Think of the buyer who has to sign off your proposal.
If he picks you and it goes well, he has done his job. If it goes wrong, it was his choice, with his name on it. If he does not choose at all, nothing happens and no one holds him to account.
Waiting is the safest decision there is. Whoever does nothing is never proved wrong.
As long as changing feels riskier than sitting still, nothing happens.
Why that offer-until-Friday no longer works
Your customer has lived through that for fifteen years and he spots it straight away.
And he learns something from it that you never meant to teach him: that your price depends on your diary, and that next December he is better off waiting.
Artificial urgency works once, and after that it costs you your credibility.
Pressure comes from the seller. Urgency comes out of the customer’s situation.
You do not make urgency, you make it visible
The cost of waiting is usually already there. He has simply never worked it out.
- What does it cost that this is not solved now — in hours, in customers, in risk?
- Who does the work until then?
- Which opportunities are going begging because the attention keeps going here?
- What happens in March, at the tax return, when that contract runs out?
Watch who says it out loud. If you say that waiting is costing him money, it is a sales argument. If he works it out himself, it is a fact.
And if there really is no urgency
Then that is the outcome, and you simply say so. I do not think this is urgent for you right now. Shall we look again in March?
That feels like giving up and it is the opposite. You are the only supplier who has not been pushing him, and he remembers that.
There is more on this on the urgency page.