Handling "Call Me After the Holidays"

“Call me after the holidays” (or after the quarter, after the reorg) is usually a soft no dressed as a scheduling note. Sometimes the timing really is bad, but often it means this is not a priority and they hope you will drift away. Your job is to tell the two apart without nagging.

Get specific and agree the future step out loud: “Makes sense. Are we talking early January? I’ll put Thursday the 8th in and send a short note before then.” A vague “sometime later” is a decline; a real date they will hold is genuine. Then keep one useful touch in between, not a “just checking in” ping.

It works when you replace the fog of “later” with a concrete commitment. The mistake is accepting the vague timeline and going silent, then cold-restarting months on. This is standard sales-floor practice with no single documented originator.