You know the deal. It has been closing next month for two quarters. The champion is genuinely enthusiastic — replies fast, brought two colleagues to the last call, used the word "obviously" about the problem. The notes from every conversation say the same thing: strong fit, high interest, timing.
And nothing moves.
The usual read is that you haven't built enough urgency. So the next move is a deadline, or a discount that expires, or a quarter-end nudge dressed up as a favor.
Bob Moesta's principle cuts the other way: you don't create urgency. The customer does. It comes from their world — board pressure, a metric that stopped moving, a workflow that broke, a number someone has to explain in April. It comes from the moment where continuing costs more than changing.
What you can do is surface it. Two questions do most of that work:
Question 1What happens if you don't solve this?
Question 2So then — why are you waiting?
The reason this held up as advice is that both questions are answerable by the buyer and unanswerable by you. But the framing I originally gave them was wrong in one specific way, and the correction is the whole point.
They are not a pair
I presented these as two truth-seeking questions, as though they were variations on the same move. They aren't. They read opposite sides of the same inequality.
Six forces determine whether a buyer moves. Three promote movement. Three resist it. Movement happens when the first three outweigh the second three — not when the product is good, not when the pitch is tight. There is no term in that inequality for how good your product is.
Question 1 reads the promoting side. Question 2 inventories the resisting side.
That is why asking Question 1 twice, in different words, feels productive and produces nothing. Most discovery calls are four versions of Question 1. The buyer keeps confirming the problem is real, you keep hearing yes, and the resisting side never gets named — which is where the deal actually lives.
What Question 1 is really measuring
The stated purpose is stakes. The real signal is fluency.
Ask a buyer what happens if they don't solve this, and watch whether they answer or construct. If the Push is real, the answer arrives with edges on it: a date, a headcount number, a specific person who is going to be unhappy, a renewal that lands before the fix could possibly ship. They have said this sentence before — probably to their boss, probably more than once. You are watching recall.
If the Push is weak, they build the answer in front of you. Abstractions, conditionals, a slight upward inflection at the end. "I mean, we'd probably keep losing time on it, which — yeah, over a year that adds up." That is not a struggling moment. That is a competent professional being polite to someone who asked a reasonable question.
Both look like engagement in a call recording. Only one of them is demand.
This is the threshold that separates a problem from a struggle. Every organization has dozens of problems it will never act on, and they are all real. A problem becomes a Push when someone has already decided, privately, that the current state cannot continue. You are not there to create that decision. You are there to find out whether it happened.
What Question 2 is really doing
"So then, why are you waiting?" sounds like a challenge. It works because it isn't one.
It shifts the buyer out of evaluation mode — should we buy this — and into self-explanation. And people are much more candid about their own barriers than about your product. Ask what's wrong with your solution and you get a courtesy objection. Ask why they haven't moved and you get the security review that takes eleven weeks, the VP who owns the current tool, the two migrations already booked for Q3, the fact that nobody wants to be the person who championed the thing that didn't work.
Those are Avoidances, Habits, and Anxieties, arriving in the buyer's own words, unprompted.
Here is why that matters more than it sounds: the resisting side is the only side you can move before the sale.
Pushes are given by their world. Desires are given by who they are. Pull is the one promoting force you influence — and it is the one a buyer has the hardest time verifying before they commit, because verifying it requires already having bought.
So your deck moves Pull. Your demo moves Pull. Your pricing page, your case studies, your ROI calculator — Pull, all of it. One force out of six, and the weakest of the three you're counting on.
Meanwhile the three resisting forces sit unnamed in a deal you cannot close, and every additional proof point you send is a heavier push against a door that opens the other way.
Two ways this goes wrong
Manufacturing urgency. The expiring discount adds nothing to the promoting side. Worse, it usually adds to the resisting side — a buyer who now has to explain internally why the timeline is the vendor's rather than theirs. You have converted your quarter-end into their Anxiety.
Reading a stall as a persuasion problem. When deals stall in a pattern, the cause is almost never messaging. It is one of two things, and they have different fixes. Either you are talking to people whose Pushes are weak — a segment problem, solved by changing who you call — or you never inventoried the resisting side, which is a research problem, solved by asking Question 2 and writing down the answer.
Neither of those is fixed by better copy. Both get attempted as copy first, because copy is the thing you can change by Friday.
Where to check this against your own evidence
You already have better data on the resisting side than you think.
A security questionnaire is an itemized inventory of institutional Avoidance, written by the buyer's own organization, in the buyer's own priority order. So is a procurement checklist. So is the list of questions your champion says they'll "need to get answers to internally." You have three of these in a folder right now, and none of them are in your positioning.
Nobody writes a forty-item questionnaire about a thing they don't want. The existence of the document is a Push. The contents of it are the barriers. Most companies read it as an obstacle to clear rather than as the most honest research artifact they will ever receive for free.