Cost of Inaction
Ask what happens if the buyer changes nothing, so doing nothing stops feeling like the safe option.
If nothing changes over the next year, what does that cost you?
Most deals are not lost to a competitor; they are lost to “we’ll leave it for now.” The cost-of-inaction question makes the do-nothing path visible and expensive. You ask, plainly, “If nothing changes over the next year, what does that cost you?” and then stay quiet while they add it up. The number they say out loud is far more persuasive than any figure you quote.
Use it after a real problem is on the table, once the buyer agrees something is wrong but has not felt the weight of leaving it. It works because people treat the status quo as safe by default, and this question drags the hidden price of that comfort into the open. It backfires if the problem is trivial, where forcing the question just makes you look like you are manufacturing urgency.
No single documented originator for the phrasing; the mechanism combines Neil Rackham’s implication questions (SPIN Selling, 1988) with loss aversion, documented by Kahneman and Tversky (prospect theory, 1979).