"This sounds great, just not right now."
Most owners treat that as a loss with good manners attached. It is usually the most honest thing anybody says in a sales conversation, and the four minutes after it are worth more than the hour before it.
Take it literally
The reflex is to hear a soft no and start handling an objection. Resist that, because in considered service work, whether it is coaching, a consulting engagement or a retained agency, the deferral is normally accurate. Their quarter is genuinely wrong. The reorganisation is genuinely happening. They genuinely cannot take on something else in March.
Treating a true statement as an objection is the fastest way to convert a warm person into somebody who stops replying, because it tells them you were not listening and that the next message will be more of the same.
The person who says not right now is closer to buying than almost anybody else you will speak to this month. They understood the work, they want it, and one variable is wrong. That is a far better position than someone who is available and unconvinced. In Revenue Engine terms this is the Convert stage, and it is the part of Convert most businesses leave with no owner at all.
The four minutes
Accept it plainly, in one line. "That makes sense." No disappointment, no reframing, no attempt to establish that now is secretly the right time. The relief this produces is real and it is what makes the rest of the message land.
Ask one question, and only one. What would need to be different for this to be the right time? Phrased that way rather than as "when should I follow up", because it asks about their situation instead of your calendar.
The answer is the whole point of the exchange. It tells you whether this is timing, money, authority, or a polite exit, and those four require entirely different things from you. People answer it honestly far more often than they answer "is it the price", because it does not require them to admit anything.
Give them something now. Whatever you would have said in the first session, or the one thing they could do this week on their own. Not a resource library. One thing, specific to what they described.
This move does more than anything else in the sequence. It converts you from a person waiting on a decision into a person who has already been useful, and it means the conversation ended with them receiving something rather than declining something. That difference decides whether a message from you in four months is welcome.
Propose a specific time and let them correct it. Not "I will check in sometime". "Shall I come back to you in early March, after the reorganisation settles?" A named month is easy to agree to or adjust, and it converts an open-ended maybe into a scheduled conversation, which is a much better object to own.
What not to send
A discount. It answers a question they did not ask and it tells them the price was arbitrary. If they come back in March, they will come back expecting the reduced number, and you will have paid permanently for a timing problem that was going to resolve on its own. I learned a version of this the expensive way, which is in how I got my offer and its pricing wrong.
A deadline. Artificial urgency applied to someone who has just been straight with you is read exactly as what it is. It is particularly badly received by the considered, careful people who make the best clients.
A newsletter subscription as the fallback. Adding somebody to a list instead of keeping a relationship is a downgrade dressed as a next step. A general broadcast will not bring this person back. A specific message in March will.
Then actually come back
This is where most of it dies, and it dies quietly.
March arrives during a busy fortnight, the note is in a notebook, and nobody sends anything. The person, meanwhile, hit their moment and either forgot the conversation or assumed you had lost interest. If that has already happened, it is still recoverable, and reopening a conversation that went quiet covers how.
There is useful evidence on the general shape of this. Researchers sending a questionnaire to 3,876 employees found only 29% of eventual respondents replied before any reminder, with 26% after one and 45% only after two or more. It measures survey response rather than buying, so treat it as evidence about persistence and timing rather than about selling. What it establishes is that a single ask reaches a minority of the people who were willing to respond.
Which means the not-right-now list is only worth anything if returning to it is a structural certainty rather than a good intention. Write the date and the reason somewhere that will surface it without you, which is exactly the kind of thing that belongs in a client record. If the only record is your memory of a nice conversation, the person is already lost.
Questions owners ask
How long should I wait before following up?
Whatever they told you, and if they gave no date, three months is a sensible default for considered service work. What matters more than the interval is that the message when it arrives refers to the specific thing they said would change, which is the proof you were actually listening.
What if not right now really means no?
Then you have lost nothing, because the response above costs four minutes and leaves them well-disposed. The question about what would need to change usually surfaces a genuine no anyway, since somebody who is politely exiting tends to answer it vaguely while somebody with a real constraint answers it specifically.
Should I keep them on my mailing list?
Only if they were already on it or they opt in. Adding somebody to a list because a sales conversation went quiet is a small breach of trust and, depending on where you both are, a legal question rather than a taste question.
How many times can I come back?
Twice, unless something genuinely changes on their end or yours. Two well-timed, specific messages over a year is attentive. Four is a campaign, and they will experience it as one.
Source: M. Svensson, T. Svensson, A. W. Hansen and Y. Trolle Lagerros, The effect of reminders in a web-based intervention study, European Journal of Epidemiology 27, 2012, 3,876 employees.