The Counterintuitive Importance of Detachment

You write a LinkedIn post. You share something real, something you worked on, something you actually know to be true. You hit publish.

Then you refresh.

Every 20 minutes. By the end of the day, four likes. One from your college roommate. You have a sour feeling in your stomach that you recognize: the one that makes you wonder if you are cut out for this.

Or maybe you have what feels like a perfect sales call. The person was smiling and nodding. They said "this is exactly what we need." They asked great questions, including when you could start. You sent the proposal, then a follow-up, then one more.

Silence.

Or perhaps you met someone at a networking event who is, by every measure, your ideal client. The right industry, right-size company, describing the exact problem you solve.

You connect on LinkedIn that night. You tell your partner.

Then nothing.

Here's the part nobody tells you when you start: if you're in your first year or two of business, you have no meaningful data. You don't know your win rate. You don't know which channels drive your best leads. You can't accurately forecast your revenue because you haven't run enough at-bats to know the numbers.

The people who talk confidently about conversion rates and pipeline projections are working from years of accumulated information. You're building that foundation right now. Which means attaching your confidence to any single outcome, at this stage, is a guaranteed way to crash it.

And it will.

Here's what's actually happening, and what to do about it.

You're measuring the wrong thing

The problem is not that you care too much. The problem is that you've tied your confidence (and your mood, and your sense of whether any of this is working) to outcomes you cannot directly control.

Think about what it actually takes to get healthy. You decide you're going to change: you work out consistently, you sleep, you drink water, you eat well. You do all of it, every day. And then you wake up on day eleven and nothing looks different. Day twenty, still waiting. The scale does what it wants. Your body runs on its own timeline, responding to inputs it has been accumulating without announcing the results.

And then one morning, three months in, something has shifted. You can feel it. People comment. The work that was happening invisibly the whole time finally becomes visible.

Building a consulting business works exactly the same way. Consistent inputs. Delayed, non-linear results. And an enormous amount of uncomfortable time in between where you can't tell if it's working.

The important thing to do is to keep going and stay patient.

I know it's a tall order.

I've been there.

What each action actually is

Let me be specific, because this is where most early-stage consultants lose the plot.

A LinkedIn post is one signal. If a post isn't getting traction, it could be worth asking an honest question: is it a distribution problem, or is it a positioning problem? If your positioning is off, even a little, the content won't land the way you expect. The audience won't recognize themselves in it. The people you're hoping to attract will scroll past.

A post that doesn't perform isn't always a failure. Here's why.

The reason they call most social media analytics "vanity metrics" is that often their biggest effect is an ego boost.

Sorry, they don't matter.

What does matter:

• Profile views from your ICP
• Saves
• Shares publicly or privately
• Traffic to your website
• Newsletter signups
• Lead magnet downloads
• Incoming requests for calls or information

A year of consistent, clear posting moves people from "I vaguely know who she is" to "she's exactly who I need to call." No individual post does that. The body of work does.

Keep in mind that while LinkedIn is important for B2B consultants, many (most?) of your prospects don't live there, and many industries and ICPs are barely represented.

A sales call is one conversation. Until you've had a significant number of qualified, vetted discovery calls and started converting them, you can't possibly know what your win rate is. Maybe you close one in three. Maybe one in five.

Maybe the issue isn't the close rate but the quality of who's getting on the call in the first place. Or maybe you're talking to the wrong people or the wrong-size company. You won't know until you have enough data to see the pattern.

Don't interpret a single lost deal as proof that you can't sell or that your business is failing. It might be the wrong prospect. It might be timing. It might be your pricing.

It might be that you haven't connected your pricing to a specific ROI for your client.

One call tells you very little.

Fifty calls start to tell you something, as long as they are with the right people.

A networking interaction is the beginning of a relationship. It usually takes multiple touchpoints over months to build real trust with someone. One coffee chat doesn't do it. One LinkedIn connection doesn't do it. This is also why relying on a single channel never works.

If you're only networking, without a website that reinforces your credibility, without email marketing, a domain email address, an optimized LinkedIn profile, or social proof, you're asking each interaction to carry much more weight than it can hold.

Trust builds across channels and over time. Someone might meet you at an event, read three of your posts, land on your website, and then six months later refer you to someone they know. You'll never see the whole chain. But every link in it mattered.

That's why attribution in marketing is such a bear. It's often a long and winding road.

The good news: thanks to AI and marketing automation tools, building a consistent multi-channel presence is more achievable than ever. Repurposing content, drafting emails, maintaining visibility across platforms takes a fraction of the time it used to.

Since the execution barrier is genuinely so much lower now, there is no good reason not to have an integrated marketing strategy.

The possibilities you can't see yet

Here's what we rarely talk about: the version of your future client list that you currently imagine is a tiny fraction of what actually exists.

When you're building a business, you can see the people directly in front of you. Your network. Your former colleagues. The people who've liked your posts. You optimize for those. You measure yourself against a really small number of people.

The client who will hire you six months from now might be someone you've never met. Someone referred to you by a person you had coffee with once and barely remember. Someone who has been reading your posts for months without a single like, reading your newsletters, absorbing your thinking, and then one day they're ready to talk: you're the one.

There are paths to your business that don't exist today. Conversations that haven't started. Referrals that haven't been made. Circumstances that haven't changed yet.

You cannot optimize for the paths you can't see.

What you can do is make sure that when those paths open, they lead directly to you.

That's what clear positioning does. That's what a specific, well-priced offer does. That's what consistent visibility across multiple channels does. When you're clear about who you serve, what you do, and your distinct POV, and you show up with that clarity week after week, you become findable along paths you never anticipated.

The work is not about forcing the outcome from specific actions.

It's about getting better and better at communicating your value proposition. Improving your consistency. Tightening your language.

And most of all, keeping a positive attitude.

I know that's hard when your bank balance is low.

What you actually control

Detachment is not indifference. You still show up. Every week. With the post, the outreach, the follow-up, the coffee chat. Consistently, without needing each individual action to deliver what you want it to.

What changes is what you do after.

After you post, let go of any expectations that this post will "perform."

After the sales call, send the follow-up and move on.

After the networking event, send a LinkedIn invitation or email, and then give the person space.

Please don't check obsessively for validation. Don't let a week of silence make you question everything. And don't let yourself be carried away by thinking that ONE type of action or ONE channel will build your business.

It's more nuanced than that.

It's also a recipe for losing perspective and momentum.

And often your self-worth.

Meg Crumbine is the founder of Heard and a go-to-market strategist for ex-corporate women building B2B consulting and service businesses. She helps women turn their expertise into clear positioning, smarter offers, and a lead generation strategy that creates strong revenue.