The wrong map, after the Scharff technique. Instead of asking a silent buyer what went wrong, you write your best reading of their week and let them correct it.
Two follow-ups, no reply. A week ago the deal was moving.
Stop asking what is wrong. Write down what you think happened on their side, in two ordinary sentences, and let them fix it. The proposal is sitting with finance. The agency build ate their month. Then give them one word to answer with.
A correction is easy to send. "Nothing has happened yet" is not.
The four tactics Granhag's team put in front of participants. A friendly, unhurried manner. No pressing for anything. The impression of already knowing most of it. And claims put to the person to confirm or correct, instead of questions. Participants could not work out which pieces the interviewer was actually after.
The sales version publishes no wording. Thomas Freese's Question Based Selling builds the same reflex into questions that invite a correction. The method is in the book. Nothing on his site gives you the sentences.
Nobody has run it on a buyer. The sales version is Freese's, method with no measurement behind it. Every experiment below used people who were deliberately holding something back, and a buyer who has gone quiet is usually just busy. Nobody has tested whether the move survives that difference.
The first controlled test, and what it did not find. Pär Anders Granhag, Steven Oleszkiewicz and Sebastián Cabezas Montecinos published the first scientific test of the Scharff technique in Legal and Criminological Psychology in 2015. Ninety-three participants were given information about a planned attack and told to balance giving away too much against giving away too little. On the amount of new information gathered, the Scharff approach did not beat open questions or specific ones. What it changed was what people thought they had done: the Scharff group underestimated how much they had revealed, and the group asked direct questions overestimated it. Hanns Scharff was a Luftwaffe interrogator in the Second World War, known for getting more out of prisoners by telling them what he already knew than by questioning them.
The review across a decade of later experiments. Timothy Luke's meta-analytic review in Applied Cognitive Psychology gathers the experiments that followed and reports three effects: more new information, an interviewer who comes across as knowing more than they do, and sources who underestimate their own disclosure. The first of those did not appear in the original study. The claim that this move gets you more is carried by the review, not by the experiment people usually cite for it.
The same reflex in police interviewing. Laurence Alison's ORBIT model deliberately overstates the other person's position so that they correct it.
Why the move ends in a one-word reply. A Cochrane review of reminders sent to clinicians reports that reminders leaving space for a response do better than bare ones. The size of that difference is not quoted here, because it sits inside the full review and could not be checked against it.
Why you name the next contact and then stop. Mette Trier Damgaard and Christina Gravert measured what reminders cost as well as what they earn: donations rise, and so do unsubscribes. Another message is never free.
Every participant in these experiments was deliberately guarding something, and a silent buyer is usually just busy. The laboratory effect is on how much information comes back, not on whether anyone decides anything. Nobody has compared a guess against simply asking what is going on.
Send one guess about process, never about what they think of you, and give them a one-word way out. Stop after two. A wrong map invites a correction where an open question invites silence, and that has held across a decade of experiments on people who were hiding something. Whether it works on someone who is merely busy is untested.