Complex sales: does a distant project seem easier to deliver?
In high-value-added selling, a distant implementation date often leaves more room to discuss ambitions than constraints. The management question is specific: how can we check that interest in future benefits is also grounded in an examination of feasibility?
What the literature establishes
Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope (1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) showed, in experiments involving near- and distant-future decisions, that temporal distance changes the relative weight of desirability and feasibility. For distant decisions, participants gave relatively greater importance to the appeal of the outcome than to the practical conditions required to achieve it. These experiments do not concern industrial selling, but they encourage a distinction between endorsing an objective and assessing the means needed to achieve it.
Distance changes the level of representation
Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman (2010, Psychological Review) present a theoretical synthesis in which psychological distance favours more abstract representations, while proximity favours more concrete ones. A distant project may therefore be considered in terms of its strategic contribution rather than the operations required. Applied to selling, this mechanism suggests a hypothesis: seller and customer may agree on the project's purpose without having examined its implementation in equal detail.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that the deadline should be brought artificially closer or that every presentation should begin with the difficulties. The cited research does not establish the commercial effectiveness of these practices, and an abstract representation is useful when discussing objectives. The more nuanced approach is to connect benefits with delivery conditions, not to replace ambition with a list of obstacles. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not establish
These publications do not demonstrate that a distant horizon causes sales of undeliverable projects in pharma or life sciences. In organisational purchasing, technical expertise, validation procedures and the involvement of several functions may also structure the assessment of feasibility. Initial enthusiasm alone therefore neither diagnoses a temporal bias nor predicts the commercial outcome.
A practical check in Bâle
Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources' « Vente à forte valeur ajoutée » programme, an exercise applicable in Basel is to review, over a period defined in advance, all proposals scheduled for implementation beyond the following six-month period. For each major benefit, ask the customer to confirm a delivery condition, its owner and how it will be verified: quality validation in pharma and life sciences, an interface with a Rhine logistics operator, or the availability of an international R&D team. Then measure the proportion of these proposals in which every major benefit has all three elements documented and confirmed by the customer. This indicator checks whether a concrete feasibility assessment is present; it proves neither that the assessment is sufficient nor that it affects sales. To go further: explore the High-Value Selling training in Basel in the canton of Basel-Stadt, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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