A jointly owned, dated plan from here to live — so the deal has no invisible middle.
Use when Use it on complex deals with long cycles, multiple approval gates, and implementation work after signature — especially where you have been burned by late-stage procedural slippage or where the buyer has a hard date they must hit.
Avoid when Avoid it on small or fast transactions, where it is bureaucratic overhead the buyer will resent. It is worthless if it becomes a seller-authored document emailed for agreement — that is a project plan with a friendly name, and it will not predict anything. And it cannot fix a deal with no genuine urgency; it will simply document the drift precisely.
Lead with a commercial insight that reframes the buyer's problem, rather than asking what keeps them up at night.
Use when Use it in complex B2B sales where you have genuine cross-customer data the buyer lacks, where the competition is undifferentiated on features, and where the real enemy is the buyer's inertia rather than another vendor.
Avoid when Avoid it when you have no real insight — performed without substance it is just contrarianism, and buyers detect it immediately. Avoid it with sophisticated buyers who know their domain far better than you, where a reframe reads as condescension. It also demands enablement most sales organisations do not have: the insight must be built centrally, because individual reps cannot see across the customer base.