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Simon's Law of Pre-Sales Effort

A simple chart on how I evaluate legitimate service inquiries.

Oct 29, 2026 2-min read

Image Source: Google Gemini/Nano Banana via Claude Code

In my days as an enterprise systems consultant, I typically worked on projects easily exceeding six months and $2 million. Many healthcare and public-sector gigs went far beyond that.

Sales cycles lasted years—yes, plural. RFIs gave way to RFPs. A few vendors and consultancies would eventually make the cut. Subsequent negotiations were rarely short. Lawyers argued over terms. What's more, promising deals could fall through. Sometimes a firm would compete for large ones only to come away with squadoosh.

My ERP consulting days are far behind me. That doesn't mean, however, that I never encounter a sales cycle. I certainly do—just in different areas. They include ghostwriting, Notion development, and speaking.

Say that someone fills out the Contact form on my site. Odds are that an individual, team, or firm is evaluating me against other competent professionals. To this end, I want to put my best foot forward. Doing so means responding to a reasonable number of emails and participating in a discovery call to assess the gig.

Weighing the Factors

Every time independent service providers respond to sales inquiries, they need to evaluate the following factors:

The size of the opportunity.
Their likelihood of landing it. (That is, is the query a cattle call?)
The anticipated amount of unpaid work they'll have to do to land it.
The chances of a successful project.
The project's timeframe.
Their other existing projects.
Their pipelines.
Their personal lives.
Where they are in their careers. (People just starting out in a field or industry will generally work harder to land smaller deals to establish credibility.)
Their own financial needs.
The estimated probability of future client references and referrals from this engagement.
Logistical considerations, such as billing, travel, nondisclosure agreements, and the like.

I could go on, but you get my point. Brass tacks: evaluating opportunities is far more art than science.

Evaluating opportunities is far more art than science.

This raises the question: How much time should a service provider devote to pre-sales?

I'll answer that query as succinctly as possible:

All else being equal, the larger the opportunity, the more time they should devote to landing it.

Because I like graphs:

An Example

Consider two scenarios:

A year-long ghostwriting nonfiction gig.
A three-hour Notion mop-up project.

To state the obvious, I expend far more effort trying to land the first than the second. Along the same lines, I chafe when a prospect wants hours of free hand-holding and multiple calls for a simple engagement that might net me $1,000.