The Real Reason Executives Are Ghosting You | Anthony Reeves - 2025

Every seller has been there. You send the perfect proposal, deliver a great pitch, and then the exec on the other end goes silent.

I sat down with Anthony Reeves, a former global executive at Amazon, WPP, LVMH, and Airbnb, to talk about the real reason executives ghost you. It's not what most sellers think.

Executives Aren't Ghosting You, They're Protecting Themselves

Executives get to their position by protecting their career and their company, and staying out of trouble.The number one question running through their head in a pitch is whether this decision could embarrass them personally or embarrass the company.If a sales conversation doesn't address that fear directly, it gets pushed to the back burner, which looks a lot like ghosting.

Slow Down. You're Probably Over-Preparing

Anthony spent years as the final decision maker at companies like Amazon and WPP, with back to back thirty minute meetings from morning to night.By the time a deal reaches an executive's desk, it's often already been vetted by their team. They just want confirmation, not a full pitch from scratch.Sales reps who try to sell all the way through the meeting are working against how executives actually make decisions.

Get to the Point in the First Few Minutes

Anthony has sat through pitches that took twenty five minutes to get to the point. At his level, he needed the point in the first few minutes.He recommends opening with a short greeting, then moving straight into what you're there to talk about: the product, the plan forward, the price, and the benefit to their organization.That structure resets a busy exec's mind fast, since they're usually jumping straight from a completely different meeting into yours.

Let Data Do the Convincing

One of the best lessons Anthony learned at Amazon was to make decisions with data, not opinion.Jeff Bezos's rule was that seventy percent of the data is usually enough, with the rest filled in by good judgment.Data driven pitches remove the office politics and personal bias from a decision, which makes it easier for an executive to say yes.

Data Levels the Playing Field for Junior Sellers

At the enterprise level, a purchase usually has to clear procurement, legal, compliance, and IT, four teams that rarely speak the same language.Data is the one language all four of those teams can agree on.Anthony says a junior sales rep with strong data can out argue the most senior person in the room, because the data doesn't care who's presenting it.