Not This Quarter… Scheduled for Never

A while back I was on a call with an owner who had fifty clients waiting on a renewal conversation. Fifty… and every one of them needed to be chased down.

The conversation was scheduled for “after the first test” (in that business, the first belt test, a few months in). Which means it was scheduled for never (because it was talked about but nothing was in the calendar and no reminders queued up), and then hunted down later, one phone call at a time.

You may have your own version of this. The proposal that went quiet after “let’s revisit this after Q1.” The prospect who loved the strategy session and said “not this quarter.” The client who wants to “revisit the retainer in the spring.” Every one of those is (usually) a conversation scheduled for never.

A backlog like that is a system/script/calendar problem not a “I don’t want the service” question.

Do one thing first: pull every “not right now” from the last 90 days and write the reason next to each name. If you can’t write the reason, you didn’t listen.

Why “I know you said no, but how about now?” doesn’t work

A lot of owners have written some version of this email: “Hi Dana, I know you said the timing wasn’t right, but how about… now?”

You already know that script is terrible.

You’re handing the client their words back and asking them to defend a position they already took. Psychologically this makes you an adversary. Nothing has changed for them. Their reasons didn’t change (or, more importantly, their emotions about it didn’t).

Say “no” out loud and it stops being a preference. It becomes a stance the person owns, and people work hard to stay consistent with the stances they own (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). They aren’t being stubborn. They’re being consistent.

The second bias is psychological reactance. People push back when they feel their freedom to choose is being squeezed, and the push-back gets aimed at whoever squeezed (Steindl et al., 2015). Ask a second time and you trigger both at once. They defend the position, and they resent being asked. That’s the adversarial seat, and you put yourself in it.

Most of those no’s weren’t no’s

Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna studied more than two and a half million sales conversations and found that between 40 and 60 percent of stalled deals die in indecision, not rejection (Dixon & McKenna, 2022). The buyer isn’t choosing a competitor. They’re afraid of getting it wrong. (I wrote about that fear in more detail here.)

They found something else that matters for how you follow up. Buyers fear messing up far more than they fear missing out. Turn up the pressure and you turn up the fear, and the client gets more stuck, not less.

Every re-ask is pressure.

The principle… You do not re-ask a closed question. You create a new event, and you let the decision come out of the new event. That’s the difference between a follow-up and a nag.

Pull your 90-day list now if you haven’t.

What actually happened in the meeting

Diagnose before you re-approach, because whatever caused the stall is still there. Five things go wrong most often.

1. Did they see past the first project? Not the deliverable. The path past it, the outcome(s). If the client can’t picture themselves or their business a year after the conversation, your proposal is a salesperson showing up asking for money. Vision comes first, always.

2. Did everyone agree to the goal? Everyone means EVERYONE. The CFO who sat in on the call, checking email, and never said the word “yes” is your no, showing up two weeks late. Everyone who signs, pays or can kill it without a word needs to say YES out loud. In B2C it may mean the whole family, in B2B, it means all partners.

3. Was there a clear outcome AND a clear transformation? These are two different things, and skipping the second one is the most common miss I see.

The outcome is what they get: “a rebuilt sales pipeline by March.” The transformation is what changes because they got it: “I stop being the only person who can close a deal, and I take a real vacation.” An outcome with no transformation attached to it is a purchase. An outcome the client has connected to their own life is a decision that’s easy to make. Goal research has said the same thing for decades: specific, personally owned goals drive effort in a way that general encouragement never does (Locke & Latham, 2002).

4. Were they ready? Some prospects are ready to decide on the spot. Some were probably never ready to be asked for a decision that day. If you asked a lukewarm prospect for a signature, you didn’t get a no, you didn’t prepare them or appreciate whether they were ready to buy.

5. Did you handle the money right, and did you listen? Options, not one number. Price last, after the goal is set and they can see the outcome and feel the transformation. Listen far more than half the time. If you did most of the talking, you don’t know why they said no, which means you have nothing to re-engage with.

No meeting ends without a date and a task

OK, you ask, when do I bring it up again?

A client never leaves your meeting without a next date and something to do before it. Two pieces, every single time, whatever they decided.

1. A follow-up appointment, on the calendar, chosen because of what you just talked about. 2. An action step that happens in between, with a piece for them and a piece for you. No exceptions, no “we’ll be in touch.”

That second piece is what makes the first one work. Deciding when, where and how a thing will happen, in advance, moves people from intention to action at a rate that intention alone never reaches. Peter Gollwitzer named these implementation intentions, and a meta-analysis across 94 independent tests found a medium-to-large effect on actually reaching the goal (Gollwitzer, 1999; Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 200638002-1)).

“Let’s revisit this after Q1” is an intention. “The 24th at 10:00, and before then your team pulls the last 90 days of lead data and I mark up where the funnel leaks” is a plan. One of those creates a next conversation. The other creates a phone call you’ll dread making and they’ll forget about.

That’s how fifty renewals end up waiting (and not happening). The fix on that meeting was simple: book the next meeting during the first meeting, while everyone is still on the call and agreeable… plus there is a REASON for the next meeting. Do that everywhere and the question of when to bring it up again stops existing. You already know when! It’s on the calendar, and it’s a week or two out.

What you say at the follow-up

You review the assignment, not the decision. Open with what they did since you last met, tell them what you saw, and ask what they noticed on their end. The goal comes back out and gets updated. If the work happened and they liked the result, the conversation reopens itself. You never say the words “last time you said no.”

DON’T say: “Just checking in to see if you’ve had a chance to think about the proposal.”

SAY: “Two weeks ago you told me the thing driving you crazy was that every deal still runs through you. We pulled the lead data. Show me what you found.” Then listen. Then add what you saw that they missed.

Then go back to the goal. What did we say we wanted? Where are we? What’s the next step from here? That question isn’t a close. It’s a status update, and it does the closing for you. If they see the outcome and feel the transformation you did your job.

The tone is a coach reviewing progress, because that’s what it is. Nobody is defending anything.

If they’re still not ready, you already know the ending: another date, another action step. Repeat until they’re ready or they tell you plainly to stop.

When one slips through anyway

Some will slip through. The ways back fall into four groups.

Build a fresh starting point. People start over at the edges of things. Gym visits, diets and new commitments all spike right after a temporal landmark like a new week, a new month or a new semester (Dai et al., 2014). Your client’s calendar is full of them: a new quarter, a new fiscal year, a budget reset, a board meeting. For some businesses new year or back to school or summer is starting matters. A scheduled quarterly review for every client, regardless of status, gives you a reason to meet that has nothing to do with the old no.

Correct the misunderstanding. With schools I’ve seen it come down to one of three misunderstandings, and none of them are about wanting the result less. I’d bet your clients aren’t that different.

- Capacity. “Let’s sit down and figure out how to make this fit your team’s workload.” Sometimes that’s the entire objection! - Stopping after phase one. They want to wait until the first project wraps. Ask them plainly: “You’re sure you want the work to stop there?” They probably haven’t thought of it that way… because nobody framed it that way. - The money. Waiting rarely saves anything. If the problem costs them every month it stays unsolved, show them that arithmetic. It is not a trick. It’s a benefit they were never shown.

Change a variable. Send a different person, because sometimes the relationship is what’s missing. Ask for a small commitment, like reviewing a scope document together, because small commitments make bigger ones easier. Sweeten the deal with integrity: if you wouldn’t hand it to the client who said yes on the spot, don’t hand it to this one. Buying a deal costs more than losing one.

State your conviction, then stop. When a client finally asks why you keep bringing it up, you get one clean shot, and it’s not a technique. Tell them the true thing: why you believe this work will change their business, and that you’re not going to give up on it.

Say it once, warmly, and then be quiet. Don’t stack a request on the end of it. If it lands, they’ll tell you. If it doesn’t, you’ve still told a client you’re not the kind of partner who quits on them, and that gets remembered long after this quarter.

Your move

This week: pull the list of every prospect or client who told you “not right now” in the last 90 days. Next to each name, write the reason they gave. A blank next to a name is probably a conversation you didn’t really hear.

Every name on that list gets a new event. Not a re-ask.

Then fix the upstream problem for good. Starting with your next meeting, nobody leaves without a goal they own, a date on the calendar and an action step with their name on it. Do that for 90 days and the “not right now” list gets short enough to clear in one sitting!

If you want help building that follow-up system into your sales process, come talk to me. The version of this I wrote for school owners is here.

References

Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591–621. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.142015

Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563–2582. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901

Dixon, M., & McKenna, T. (2022, June 8). Stop losing sales to customer indecision. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/06/stop-losing-sales-to-customer-indecision

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705

Steindl, C., Jonas, E., Sittenthaler, S., Traut-Mattausch, E., & Greenberg, J. (2015). Understanding psychological reactance: New developments and findings. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 223(4), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000222