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How to Create Urgency in Sales

Thomas Waites

Create Urgency with the Four Urgency Motivators

To create urgency, you need to tie closing the deal to something the prospect wants. You can create urgency by tying your deal to the Four Urgency Motivators:

  1. Price

    • Discount or upcoming price increase

  2. Compelling Event

  3. Pain Alleviation

  4. Excitement

Excitement is my personal favourite (see: Thinking vs Feeling). Price discounts are my least.

Different prospects have different motivators. It’s critical to understand what matters to them most. Some prospects will act urgently when you offer a price discount. Maybe your discount is the difference between them being able to purchase or not. Whereas other prospects won’t care about your discount at all. Their budget has already been approved and the savings you’re offering is of little or no benefit to them.

If you try to leverage one of the Four Urgency Motivators and see no change in urgency- you’re pulling on the wrong lever. It doesn’t resonate and it simply isn’t important to them. This is where a lot of salespeople either give up or continue trying to pull the same lever. Instead, keep digging to uncover what truly matters to the prospect and adjust your approach accordingly. Pull on a different lever.

Resistance to Next Steps

Resistance to taking the next steps often indicates either a lack of urgency or an unknown blocker. Recently my team has seen deals move to the ‘Selected’ stage in our pipeline (meaning we’re the chosen vendor) but they’re having challenges scheduling calls to discuss and start work on the procurement items needed for closing the deal (e.g. our Agreement).

We want to discuss next steps for closing the deal but that’s not what our resistant prospect needs or wants. That’s why we’re getting resistance. As salespeople, when we get resistance, we often keep pushing for the thing that we want... and never get it. Instead of “Yes”, we continue to hear different, polite variations of “No”. We exhaust and frustrate ourselves because we’re only thinking about we want and we’re not getting it.

When I see deals moving slowly through our pipeline, I often joke “Don’t they care that I have a quota to hit this month??” or “They really don’t seem to care about me hitting quota nearly as much as I do.”

Turn your attention to the prospect. When your prospect isn’t doing what you want, find out what they want. Instill or reignite their urgency. Or uncover their blockers.

Uncover Blockers

If none of the Four Urgency Motivators are working then there are one of two things going on.

  1. Your deal is dead. Walkaway… the dead can’t buy.

    OR

  2. Your prospect is blocked by something.

When Your Prospect Has A Blocker

Ask thoughtful questions until you’ve uncovered the blocker. Your prospect’s response may require you to read between the lines or ask more questions to understand what’s really blocking them.

Prospect usually don’t proactively share their blockers with us. I’ve never received an email that said,

I’ve never received an email like that. But I bet we have a bunch of unresponsive prospects in our pipeline with similar fears right now.

Maybe your prospect is bogged down in other projects and work. You’re not their top priority.

Maybe the thought of implementing and rolling out your software is overwhelming and they’re putting it off.

Maybe they’re scared of launching your platform and fear it being a complete flop (see: Customer Indecision).

Maybe your prospect is getting internal pushback. Perhaps their IT team thinks they can use the software that they already have.

Maybe your prospect has to jump through internal hoops first. Perhaps they have to get 3 other quotes as part of a competitive bidding process.

And if your follow ups are just a sequence with variations of “Hey, when are you free for a call to discuss the Agreement?” then you’ll never uncover the blocker. You’ll either: 1) lose the deal or 2) finally close it after having moved back your forecasted close date a few times, wasted a ton of time on follow ups, depleted your mental energy wondering about when it’ll close, and lost some other deals in the process (a hidden cost that few salespeople think about- you can’t focus on everything).

Prospect usually don’t proactively share their blockers with us. I’ve never received an email that said,

You Own Your Prospect’s Blockers

Earlier today, during a renewal call, a customer shared with me that they were struggling with getting employee engagement for our platform. I asked a follow up question on this. And they said, “Oh that’s more of an us problem than something that has to do with your team.”

This is definitely a ‘me’ problem. Any blocker or challenge that a prospect or customer is facing with either adopting, or increasing utilization of, our platform is my problem. I own this. We must take ownership and accountability for their blockers. We own uncovering them. And we own solving them. Figure out ways to solve your prospect’s/customer’s blockers.

Once you’ve removed their blocker or challenge, their wants can then be realigned with yours. And then you can move your deal to Closed Won.

Walk Away

Finally, if you’re pulling on the 4 Urgency Motivators or trying to uncover blockers and you’re getting nowhere… walk away (see: Engagement & Micro-Commitments). Much like the Serenity Prayer, as salespeople we must accept the deals we cannot close.


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