Context
The same signal can mean something very different in a different situation.
A red traffic light in the middle of a busy city and a red traffic light on a completely empty road display exactly the same instruction. The signal has not changed. The situation around it has.
Commercial conversations work in much the same way.
Meaning does not exist in isolation
A customer asking about price may be preparing to negotiate. They may be trying to fit a solution into a fixed budget. They may also be testing whether the scope can change.
A delayed response may indicate lost momentum. It may just as easily reflect an internal approval process that was expected to take several weeks.
The observation alone rarely tells you which explanation is correct; context is what gives the observation somewhere to sit.
Look at what surrounds the signal
Useful context can come from many places.
What happened earlier in the conversation? Who is involved now? What stage is the decision in? Has the customer behaved this way before? Did anything change immediately before the signal appeared?
Even the same person can behave differently depending on what they are dealing with internally. That is why fixed interpretations are so unreliable.
There is no universal translation table in which silence means one thing, a crossed arm means another, and a price question always points to the same concern.
Context changes the question
Instead of asking:
What does this signal mean?
it is often more useful to ask:
What could this signal mean here?
That small change keeps interpretation connected to the situation rather than to a rule. And it leaves room for something important: validation.
Because context can make an interpretation more plausible. It does not automatically make it true.
From the book
The role of context in interpreting customer behaviour and commercial situations is explored throughout Sales Between the Lines.