Getting rejected by a prospect you’ve spent months nurturing is one of those things that tests how a company is actually wired. The instinct, for most teams, is to move on, clean up the CRM, and redirect energy toward warmer leads. At Lendsqr, we made a different call, and we’ve made it consistently enough that it’s become one of the more defining things about how this company operates. These two stories are a direct result of that call.
The lender who went cold in 2023 and came back in 2025
In 2023, a lender signed up on Lendsqr. The person running it was someone with serious weight in the industry, someone our founder Adedeji Olowe genuinely respects. Early conversations happened, things looked like they were building toward something, and then the engagement dropped off completely. No explanation or a formal close. They just stopped responding to us.
There’s a version of this where we quietly archive the contact and move on. We didn’t do that.
What we did instead was keep the communication going. Not in a pushy, chase-every-lead way, but consistently and without making it weird. Emails, SMS messages and WhatsApp updates went out. All of it tied to what we were building, what had improved, what was new. The lender wasn’t engaging with any of it, at least not visibly, but they were receiving it. And over two years, that steady presence kept Lendsqr from becoming a company they had to rediscover when they were finally ready to move.
Because that’s what happened. In 2025, they came back. By then, the product had matured significantly, and when they re-engaged properly, they found a team that treated the relationship like the two-year gap hadn’t made it any less worth investing in. That combination, a stronger product and a team that hadn’t written them off, was what got them to go live.
Recommended read: What is Lendsqr, and how does it work?
The Dutch CEO who came to us first
The second story follows a similar pattern, and by the time it played out, it wasn’t entirely surprising to us because we had seen versions of it before.
A CEO of a global Dutch company had engaged with Lendsqr at some point without converting. Things didn’t come together at the time, and that was that. But when he eventually decided to go into full vendor evaluation mode, to properly assess the market and find the right lending technology partner, the first company he came looking for was Lendsqr.
That kind of return, from someone who had already opted out once, tends to be grounded in something specific. In this case, it was the sense, formed through whatever interactions had happened before, that Lendsqr was a company that would genuinely engage with his problem rather than hand it off to an account manager with a script. Adedeji and the team have a reputation for showing up fully, for treating a customer’s business challenge as something worth understanding from the inside rather than solving at arm’s length. That reputation travels, even when the original engagement didn’t convert.
We were more than glad to have him back. And because this was far from our first experience of a lender ghosting us and then returning on their own terms, we knew exactly how to receive it.
Recommended read: We’re giving our lending tech away for free to non-profit and DFIs
We don’t ghost them
This is probably the most direct way to describe the internal principle that connects both stories. Regardless of how a prospect goes quiet, regardless of how much time and effort went into a relationship before it stalled, Lendsqr does not cut off communication. The emails, messages and random check-ins keep going consistently, because top of mind matters in a long sales cycle, and because you genuinely never know when someone’s circumstances are going to shift and make them ready to move.
We’ve had other situations that follow this same arc. A customer we reached out to more than four years ago through outbound marketing found us on their own two years ago, as if the idea had simply incubated somewhere and then surfaced when the timing was right. These things happen more than people in SaaS tend to account for. The pipeline doesn’t always move in a straight line from first touch to close. Sometimes it loops back years later, and the companies that benefit from those loops are the ones that stayed present instead of walking away clean.
Maintaining communication with cold prospects over months and years is not free. It takes intentionality to keep those sequences running, to make sure the content going out is relevant enough to be worth receiving, and to ensure that when someone does come back, the team is ready to pick up where things left off without making it awkward.
The return on that investment is harder to quantify than a standard conversion metric, but it shows up in exactly the situations these two lenders represent. A prospect who comes back after two years of silence, or who names you first in a new vendor search, has already done a significant amount of the evaluation work. They’re not starting from zero, because over time, they have a formed opinion of how you operate, built from a longer window of observation than a typical sales cycle allows. When that opinion is positive enough to bring them back, the path to going live tends to be shorter and more straightforward than a cold engagement.
On the customers who didn’t stay
We’ve lost customers too, and those losses were not clean or easy. They were relationships that had taken time to build, and somewhere in the process we didn’t move fast enough or hold things together well enough to keep them. Our customers have sat with us through bugs, through issues that reached them when they shouldn’t have, through moments where we had to show up and own something that hadn’t gone well.
The ones who stayed did so because they could see that we weren’t the type of company to go quiet when things went wrong. The ones who left taught us that caring about the relationship is not enough on its own. The product has to keep improving at a pace that justifies the trust.
When we say we want to be the best lending infrastructure company in the world, it’s said with full awareness of what that requires. Our customers, lenders operating globally, deserve infrastructure and support that doesn’t ask them to compromise. That’s the standard we’re building toward, and every customer who comes back after going cold is a reminder of what’s at stake in maintaining it.
We don’t ghost them. They always know where to find us. And when they come back, we’re ready.
If you’re building a lending business and looking for infrastructure backed by a team that will stay in it with you, talk to our team. We’ll be here.
