One of the absolute best ways to scale your sales earnings is by speeding up your sales cycle. You know this. But how often do you still get hit with “maybes” and “I’ll think about its” when you’re trying to close?
The problem—they don’t feel the urgency. And sorry to say, that’s on you.
Here’s how to fix your problem with urgency (and the lack of it).
“Stalled” Prospects
“Stalled” prospects.
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 if you’ve tried to close them and they haven’t said “yes” or “no” yet. They’re up in the air.
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 momentum through increasing the level of urgency.
Many low-performing sales professionals waste time trying to sell these stalled individuals. The fact is, once the momentum of the initial discovery calls and solution presentations has waned, every week that goes by is a lower chance of that potential customer ever buying from you.
So how does your pipeline look? Do you have a bunch of stalled accounts in there? If so then this video is for you.
4 Strategies for Driving Urgency
So with that said, let’s 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.
1. Understanding
Understanding.
Tip one is this – Really understand your potential customer’s pain point.
If your potential customers aren’t in extreme pain, there will never be any urgency to get the deal closed.
Now 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
These are the REAL pain points that you can use to drive urgency and get the deal done faster.
Let me use a quick analogy to explain what a REAL pain point is. Your lead doesn’t buy a shovel because they need a shovel. They don’t even buy a shovel because they need a hole, which is the classic, cliché sales analogy.
Instead, their problem is deeper. Much deeper. They’re reworking their landscape to impress the hoity-toity neighbors. They’re finally installing that pole to fly their grandfather’s flag. Maybe they’ve even got a dead body in their closet that’s starting to smell and their wife is getting suspicious!
This is the real pain and obviously there is massive urgency here. If you tried to sell a shovel, they wouldn’t care about the features and benefits. If you tried to sell them hole digging service, well they might be slightly more interested. But if you explained that you could get rid of a body… they wouldn’t even ask what the price was and they’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 of urgency in your conversations be much higher.
2. Naivety
Now the second strategy revolves around naivety.
Tip two – Don’t let the potential customer think 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.
A lot of reps are guilty of shelling out too much free consulting advice throughout the sales process. And that can give the potential customer confidence that now they know all the secrets. They’re capable of solving the problem themselves.
This leads to stalled deals and a severe lack of urgency as now you don’t even seem necessary to solve the problem! Not good.
So 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 only. Don’t solve the entire issue for the potential customer right before you get paid.
3. Speed
Now tip number three is a simple one. But it’s powerful too.
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.
And now we’re at the final and maybe most important strategy for creating urgency…
4. THE Question
Popping THE question more often.
Tip four – Close more often.
As crazy as it sounds, sometimes you just need to make the deal real. And that means attempting to close earlier rather than adding layers of artificial urgency to pressure them into asking about the close themselves.
Now we cover the Closing 3.0 Methodology in a lot more detail in the Selling Made Simple Academy. But the basic gist of it is that closing the sale can be done with no pressure, no weird manipulation tactics, and basically 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. And that’s part of the magic behind it. Because instantly you have a level of urgency that wasn’t there 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.
And if they say no, then just ask the following question.
“What needs to happen to move this forward?”
No matter what the answer, you’ve automatically built urgency into the conversation because once this next step is complete, your buyer themself has told you that they will then be ready to close the sale.
Rather than GUESSING at what they need to move forward, they outright tell you! It’s a prescription for selling success and urgency that you just can’t beat.
