Did I just spend 8 months as an unpaid consultant for a client?
Spent almost 7–8 months chasing a deal and I genuinely want opinions from people in sales/procurement/corporate roles.
We were working with two departments of a company. Multiple discussions, countless follow-ups, stakeholder meetings, site visits — the works.
One person from the client side worked very closely with us for almost 6 months. We practically built the project with him. Helped shape the scope of work, identified ground-level issues, visited locations, and even suggested improvements that made the entire project stronger.
His favorite line was: “Let’s close this this week.”
Need scope? Urgent.
Need quotation? Urgent.
Need senior management alignment? Urgent.
Need meetings with multiple stakeholders? Urgent.
We moved mountains because everything looked like a done deal.
Then came senior leadership discussions. CEOs involved. CFO meetings happened. During one meeting, the CFO literally said something along the lines of: “Let’s get this started.”
At this point, everyone internally thought this was as good as closed.
Then the same client contact started reducing scope, delaying commercial closure, pushing rate discussions from “today” to “tomorrow”… and tomorrow somehow became next week.
This went on for over a month.
Then one day he called.
I thought: finally, agreement signing.
Instead he says:
“Sorry. This project isn’t budgeted. Can’t move ahead.”
After 7–8 months.
My question: if there was no budget, why involve leadership? Why involve the CFO? Why ask us to build scope, improve the project and invest months of effort?
Was this a genuine project that died internally?
Or did we unknowingly end up becoming unpaid consultants helping someone prepare an internal execution plan?
And here’s the bigger question: when professionals waste months of external teams’ time like this, should there be accountability? Should this ever be escalated to senior management?
Curious how many people in sales have faced something similar.