Creating Urgency in Sales (Obliterate the Status Quo)

If your buyers don’t have a reason to move forward in their buyer’s journey, then they will stand still. This leads to 26% of all deals that are forecasted as a likely win, to turn into a “no decision” according to CSO insights. That is a massive amount of revenue that you’re leaving on the table every quarter. It could be the difference between hitting quota or not. So, let's take a look at why this happens and then what we need to do to create too much urgency in our buyers that they get the deal done, quicker than ever before. Pain of Implementation The main thing that kills urgency in B2B sales is the “pain of implementation”. This is where the buyer has casually come to the conclusion that the pain of implementing the solution and then seeing the benefits, is more painful than just plodding on with the issues they are currently facing. For example, lets say someone is dramatically overweight. They might come to the conclusion that even though the benefits of losing the weight and becoming healthy would be life changing, they don’t want to go through the effort of dieting and exercising to get there. Outside looking in, everyone else can see that this is dumb. But for that individual, it makes sense in their brain. They’re thinking short term, rather than long term. In a business context, lets say that the prospect is struggling to use excel spreadsheets to complete all their financial reporting. You offer them a new software solution, designed specifically to fix this issue, it seems like a no brainer for them to get started working with you, but they don’t. It’s likely that the prospect feels the pain of learning a new tool and then getting the benefits of that software don’t outweigh the small, niggling pain that they’re in right now where excel crashes once every couple of hours. You’ll know if you’ve a lack of urgency in your deal because of the pain of implementation if you get hit with objections like: Which begs the question, how do we turn these objections on their head, add more urgency to the deal and get it over the line? To do that we need to re-enforce the “reality gap”. The Reality Gap Method If the buyer doesn’t have a clear understanding of their current reality and their future reality then they can trick themselves into a state of procrastination. Alternatively, if the prospect truly knows the risk of staying where they are and the upside of taking action to move to the bolder, brighter future reality they could be living in, then the amount of urgency to make the change increases. It’s our job to coach the prospect to better understand their current and future realities with questions like these. Current reality: You shared that this problem takes X time each week, what is the financial cost of that to the business? What is stopping you from solving this yourself? When does this problem need to be solved? What happens if it doesn’t get solved by then? Future reality: If you could stop this issue happening in the future, how would that make you feel? What would be the knock-on, positive consequences of this being fixed? What’s stopping you from getting started with this today? These questions need to be asked constantly, throughout the entire sales process. This is because buyers get distracted easily. Sure, right now you are their main priority but tomorrow something else is bound to break. The next day, their wife is threatening to leave them. The next week they’re not even sure if they want to be working for their current employer at all. Buying Temperature So, urgency needs to be managed at all times. If you haven’t spoken to your prospect for a couple of weeks, their buying temperature will decrease. So, urgency needs to be managed at all times. If you haven’t spoken to your prospect for a couple of weeks, their buying temperature will decrease. The prospect might have been past the “activation energy” of getting a deal done last time you spoke with them on the phone, but since then a bunch of other crap has been dumped on their desk. That means you must keep reinforcing the pain of their current reality and the pleasure of their bolder, brighter future reality regularly. That is how you build massive urgency and that is how you get the buyer to leap over the initial pain of implementation so that they receive all of the benefits you know that they will receive from your product.