When the buyer wants it but cannot start this quarter, get the contract signed now with the start date written in for later. Borrowed from pension research; nobody has measured it in selling.
The buyer wants it, but not this quarter. They have other priorities and cannot start until later, so the deal slides into a calendar of check-ins.
Get the contract signed now, with the start or delivery date written in for later. Ian Koniak, a sales coach, calls this a future-dated order and uses it for exactly this case: a client with competing priorities this quarter who cannot start your project until a later date.
Koniak's future-dated order. Sign now, deliver later, with the date in the contract. His companion move for cash-flow worries is a split payment: if you normally bill annually, bill half now and half in six months.
Nobody has measured it. Koniak publishes it as practice. Nobody has compared deals signed with a later start date against deals parked until the buyer was ready.
People commit more easily to a change that starts later. Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi's Save More Tomorrow programme, published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2004, asked employees who had turned down a higher pension contribution today to commit instead to increases that would start at their next pay rises. Of those who had refused the immediate increase, 78% accepted the later one. Their savings rates rose from 3.5% to 13.6% over forty months. It worked because nothing changed today, and the increase never showed up as a smaller pay cheque.
Why this is the closest comparison available. A buyer who will not sign this quarter is often not refusing the purchase. They are refusing a change that lands now. A signature with a later start date asks for the same kind of commitment as the deferred pension increase.
The evidence is employees committing their own future pay rises. Whether it holds when an organisation commits money that needs someone else's approval is untested.
When the buyer has no reason to sign now and a good reason to start later, offer a signature that starts on their date. It removes the reason to wait without adding pressure. The evidence for committing now to a change that starts later is strong, and it comes from a very different decision.