The first meeting went well and then nothing. It is tempting to read that as a lie, or as bad timing. Usually it is neither.
Your contact went back inside and hit something: a competing priority, a budget they do not control, a security review they cannot navigate, or a boss who was not in the room. They are not avoiding you. They are stuck, and they have no incentive to narrate being stuck to a vendor.
A single-threaded deal gives you no way to learn any of that, and no way to help.
The reflex is to follow up, then follow up again, then send a breakup email. All three come from the same address the champion has already stopped answering, and each one makes replying slightly more awkward than the last.
The pattern to notice: if two follow-ups have not worked, the third will not either. The channel is exhausted, not the opportunity.
1. Name the committee. Economic buyer, champion, technical evaluator, security, procurement, budget owner. Write the names down. An unnamed role is an unmapped risk.
2. Find a second route, across the whole company. Not another contact at the account - another relationship. Someone at your company who worked with someone at theirs. That person is rarely in sales: it is an engineer, a customer success lead, a founder, an investor.
3. Open it peer-to-peer. Your CTO to their CTO is a different request from a rep to a title, and it tells you things the champion could not say.
4. Let the champion off the hook. The second thread should never read as going around them. Done well it gives them cover - someone senior is now interested, which is often exactly the help they needed.
Three independent threads is the point where a deal stops being fragile. Below that, one person's calendar decides your quarter.
The work is a lookup across every employee's history and interactions against the account's buying committee - a few hundred relationships per deal, which no rep does by hand. Orbb runs it automatically, so a rep opening a stalled account sees which committee members are reachable and who holds each route.
Centrical had exactly this problem: a high-stakes enterprise opportunity and no way through the decision-making process with conventional outbound. Relationship mapping surfaced routes to the decision makers and the deal closed at seven figures.
Sometimes the mapping returns nothing. That is useful too - it tells you this account is a cold-outbound account, and you can price your effort accordingly rather than spending another quarter on follow-ups.