Do your sales cycles seem to drag on and on and on? Do you attempt to close the sale but you get knocked back with “maybes” and “I’ll have to think about it?”
Well if you can create urgency in sales you will have all of your issues solved.
If your potential customers don’t feel in a rush to purchase from you, then they are communicating that they don’t feel like you’re really solving any problem worth rushing for.
So in this video I’m going to share 4 tips that will help you create more urgency in sales so you can reduce the number of maybes you get, without being manipulative or weird. So stay tuned.
Not being able to create a level of urgency with a potential customer is the number one reason why deals “stall”.
One of the key differences between high performing sales professionals that crush targets and those that don’t, is the number of “stalled” potential deals in their sales pipelines.
A potential customer is classed as stalled, you’ve tried to close them and they haven’t said “yes” or “no”.
Stalled deals will kill your chances of hitting your sales target and the 4 tips I’m about to share with you will help you give them some mometum through increasing the level of urgency.
Many low performing sales professionals waste time telling to sell these stalled individuals and the fact is, that once the momentum of the initial discovery calls and solution presentations has waned, every week that goes by, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the potential customer will ever buy from you.
So how does you pipeline look? Do you have a bunch of stalled accounts in there? If so then this video is going to help.
So with that said, lets take a look at 4 tips to create urgency in sales so that your prospects don’t get stuck in your pipeline and you can get more deals closed, quicker.
Tip one – Really understand your potential customers pain point.
If your potential customers are not in extreme pain, then there will never be any urgency to get the deal closed.
Typically there are three types of pain points that you should be looking out for when you’re going through your discovery and questioning process. They are –
- Productivity pain points
- Process pain points
- Financial pain points
Let me use a quick analogy to explain what a REAL pain point is. So rarely do your potential customers by a spade because they need a spade. Even rarer do they buy a spade because they need a hole, which is the classic, cliché sales analogy.
The reality is that they have a dead body it their bedroom wardrobe and it’s started to get smelly, their wife is starting to get suspicious about the padlock on the door and so they need to bury the body as quickly as possible.
This is the real pain and obviously there is massive urgency here. If you tried to sell this dude a spade, he wouldn’t care about the featured and benefits. If you tried to sell him a hole digging service, well he might be slightly more interested. However if you explained that you could get rid of a body… he wouldn’t even ask what the price was, he’d jump at the chance to work with you.
So you need to work out what the body is that your potential customers are trying to bury, so that you can sell them the tool or solution to help with the real issue.
Once you start doing this, the level urgency in your conversations be much higher.
Tip two – The potential customer thinks they can do it on their own.
Another issue that sales professionals run into during the sales process is that they make it seem all too easy to remove the pain for the potential customer.
Sales professionals often give too much free consulting advice throughout the sales process which gives the potential customer a confidence that now they know all the secrets, and they are capable of solving the problem themselves.
This leads to stalled deals and a severe lack of urgency as the seller is now seen as being inconsequential to the potential customer having their pain points resolved.
By all means, give advice, share insights build your reputation as an industry expert throughout the sales process, but keep your advice to more general industry trends rather than solving issues for the potential customer, right before you get paid.
Tip three – Follow-up quicker
One of the reasons deals stall and urgency drops out of the sale process is because salespeople are too slow with their follow-ups.
If you have a sales call on a Tuesday, don’t give the potential customer a week to pull together the information you require to help them. Instead, arrange the follow-up call for this coming Thursday instead.
Most salespeople are passive in their follow-up schedule because they are happy that the potential customer wants to speak to them at all!
High performing sales professionals on the other hand are always oversubscribed with potential meeting options and so they need to get deals moving quickly to make sure they have enough time to get through them all, and so their follow-up dates are set in quick succession.
Even if you aren’t completely oversubscribed right now, this is the impression that you want to leave on your potential customers if you want this to become the reality in the near future.
Tip four – Close more often
As crazy as it sounds, sometimes you just need to make the deal real for the potential customer by attempting to close it, rather than attempting to add layers of artificial urgency to try and pressure then into asking about the close themselves.
When you’re sales are slow, often closing more often will speed them up.
The salesman.org, closing 3.0 selling methodology is covered in great detail on our platform, but the basic gist of it is that closing the sale can be done with no pressure, no weird manipulation tactics and zero chance of rejection by asking the following questions –
“Does it make sense to X”
So, for example, “does it make sense for you to sign up today, to relieve the pain point of your sales team underperforming which I know is stressing you out and to jump on the Salesman.org sales training platform?”
The potential customer, in this example a sales manager, will either say yes or no.
This question can’t be answered in a maybe. Instantly you have a level of urgency that you didn’t have before.
Of course, if they say yes, then you’ve closed the deal and so the rest of this conversation on creating urgency is irrelevant.
If they say no, then just ask the following question –
“What needs to happen to move this forward?”
No matter what the answer, you have automatically built urgency into the conversation because once this next step is complete, potential customer themselves has told you that they will then be ready to close the sale.
Summary – How to create urgency in sales
To quickly recap, the 4 tips are –
Tip one – Really understand potential customers pain point.
If your potential customers are not in extreme pain then there will never be any urgency to get the deal closed.
Understand your prospects –
- Productivity pain points
- Process pain points
- Financial pain points
Tip two – The potential customer thinks they can do it on their own.
By all means, give advice, share insights build your reputation as an industry expert throughout the sales process, but keep your advice to more general industry trends rather than solving issues for the potential customer, before you get paid.
Tip three – Follow-up quicker
If you have a sales call on a Tuesday, don’t give the potential customer a week to pull together the information you require. Get the next meeting booked for the Thursday.
Tip four – close more often
Sometimes you need to make the deal real for the potential customer by attempting to close it sooner.
Close more often with the Closing 3.0 methology and you’ll create massive urgency and get more deals done faster.
If you enjoyed this video make sure to subscribe and hit that thumbs up button. Leave a comment below if you’ve any ideas you have to create more urgency in the sales process. And I’ll see you in the next video.
