small enough that it follows you. Ask openly, give a reason that serves him, and let him control the introduction: you need someone who can speak to the security review because it takes six weeks and would otherwise land on him, or you would like the operations lead in the room so the design does not have to be revisited later.
Conferences, user groups, mutual connections and inbound requests from elsewhere in the same organisation are all legitimate ways in. What is not legitimate is telling a second contact something different from what you told the first, because those two people talk and the discrepancy is the only part they will remember.
Naming the point where you stop
Interviewers ask the second half of this question deliberately, because presales people are trained to be helpful and helpfulness has no natural stopping point. The strong answer sets the condition in advance rather than deciding by exhaustion. Something like: one substantive ask, made clearly, with a fortnight to produce either a named second contact or a document that circulates. If neither appears, the opportunity moves out of the current forecast and into a low-cost nurture cadence.
Say what nurture actually means, because "keep in touch" is how these deals stay alive at thirty per cent for a year. It means periodic, genuinely useful contact — a relevant release, an invitation, a customer story from their sector — with no environment builds, no bespoke architecture work and no colleagues' calendars consumed. You are keeping the relationship warm at a cost proportional to its probability.
And tell your champion plainly, because a vague fade damages the relationship more than honesty does. "This is not going to get funded this year from what I can see, so I am going to stop consuming your time on evaluation and stay in touch. When it becomes a project, call me and we will move fast because we have already done the technical work." That is a sentence a good architect respects, and it leaves you first in line when the budget appears.
The internal conversation nobody wants to have
The last part of a senior answer concerns what you say inside your own company. An opportunity with a single technical contact and no route to a buyer should not be forecast as though it were a deal, and the person best placed to say so is the presales lead who has seen the access problem first-hand. That is an uncomfortable conversation with an account executive whose pipeline coverage depends on it staying where it is.
What makes the conversation survivable is bringing evidence rather than an opinion. Not "I do not think this is real" but "we have asked three times for a working session with the platform team and not had a name, and there is no line item we can point at" — the same specifics that qualified the deal out, presented as facts about access rather than as a judgement about a colleague's account.
A champion who cannot get you a second meeting is telling you something about the deal, not about his enthusiasm. Make one ask that requires other people, give it a deadline, and say out loud what you will do if it goes unanswered.
© 2026 Preptima. Originally published at preptima.com (opens in a new tab).