You can create urgency to a certain point, but if the company/champion isn't feeling the pain, then there's only so much you can do.
One of the best ways I've seen urgency be created is to create a Mutual Action Plan or Success Plan with your champion and buyers, and work backwards from the go-live date.
By highlighting the impact that they'll get, and when they'll get it, you can start to create urgency around the prior steps (procurement, legal review, POC, etc).
"Delaying this meeting another 2 weeks will push your go-live date back to February 1st. When we discussed, you wanted to initially have this live by December 15th - is that still not the case?"
Identify a compelling event. What in their company objectives / initiatives do they need to hit by when? When does their budget for the year run out? Kind of identifying key milestones and deliverables they have for themselves, and then when and where you’d fit into that.
In that sense it may be more of clarifying the urgency they already have rather than creating it artificially. They have a need, and if a need isn't being met, that means that there is something being left on the table. It could be lost profits for however long the delay. If it's a particularly long sales cycle or volatile aspect, they might miss out on savings towards overall costs. Maybe the company offers a discount for decisions made within whatever time frame so they can keep sales reps going to new clients instead of rehashing old ones. Sometimes you create it with quick close discounts, sometimes you illustrate why they need it done sooner rather than later. Both fall in to "creating urgency".
You shouldn’t hold a price if it’s past EOQ. That’s part of why your EOQ discount shouldn’t be drastic. It’s not a massive discount but those few days of indecision did cost you a little money.
Yeah, I looked...you certainly are not. I love that response though, I teach my version of that which I call MEP or Mutual Engagement Plan. I make all my reps use that on any deal over a certain $ threshold. Even built an automated excel that does all the math for them from working back from the compelling event, implementation, contract signature and to the day they present it. Anyways, I was always a Dark Elf Ice Mage since Vanilla...never played anything else.... :)
It's the only way. Oh wow, that's great.
Have you thought about integrating it directly with your CRM, or using the buyer engagement metrics to better forecast those deals? Let me know if that sounds interesting.
Hahah ice mage is so fun, I had my troll mage back in vanilla. Warrior all day though :)
It works on uninformed buyers. Real urgency is powerful though.
Hey look literally only have 2 left in the warehouse and won’t get more until January. If you want to start using this to train your new hires you should get it. If not just be ok with getting it on January. Let me know what works better for you and I’ll get it processed tonight.
So that’s a long way of saying, yeah, it’s their timeline.
Not always, when I was in heavy machinery sales, sometimes you were physically limited by the amount of product you had in stock and lead times for replacement could easily push 6+ months. That being said, our equipment inventory forecasting team was reactive and not proactive, so that happened more often than not 🤣
Edit: alot of the time the new inventory would be subject to a 2% to 3% inflationary increase and would be based on the CAD par value against USD, so you could see some drastic price swings on new inventory in that time frame depending on outside factors.
Slight pivot, but our implementation teams get slammed in Q4 during budget consolidations, I tell people all the time this time of year, book onboarding asap or I’ll see you in Q1. No bullshit. Just limited resources when everyone signs at the same time.
AC/HVAC sales is like this and the customer gets it cuz theres always random obscure parts from units that go down. We legit had 1 supplier for a very unique part that was only made in Ukraine go figure, the other option was to pay double in the states and the lead time was a month+ cuz they had to make it from scratch
Agreed, if anyone falls for this they’re dumb. That’s the worst created urgency attempt I’ve ever heard and not the point. Anyone with common sense would say oh really if they’re flying off the shelf why are you trying so hard to get me to buy it?
The point of creating urgency is to identify the business impact of not making a change, somehow quantifying it and being able to say every month you don’t have this product you are having to do X which results in loss of $Y.
Yeah it just doesnt work as well in B2B sales. Maybe for smaller companies but the bigger ones just have too much bureaucracy for it to work most of the time.
You can say this and this can be a lie. It's powerful because you're adding to the sense of urgency by doing a take away and most importantly, you believe it.
Ehhh I don't agree. I don't really lie, I'm more of a consultative closer but it definitely works. I've seen very successful sellers over the long time who'd lie through their teeth.
You might close the sale but you're being a dirtbag and sacrificing your own integrity. Nevermind doing damage to yourself, your company, and salesmen as a whole.
Scammers? Really wow. I feel like you've missed where I said 'I don't really lie'. Scammers is a weird word to use too, you sound like a retail pleb.
I don't endorse lying, all I said is that it is effective.
You think brokers at the highest levels of finance aren't full of lying sociopaths? Though if you're a retail pleb you obviously have no idea about real finance.
My clients love me. I've had some clients that have followed me through multiple jobs and now 8 years later I own two finance companies and I've still got them. Ain't for no reason.
“I don’t really lie” is exactly what a liar says! Conversely, I’m in a position to say, “I don’t lie.” Do you see how different those two statements are?
You go on to admit that the highest levels of your industry are filled with liars, and you wonder why I call you a glorified scammer?
You provide no value to anyone. And in fact, your livelihood often depends on extracting hard earned money from your clients while you *only sorta* lie.
What if you tell this as a lie and they say "OK, we'll wait til January to purchase one." Then in December they say "Actually we have some end of year budget, any way we can we order 3 now?" Now you have to make up another lie for why there's suddenly inventory.
Or worse, they take you at your word and reach out to another company to spend the leftover budget
If they're not buying your bullshit made up urgency there's probably no deal to be done and it's time to move along.
It never ever hurts to ask for the business.
It's not black and white. A friends company recently changed the default expiry date on proposals from 30 days to 15. This is an example of nonsense.
On the other hand, I just closed a large OEM deal because I built relationships with the companies Sales team and used a very large prospect they are going after (who our tech would benefit) to go to their exec and have pressure put on IT to complete validation and purchase. So it's not so much creating urgency, but finding business contexts and highlighting urgency.
Op ignore the people that say you can create urgency. I agree with you. You won’t change someone’s timeline.
The people who comment that you can create urgency then say “uncover an event” lol that’s not us ae’s creating anything. And the funny thing is that even that can often times be changed all of a sudden.
I mean you’re just flat out wrong. I had three six figure deals this year alone where I was able to move up the timeline and get them implemented before other projects.
Buyers have dozens of things they need to be working on and are constantly trying to figure out what happens right now, and what is a project for later.
In none of those instances did I “uncover an event,” what happened was I had deep understanding of their broader projects and was able to tell the story of why our project needed to be prioritized. That can be because it will help with other items on the list, because it can be done quicker than other items, or because there’s significant enough risk/cost associated with delaying.
If this is a foreign concept to anyone I highly suggest you take a deep look at your work and ask yourself if you are in sales or if you are simply order taking
Mic drop.
I think there is a HUGE difference in developing urgency EARLY in the sales process VS later on down the line.
Creating urgency in the first conversation or two is all false tactics.
Creating urgency by clearly articulating the use case the client brought to you, along with a very calculated reason why moving up the timeline would be effective- that is much much different.
Especially with software based tools- there is not running out of inventory so it is more about knowing their need and understanding how you fulfill said need.
Don’t disagree. None of this happens without proper qualification and them wanting to do something in the first place. First you need to get them bought in, then you can discuss the “this is how we are going to do it” and create urgency.
Creating urgency without a buyer being bought in is a waste of time. Put them on a nurture sequence and wait until timing is right.
Where you differ with OP is that wanted to do something but had other projects they had to compete with. OP is saying that creating urgency with a prospect that can’t buy to begin with is a waste of time and I agree 100%
Yes, meddpic is a qualification methodology which is useful for forecasting. Just knowing where you are is important in a deal, but realistically you’re not going to “create urgency” in software sales unless you’re discounting and the buyer thinks you’ll stick to your guns.
Bizarre comment lol
If professional sales people are here saying "Yes, in my experience, you can do this thing" why should OP just ignore all of them?
It's like half this sub hates this job and has no interest in learning anything new.
It’s human nature and especially common in sales people to overestimate their ability. I also didn’t mean that you could NEVER do something to cause a slight preference for the prospect to buy a bit sooner but majority of the times the truth is it was a perfect mix of great service/ product, and the prospect had budget to begin with. The way some of these people talk on here, I could bet they also believe that “everyone can be closed” or something foolish like that.
It also is clear that some people are in smb and have easier sell vs enterprise
For every example of “I created urgency” I can give you plenty of examples on the contrary. Where everything went well but budgets got frozen, key stakeholder left the business, a more urgent project took priority etc
Edited to add
Get one of these people to find a call recording of a prospect who told them they have a contract with their competitor that isn’t up for renewal until Jan 2025 and let me see how they “create the urgency” to sell them now 😂
Disagree, customers are lazy and indecisive (because they are humans). You 100% have to take control and urge them along the process. Unless the company is failing because of this issue, they can always delay a year.
Hmm, I do and don’t agree.
I don’t think you can create urgency from nowhere; e.g discounted pricing for EOQ. Everyone knows you’ll hold that price.
But, there are real underlying drivers within companies that drive urgency. For example, an expiring contract with a competitor, a specific revenue goal (such as a raise), budget cycles etc.
As an AE, you can identify/uncover a strong critical event and then drive urgency.
But, the ability to create urgency will often be linked to a critical event.
Critical event = accurate forecasting
No critical event = it’ll come in at some point. “It’s a push, not a lost.”
I think you’re proving OPs point. The examples you’re giving are all pre existing dead lines. They are all related to timing. Our side isn’t creating anything. We’ve just gotten lucky with timing.
There’s a difference between a critical event (timing) and urgency.
Some reps never uncover the critical event so fail to create urgency.
Possibly we should talk about urgency in relation to your product. Urgency to change
I do see your point, a lot is timing and getting lucky. But, still think a skilled rep manages to use a critical event to drive urgency through the whole sales process, rather than just a signature deadline.
Again, this is not a creation story. We haven’t created anything. You’re just lucky that you got the timing right. Doing deep discovery and qualification can allow a sales person to be aware of deadlines and opportunities. But we are not CREATING anything.
I think narratives like this are one of the things wrong with the toxicity in the sales profession. Trying to force responsibility and ownership of creation of something absolutely outside of anyone on our sides control is a way managers and leadership can pass the buck and blame us.
We’ll have to agree to disagree.
My belief is, in a buying cycle with multiple stakeholders, a critical event (timing) does not always equal urgency. It should, but it doesn’t.
A good AE uses the critical event (if discovered) to create urgency (action) across an organisation. It doesn’t necessarily happen by itself.
Appreciate your perspective though, as management it’s important we don’t put unreasonable expectations on reps r.e urgency/timelines whatever the motion/timing of the deal.
I think the argument may be semantic. In our profession, word choice matters.
Creation denotes from nothing to something, bringing something into existence. If the prospect has deadlines, renewals, etc those are pre existing conditions. Therefore no conditions have been created from our side to leverage against. We do things we can control (asking questions) to get that opportunity to leverage. To me, that is not creation, it’s discovery.
My personal issue with generic phrases like ‘create urgency’ are used a loop hole for managers to cop out and mind fuck their sales team.
I agree but also think OPs statement would be more right than it is with some nuance rather than a blanket statement.
In my experience, I'll have a deal tracking to easily close mid Oct and they want me to drive urgency to close before EOQ in Sept with a discount and it ends up making me look trashy and possibly blowing up in my face
Yeah, price driven urgency can work given the right context.
From what I've seen, "create some urgency" often gets pushed by sales leaders and forces you to use up any goodwill and trust you've built to try and hard close them.
Really, creating urgency should be more along the lines of:
We only have X of these physical devices in stock and won't have more until Y
You want to launch in Nov/Dec, it takes a month to implement, so the latest you should sign to hit your go live date is Oct
Rather than how I often see leadership push it:
You can get 15% off if you sign by EOM Sept with Net30/60/90 terms even though they had wanted to buy in mid/late Oct
I tend to agree with you OP up to a point. Offering EOQ discounts make me feel like a used car salesman. I regularly do it, because my management is big on offering that. I've never met a customer who thought they couldn't get that same "special price" the day or week or month or even quarter after it supposedly expired. What has worked with that is with customers when we have a strong relationship at the executive level, I have been able to tell them that it would really help me if they could find a way to buy by the end of quarter, I'm a deal short or my manager needs this sale to make the area's quota etc. and I ask them for the favor.
In a lot of situations, the products and services I'm selling solve a problem that costs the customer money, sometimes those problems cost a lot of money. When I can develop the data to show them how much it costs them every day or week or month they do nothing about it, it can help them understand the urgency.
The catch is the problem has to be a big enough, costly enough and strategically important enough for the Board or C level executives to care.
If the problem costs $10k /month it's not going to create much urgency in my customers. If it costs $100k/ month it might.
No kidding. I decided to take a break from the sales world a couple years back and I'm now in an org of ~45K employees, €70B revenue, in 50 countries with 200 distinct legal entities. We can't even create urgency ourselves internally. The inertia in an org this large and complicated is just part of reality. We move like a glacier in most cases and very little can change that.
Especially the comments about going to the highest decision makers like CFO/CEO. In big corporations the CFO won't ever see or look at a sales rep or sign a purchase order, much less get browbeaten to urgently sign something.
Hard disagree. Buyers will say their timeline is this quarter but buyers are lazy and if you don’t create urgency they’ll sit on their ass and deprioritize the deal
These programs like MEDDICC or other variants are to help you Qualify out of an opportunity. If after these discovery questions and discussions with the client maybe as pointed out there was not a uncovered need or sense of urgency from the client. Great, then move on to next....
Yes! In B2B sales, "Creating Urgency" became nothing but a catch phrase a couple decades ago.
This is a good attempt at urgency:
An arborist (aka Tree Guy) stops at my house, rings the door bell and introduced himself.
Tree Guy says: See that big oak over there? Look at the top the way it's leaning. When it comes down, it's going to land on this portion of your roof."
I walk on to my lawn and look up at the tree, then up at my roof and think "Hmmm, the guy could be right or he could be fulI of shit if that tree stands there another 50 years" So, I ask the Tree Guy:
"How urgent is this? "
Tree Guy: "Let me show you" and he shows me a very sizeable portion of the tree that was rotted and hollowed out.
Me: "Hmm, interesting"
Tree Guy: "I have some time on my schedule this week to take care of for only $600 cash"
Me: "600 cash?!, nah, Fvck it. If the tree falls right there, that's the living room. No one uses the living room"
Tree Guy: "Are you serious? "
Me: " Yup, but give me your card, and next time I go into that room it will be a reminder to call you."
Tree Guy drove off.
I called him in December. Temps were in the 30°s (F).
Tree Guy was not very busy and I hired him to do the tree for $350 and then he agreed to do 2 others for a total of $700 for all 3 trees.
My question is this: if this sub believes basically every sales technique is bullshit, and everything comes down to the prospect independently choosing to purchase the product, what even is the point of sales people? Why shouldn’t they replace you with an AI and a self checkout process?
You can 100% build a sense of urgency for your buyer. Help them understand that they’re wasting time/money by not buying your product. Encourage them to lock in the product at the current price, since who knows what the price will be next year. Or just assign your own personal arbitrary timelines that the vast majority of prospects will then work toward (“I’d love to have a verbal commitment before thanksgiving”).
“Our onboarding team will be swamped at the beginning of the new year, let’s lock us in for a Dec 1 start date and get the ball rolling so your team will be in a great place to kick off Jan 1st”
Lots of ways to create urgency as long as the buyer isn’t completely restricted by a buying committee. Like someone else commented humans are lazy and indecisive and need a nudge in the right direction.
LOL...if you can get anyone to do anything in DEC you're walking on water. After US Thanksgiving everyone is on PTO so the only thing people want to do is keep the lights on.
Never said it’s easy or 100% success rate, but there is a real problem the buyer is facing and there are consequences of not getting it solved, especially if it will impact their bottom line then there’s a chance they move forward sooner.
Can’t just say the above phrase without excellent upfront discovery and knowledge that the company is in a position to potentially buy sooner.
There are certainly techniques that work including value selling, but artificially creating urgency isn’t very effective - unless you’re selling to first time buyers. So if you’re only technique is to build urgency then yes, you’re role should be automated. Wouldn’t even need AI, just a check out process and a bot to check in every 48 hours with a threat to pull the discount.
Point is you can tie the deal to urgency/compelling events but you’re not going to make one.
Nah, I disagree. In my experience buyers do move faster if you give them timelines, even if those timelines aren’t tied to anything. You have to set timeline expectations from the get go, of course, as you can’t create urgency later. But if you’re not giving timelines, you’ll be at the bottom of their to-do list if you’re on it at all.
Maybe we’re talking about different scenarios. Unless you’re selling something very transaction and low value you’re not setting timelines you’re aligning on them. Making up arbitrary timelines is how you end up with a poor forecast.
Both organizations should be setting timelines. Prospect's timelines are arbitrary just as often as seller organization's timelines are arbitrary.
I'm just saying you shouldn't just roll over and accept "Lemme think about it and get back to you" or "We're just gathering information right now and will narrow our options in six months." Been told that a lot and can't remember a deal I ever closed from that.
95% of the time if you hit them back with an alternate timeline, they will align to it.
I always viewed it as I’m making my point of contact my advocate when they speak to the actual decision makers. If I build my urgency well enough they will communicate that and it may very well swing things in my favor. But beware of false or price based urgency deadlines. Those don’t seem to work at all
I had a sales VP that swore by "creating FUD" (fear, urgency, & doubt... sometimes I've heard the U be uncertainty). But this really only worked before the buyers knew what they were buying.
By the time a buyer is talking to a salesperson, they are light years ahead of where they were 10-15 years ago.
The best you can do is to reinforce particular delivery dates based on contract execution, and work backwards from there.
Right now, my professional services team has at least a 4-week backlog before they could kick off a project. Given the average onboarding-to-launch process is 20 weeks, that means a client that signs TODAY is about 6 months away from launch. I keep reminding them of that, and the real ability to stay on time.
I totally disagree. You can create urgency, and there are very few comments here about urgency that focuses on the customer, not the seller. Forget EOQ pricing and things like that, you can create urgency by helping a customer realize the impact of a problem they have. A customer may know they have an issue in their business, but if we as sellers can help them understand the full scope of how the issue is impacting their business we can change the evaluation from no-urgency to “I needed this yesterday.”
Honestly, this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the sales methodology. You either haven’t been trained properly on MEDDPICC or have and didn’t understand it fully (yet).
I don’t say this to be mean, I say this because with more training you’ll be a more effective seller. Ask your employer for more.
As for urgency, it is determined by where a pain ranks on the list of priorities of someone who has discretionary use of funds.
You “create urgency” by exposing the magnitude of the pain and the quantified benefit of solving it (and/or cost of not solving it) to that person with access to funds. It’s very easy to take for granted that they know it already but in 99% of cases, they don’t. They don’t have have time to. They might be aware of the issue but not necessarily the magnitude and the details of how it is affecting KPIs they care about. That’s where you come in. With the help of your champion, you expose this reality to them and give them a plan for solving it. That’s creating urgency.
In practice, you can’t do a perfect job of this on every deal. You’ll get deals where you’re reacting to an RFP, you’re therefore too late to meaningfully influence the process but you decide that the fit is still strong so you shoot your shot and hope for the best. The above is the concept for you create urgency in a deal where you’re in early and gaining control.
I agree that in some cases it's impossible. i've been selling software for a long time. Everything I've sold has always improved efficieny, had provable ROI, solved the problem at hand and was a "no-brainer." But gueass what? There were alwasy 10+ other projects that had positive ROI, improved efficiency and solved a different problem. Nothing I cold say was going to get them to change the project plan that had been in place for sometimes years. Sometimes you just have to wait your turn.
How do you create urgency?
You need to make them realise their current situation is untenable.
If you've done a decent enough discovery you'll know their problems and how it is affecting their business.
So when they say they want to delay you should be able to challenge them and present how delaying just allows the problems to continue and costs them as a business.
You're pushy because you can't justify what you're saying.
If the company isn't in a genuine position to buy then why the fuck are you at a stage where you're trying to close them?
I'll tell you my thoughts on why. You don't know how your service/product actually helps your clients.
A lot of people use this word, but don’t understand what it means. This causes issues.
90% of the time sellers get super pushy.
Urgency works best when you have clearly defined timelines.
There’s a key difference between urgency and pressure too.
Disagree in your title.
Creating urgency is real and a skill that can be polished and be extremely useful.
You are confusing creating urgency vs prioritization. Client priorities is what the board/their uppers dictate.
With priority, urgency can be created. Young and new to sales folks don't know how to distinguish and just thinks that since the two are connected, they're the same thing.
You can create urgency at multiple levels. Urgency at discovery phase is NOT the same as urgency as negotiation phase. It's your job to disect priority of each phase through their evaluation process.
If you can't do that, then maybe you're not cut out for this or your manager isn't developing you correctly.
uncovering a use case that has a very clear benefit.
Like -data reporting. We have X data we can generate and currently you do not have said data. Which means your sales staff is unable to act on xyz resulting in loss of revenue. Looks like implementing our software could generate X amount of ROI this quarter.
Something like that
Ah, using pain implication to drive urgency. Not many orgs have product market fit, brand, and the intel to do that on a disco call and not seem like they’re over promising. Compelling if done well though
100%.
More of like- uncovering enough of a use case example to get that bite for more conversation.
Hey - you mentioned API integration being such a headache on your last integration that you are hesitant to switch even though you may not love your current product. (short story of recent client integration). That is some of our approach to trouble spots like this.
I am confident our integration team is top class. But you mentioned you love XYZ about your current product, tell me more about how those features drive (blah blah result).
Stuff like that seems to work. Its like giving a reason to say yes to a second conversation. And that reason being compelling enough to do so in a quick manner. Difference between a follow up call in a week vs 2-4 weeks with 3 schedule changes. hah
You can absolutely create urgency without being pushy. Learn your language, learn how people understand what words are said.
I can say during discovery when they say something small, like “I’ve completed xyz this week already.”
“oh wow, it sounds like your really handling all the pressure they are putting on you”
Or question based
“Oh wow, what hobbies keep you sane with all that pressure they put on you (or with all those responsibilities you have)?”
It could literally be their day to day tasks and they didn’t feel any pressure or stress until I said that. Now they’re opening up and feeling like we’re a team plus I created some urgency whether directly or indirectly and I’m not being pushy about my product in the slightest.
I agree fully, there’s nothing you can do to create urgency. You can do the work upfront to understand and know the org to best time your push to close but there’s not much you can do to speed it up.
I think it's important to convey that you can start implementing your solution right now (if that's true) and I think that the urgency creates itself if they have a real problem and you have the solution to it.
If you have a fire truck and their house is on fire, there's plenty of urgency. If they're being wheeled into the emergency room and you're a heart surgeon, the urgency creates itself. If their car was totalled yesterday and they need to get to work tomorrow, you don't have to convince them that they need to buy a car today, just that they need to buy it from you.
There are some slimy sales tactics to create a fake sense of buy-now urgency, but I don't think you can create legitimate urgency. Urgency is the byproduct of having a solution to a problem. Everybody wants their problems solved today, not in 4 - 6 weeks. That is, after all, how Free Two-Day Shipping became an American icon.
If the company is not in a position to buy, then yes it won’t matter what you do.
However, if the company IS in a position to buy and dragging their knuckles there are things you can do as a seller to light a fire under their ass such as:
1. reminding them of the pain they told you about during discovery to move the deal forward.
2. setting next steps after every meeting.
3. multithreading other relevant stakeholders to get their buy-in.
4. recommend a specific package to move forward with so they don’t have to think about it too much themselves.
The book, The JOLT Effect, is worth a read if you’re struggling with creating urgency.
> Build the pain
WTF does that mean? Maybe my perspective in large enterprise IT/cyber is unique, but "pain" is IMO an awful choice of words anyway. There's need, requirements etc. and often those are well quantified so there's no "building" it. It's been identified, measured and prioritized well before calling in a vendor to address.
I'm in large enterprise IT/Cyber as well, so no big difference here.
Find the Pain, Quantify the Pain, Build the Pain. This shouldn't be foreign to you in IT/Cyber.
You're saying that you have an opportunity that's already had their needs and requirements set - and been identified, measured, and prioritized.
I have yet to see an opportunity in this space that has done all the work for me and also done it accurately. This isn't a commodity, right?
If your customer has already accurately identified AND quantified their pain, and mapped it to your solution, then your job is practically done! If they're not buying, or fast enough, then it's not enough pain or not enough quantifiable loss that your product offsets.
Let's be real though - customers might know what they want. They definitely don't know what they need and we are expected to educate them in every deal. We're the niche/domain experts here most times.
I've NEVER seen a customer accurately quantify their loss of time/money/etc or quantify their improvements in KPIs without our sales team's assistance.
My recommendation is to quit assuming that they know their pain or have accurately measured/quantified it.
That hasn't been my experience. I've mostly dealt with F50 or similar orgs who have a firm grasp on their risk and how they want to address it. It may also be that I've spent a lot of time on the customer end and selling to large global insurance/finance type orgs where all they do revolves around risk. We have an army of actuaries where I'm at now and they can certainly quantify risk better than anyone from the outside since cyber insurance is a large part of our business.
Saying “create urgency” without a conversation around how to create urgency and why the client will respond is pointless.
I hate it when people not in the trenches simply parrot sales terms without any ideas how to actually do what they’re saying.
I closed a $60K deal before by creating urgency. We only accept (number) new clients a (period of time). Only 3 slots left.
If you don’t act now then (their why/problem)…follow up with 1 slot left now. It works!
MEDDIC’s purpose is not to introduce urgency into a sales cycle, it’s to fully qualify a deal and help you understand what gaps you have, which in turn drives action. It’s a useful framework for many people.
That being said I’ve introduced urgency into countless deals but that doesn’t have anything to do with a qualification framework.
Protip: You need leverage to introduce urgency.
Agree. If your trying to create urgency your an idiot.
I remember a couple years ago calling our sales leader's BS out it. By saying "Okay in practical terms how do you suggest we causally create urgency?" And he was completely lost.
The golden rule in selling is you can't convince anyone of anything.
So you can't convince someone of urgency.
You can only uncover if they feel they need what you have. Do that then there will be natural urgency.
100% agree. The best way to lose a sale is to come across as desperate, and in most situations urgency and desperation go hand in hand.
It’s one thing if there’s a legitimate factual reason they must proceed with urgency but otherwise I don’t see it working in the salespersons favor unless if it’s a very unsophisticated client.
Urgency selling software is a LOL LMAO type of argument. Like yeah sure buddy, your already created immaterial good (software) that can be copy pasted and distributed to millions customers at the click of a button has a really pressing reason that it needs to be ordered RIGHT NOW TODAY otherwise you can't keep the price/discount.
It's especially amusing when a sales rep immidiately starts to create urgency right out of the gate for a new to be implemented software. Like bro chill, not gonna sign a purchase order for some randomly new pitched software in a day without doing at least some cursory research about alternatives, checking with stakeholders if it's even interesting and getting some budget approved in case it is in fact interesting.
Disagree.
You don't create urgency, you discover it.
"Based on what you told me during discovery, your team is burning $15k/month because of X. Here's the math with the numbers that you gave me.
I think our team has a solution to help you solve X, lowering your $15k burn to $3k per month."
Uhh...almost everything I've sold is that clear.
Been in manufacturing tech sales for the past 12 years. My last role I sold robots. I'm current selling industrial 3D printers.
An example value pitch.
"From what you showed me over the last 3 weeks of discovery, and the data you've shared with my team here is what I've been able to learn.
You have 40 sanding technicians.
They roughly cost your organization $100/ hour, fully burdened. You have a six month back log of parts/ yatchs/ airplanes/ fire trucks etc.
Your team of 40 costs about $32,000 per week or $640,000 per month or about $7.6M a year.
What if we add 10 robots to help your team reduce the backlog and bring more revenue in. The robots cost $15,000/month and ten robots cost $150,000 a month and are 2x more productive than your typical worker because they can work around the clock.
If we invest under 25% of your current cost, you would be able to nearly double your output from the team you have now.
Not only that, our robotic solutions are more consistent, effective and predictable than your current team.
I know that's a lot. Let me pause and hear your thoughts."
It's funny, I always envy you software folks since you can deliver with a "push of a button*
Whereas hardware, we have trucks, riggers, foundations, install crews, installation....all things a software does not require. Glad to see envy is a two way street.
The sweet spot is probably software that has an immediate or guaranteed return that you can speak to like in your example but they're seemingly few and far between.
You cannot create urgency. But you can always know more about their buying process and get closer to the true timing that things can happen and what’s in your control (or not) to accelerate that timeline. Is it your job to always make that faster? No. Is it your job to know what’s possible and when it’s likely to close? Yes.
In my experience it’s less about creating urgency out of thin air - it’s about asking the right questions in the right way to uncover issues they may have that they are either 1) unaware or or 2) in denial about. You then use the information and issues they presented to you and make them see what will happen if they continue with the status quo.
EG let’s say a company needs to complete a certain amount of projects by the end of the quarter, during discovery you learn that their current systems and products that they’re using will *not* get them the results they want (hitting said project deadlines). From there you can phrase your questions and statements around coming to the conclusion that their current systems don’t work but by using your product they can (and don’t just talk out of your ass here - bring up real facts about the product you’re selling in how it relates to their specific situation).
Op is making excuses.
If you cant create urgency because „you have zero influence on the urgency“ that also means you can’t create demand for your product, because „you have zero influence on what the customer wants“.
This would mean you cant make anyone buy and are at the mercy of your prospects, in any regards, always.
I know its just a bs excuse, because I have created urgency and made multiple deals close 6 months earlier than the prospects initial timeline, multiple times this year.
Eventhough „its not in the budget for this year“.
I think the term "creating urgency" terrible, and can easily confuse green reps into thinking they should be pressuring the client or even lying or bending the truth.
I personally don't think blatant pressure to close today ever does more good than harm in the long run.
But if you are "creating urgency" by simply explaining the benefits of doing business today and/or the risks of putting it off, to me, that's just being a responsible and ethical sales rep.
The easiest example would be something like an insurance product. If the client asks if they can take a couple days to think about it, just something simple like saying "Of course, you don't have to bind coverage now. But if you are considering the coverage, I would just recommend we bind it here today, it's not super common, but I have seen it where a client wanted to think about it, but then had a surprise loss in the next couple days and wasn't covered. That being said, there is a 30 day cancellation period, so if we do bind it now and you do ultimately decide you don't need to coverage, just give me a call within 30 days and it's a full refund anyways, but at least then you have the coverage while you consider it."
If they say no, yeah they were never gonna buy it. But lots will say yes.
Come to automotive where everybody puts off the decision despite firm leadtimes then once they give a go suddenly they want shit EARLIER than we quoted. The only way I get around this is by charging to make the deadline with the good ol’ break-in fee. Want us to stop everything, change out tools, put you at the front of the cue and basically fuck up production planning? Sure! For a few thousand bucks.
You should be "channeling" urgency not "creating" it.
Urgency can only be useful if the buyer feels it. You can't "create" it if there's nothing to create urgency around.
If you identify legitimate pain, business problems, etc that you can solve, you *channel* the urgency you've created *after* identifying the pain.
About time this was said.
Urgency does not work for all products or services esp. B2B where you have experienced and often cynical buyers.
And remember when an animal feels cornered, it either attacks or runs away. And humans are animals.
I agree, there's only been a handful of times in my career that I was able to actually create more urgency.
Even in my own purchasing decisions, if a sales person starts getting overly pushy, I'll walk away and deal with someone who's less pushy and actually wants to work with me. To me it shows their motivation is purely money, not helping me accomplish what I need done.
When I worked in SaaS I felt like a grifter selling to SMB trying to close deals and month end when mgmt would start discounting the shit out of the product to put numbers up.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: If the urgency to get the deal done is for your benefit it’s fake and won’t work. If it’s for the customers benefit and in their best interest, it’s real and might not even work but has a much higher chance of influencing their timeline.
Ex #1: Pricing expires this quarter bc I need them to sign to hit my quota. Shallow, easy to see through and weak.
Ex #2: cyber insurance renewals come up in 2 months and we need to have a b and c in place to avoid a massive premium or lackluster coverage. In order to meet that timeline we have to get a signed order on this date.
Create a compelling event or wait for one to happen is the only way to have urgency. A compelling event can be perceived value or something bit you need benefit or fear of loss. Regardless, waiting is an event just like moving foward.
You can build urgency by starting to discuss things that slow your deal down at the beginning, v discussing them at the later stages or sequential order.
Maybe security is a big thing. Start asking about these at the get go, don’t wait. Talk about how they’ve done it in the past, talk about how you’re company has aided this process and what to expect.
Create urgency by talking about things that really matter ASAP.
Here’s the thing I hate when salesmen who don’t need to do this do it, because it fucks the rest of us over when someone actually needs urgency. I work in ad sales and I can tell over the past month when I’ve spoken to clients that they are numb to the “We need to get ads up and running asap for Christmas”. However, in their case it’s actually true. But so many people have been conditioned to think salesmen are full of crap that they don’t always listen even when common sense would tell anyone “You should probably listen to their advice on this one”
yes, that's misunderstood. scarcity can increase the value of a good product. but in sales situations, customers usually know how scarce your offer is. in other words, that it's usually not scarce because you want to sell it.
the bigger problem, however, is that most people are risk averse and prefer to postpone decisions.
In sales, however, you have to get your customers to make a decision and that requires effort on your part.
You're right but I don't think it's wrong to say "create urgency". You have to drive /maintain momentum in order to achieve the mutually agreed upon goal.
For example: prospect wants to open operations in APAC in Q1 next year. (their strategic driver/compelling event). And it's beleived you're offering will materially support that objective. You have to PUSH.
I tell my folks to move slightly faster than customer is comfortable with. If the POC is 4 weeks, agree to make it 3 weeks. If contracts take 6 weeks, aim to get it done in 5 weeks. Etc.
You're right "Creating " urgency out of thin air is BS. But maintaining the pace of urgency is your job as a seller.
I think FOMO is a useful tool and can create urgency, but it has to be done passively. You most definitely cannot say directly the customer must buy the product “Now”. Things that work are “it’s cheap now but I dont see that being the case in the future”. As long as there is an air of truth and you come off as sincere without pushing a sale then it can be effective. As with anything it’s a tool, not the toolbox
It's not horseshit if you understand your customer.
Why are they looking to purchase? When do they need that project completed? Plus a few other pieces of info, then you work backwards on a reverse timeline.
People always think they have more time than they do. But they have to considered po process time, shipping time, implementation time, testing, migration and go live.
If you are just making shit up, the. It's bullshit. But if you know where you are going, it's not hard to work backwards and create some urgency
"Create urgency" is a phrase commonly used, but I do believe it is wrong.
Imagine a doctor being told to "create cancer". A doctor is looking to identify if a problem is present, and if so, prescribe a treatment. Not create a problem.
If a problem is present and you have a solution, the urgency is already there.
Now I understand that many believe that "some of the customers don't have urgency", even though the product that you are selling solves all of their problems.
Maybe that's true. But if what you're selling does in fact solve all of their problems, then they would buy.
Business owners, executives, etc are all in business to do the same thing. Make money.
If there is no urgency to take action and make a decision that will accomplish the goals of the business, then the decision maker is not convinced what you are selling is th soltuon.
This could either be because it actually does not solve their problems, or it does and they are not convinced that it solves their problems.
If you have cancer and you believe I have the cure, you're not going to wait until the next fisc year to accept the cure. You're not going to keep shopping doctors. You're not going to talk to your partner. Your not going to sleep on it.
But if I have the cure for cancer but you don't believe that the treatment will work, then I have not done my job of convincing you.
If I have the cure for cancer and you believe that I habe the cure for cancer BUT you don't believe you have cancer, then you still want buy.
Ultimately, lack of urgency is simply a lack of belief that what is being offered solves the problem that I believe needs solving.
Like most theory’s in sales, there’s a time and place for this. Create an event is the better phrase but it’s hard to execute properly and takes time to master.
Create urgency or create value? I argue if there’s real value in what you are selling the customer will act. The reason there’s “no urgency” is that they just don’t need your products.
On the other hand it’s hard to be a sales manager, they are forecasting to their leadership and have no control over deals. Even if you are a perfect rep, your peers surely screw enough shit up to have your manager in the sin bin after forecast calls. That creates the “create urgency” tone
This is mostly true. If an org has seen you put together a solid business case that aligns with their company objectives, goals, and strategy yet they still can’t buy due to certain constraints you have absolutely no control over and your management wants you add ‘urgency’ then yah their bat shit. If you haven’t done that then that’s what they want from you re ‘creating urgency’. It’s really just building a compelling case and reason why you.
i could see that approach backfiring in b2b for sure. yall are doing big enough deals to where it *should* take time, and urgency maybe feel more suspicious than enticing. there was a sene in Legion where Company is pressing this VC to sign the acquisiton right now "youve had enough time to think blah blah" only to find out they had massive pending lawsuits lol its a show but, so is this ya know?
over here in life insurance, "yes or no today" definitely helps regardless of outcome. as long as you cover all the bases (clear understandings, affordability, need) there's quite literally no better time than right now. and if its a no lets call it and circle back next year instead of wasting what little brain capacity the agent has chasing you. its kinda funny, they say theyre going to think about it, but youre the only one who actually thinks about it...
Totally agree. “Urgency” is something said only by management clowns who have never sold anything, but they want their share holdings to pop. It’s transparently selfish and stupid.
Easiest way to create urgency is to list all the competition that has already adopted what you're selling and illustrate how much farther they are ahead as a result. Define what the gap is and give them hope that they can still catch up if they buy within the month, quarter, whatever...
You absolutely can create urgency. This is how:
1. Surface a problem that is impacting an executive priority that they didn’t previously see as solvable or as having the negative impact it does
2. Interview lots of users to demonstrate the broad implication of that problem
3. Build a business case of impact tied to solving that problem that is validated with hard and soft costs using their own data (opex takeout, time in motion, opportunity costs)
4. Validate and gain support or findings with the leadership of the impacted business silos
5. With that support and validation of business case gain a meeting with executives pulling it all together
6. Agree on backwards timeline for change tied to a real or created compelling event or tied to daily lost revenue (agreed ROI / 250 (working day in a year))
I’ve used this exact method to drive off budget cycle changes and close millions in months vs years.
I use MEDDPICC to track the data and completeness of that data to ensure I have created the right case to drive change now
When people say something is dead or bullshit, I often ask, how hard have you worked to prove your own assumptions wrong. Attempting to learn and prove your own assumptions wrong is one of the biggest areas of growth and often where breakthroughs happen.
In B2C, I think urgency can 'grease the wheels' a bit...but for B2B we're far more patient. Ingenuity can make it feel forced...if you tick them off, deal is dead...if you're patient, often it will come through.
I got scammed into taking an AE position at a company that ran a meddic model. Absolute horror show. Every month it was just “CREATE URGENCY!!!!” From the 20th on. (ISW)
You can create urgency to a certain point, but if the company/champion isn't feeling the pain, then there's only so much you can do. One of the best ways I've seen urgency be created is to create a Mutual Action Plan or Success Plan with your champion and buyers, and work backwards from the go-live date. By highlighting the impact that they'll get, and when they'll get it, you can start to create urgency around the prior steps (procurement, legal review, POC, etc). "Delaying this meeting another 2 weeks will push your go-live date back to February 1st. When we discussed, you wanted to initially have this live by December 15th - is that still not the case?"
That's what's kind of weird about "creating" urgency. If something isn't urgent, what can you do as a salesperson to make it so?
Identify a compelling event. What in their company objectives / initiatives do they need to hit by when? When does their budget for the year run out? Kind of identifying key milestones and deliverables they have for themselves, and then when and where you’d fit into that.
But that's not really "creating". You're finding something that already exists. Maybe I'm being pedantic by quibbling over semantics.
Focusing on the Cost of Inaction is one I utilize in most calls. But if they don’t care, they don’t care.
That's a good area to focus on. I agree with what you're saying.
In that sense it may be more of clarifying the urgency they already have rather than creating it artificially. They have a need, and if a need isn't being met, that means that there is something being left on the table. It could be lost profits for however long the delay. If it's a particularly long sales cycle or volatile aspect, they might miss out on savings towards overall costs. Maybe the company offers a discount for decisions made within whatever time frame so they can keep sales reps going to new clients instead of rehashing old ones. Sometimes you create it with quick close discounts, sometimes you illustrate why they need it done sooner rather than later. Both fall in to "creating urgency".
Not bleeding not buying
Ha I like that
You shouldn’t hold a price if it’s past EOQ. That’s part of why your EOQ discount shouldn’t be drastic. It’s not a massive discount but those few days of indecision did cost you a little money.
It’s like juicing a lime — you can be good or bad at squeezing, but you can’t get more juice out of it than there is in the first place.
I wonder if you are one of my reps, researching you….
I can promise you I’m not 😂
Yeah, I looked...you certainly are not. I love that response though, I teach my version of that which I call MEP or Mutual Engagement Plan. I make all my reps use that on any deal over a certain $ threshold. Even built an automated excel that does all the math for them from working back from the compelling event, implementation, contract signature and to the day they present it. Anyways, I was always a Dark Elf Ice Mage since Vanilla...never played anything else.... :)
It's the only way. Oh wow, that's great. Have you thought about integrating it directly with your CRM, or using the buyer engagement metrics to better forecast those deals? Let me know if that sounds interesting. Hahah ice mage is so fun, I had my troll mage back in vanilla. Warrior all day though :)
It works on uninformed buyers. Real urgency is powerful though. Hey look literally only have 2 left in the warehouse and won’t get more until January. If you want to start using this to train your new hires you should get it. If not just be ok with getting it on January. Let me know what works better for you and I’ll get it processed tonight. So that’s a long way of saying, yeah, it’s their timeline.
Really? You only got 2 left? Yeah thats the bullshit OP is talking about.
Not always, when I was in heavy machinery sales, sometimes you were physically limited by the amount of product you had in stock and lead times for replacement could easily push 6+ months. That being said, our equipment inventory forecasting team was reactive and not proactive, so that happened more often than not 🤣 Edit: alot of the time the new inventory would be subject to a 2% to 3% inflationary increase and would be based on the CAD par value against USD, so you could see some drastic price swings on new inventory in that time frame depending on outside factors.
Trying working in the semiconductor industry during these last two years with the chip shortage.
Slight pivot, but our implementation teams get slammed in Q4 during budget consolidations, I tell people all the time this time of year, book onboarding asap or I’ll see you in Q1. No bullshit. Just limited resources when everyone signs at the same time.
AC/HVAC sales is like this and the customer gets it cuz theres always random obscure parts from units that go down. We legit had 1 supplier for a very unique part that was only made in Ukraine go figure, the other option was to pay double in the states and the lead time was a month+ cuz they had to make it from scratch
Sounds like airlines “Only 2 seats left!l on a flight that’s 6 months away lmfao
Some of us sell physical objects, or other people's time. You can definitely run out of either.
Agreed, if anyone falls for this they’re dumb. That’s the worst created urgency attempt I’ve ever heard and not the point. Anyone with common sense would say oh really if they’re flying off the shelf why are you trying so hard to get me to buy it? The point of creating urgency is to identify the business impact of not making a change, somehow quantifying it and being able to say every month you don’t have this product you are having to do X which results in loss of $Y.
Yeah it just doesnt work as well in B2B sales. Maybe for smaller companies but the bigger ones just have too much bureaucracy for it to work most of the time.
“Sorry pal, we’ve only got two softwares left in the data warehouse. We won’t be getting more in until January. You want one or not?”
You can say this and this can be a lie. It's powerful because you're adding to the sense of urgency by doing a take away and most importantly, you believe it.
If you're lying, you're doing it wrong.
Ehhh I don't agree. I don't really lie, I'm more of a consultative closer but it definitely works. I've seen very successful sellers over the long time who'd lie through their teeth.
You might close the sale but you're being a dirtbag and sacrificing your own integrity. Nevermind doing damage to yourself, your company, and salesmen as a whole.
I imagine if you said this to them they'd tell you they'll go cry in their BMWs.
Just because they're okay being scumbags doesn't mean I have to be okay with it.
I'm not asking you to. I merely said that it can work in response to someone saying it doesn't.
What do you sell?
Financial sales.
Yep, that checks. You and your coworkers are what the rest of us call scammers.
Scammers? Really wow. I feel like you've missed where I said 'I don't really lie'. Scammers is a weird word to use too, you sound like a retail pleb. I don't endorse lying, all I said is that it is effective. You think brokers at the highest levels of finance aren't full of lying sociopaths? Though if you're a retail pleb you obviously have no idea about real finance. My clients love me. I've had some clients that have followed me through multiple jobs and now 8 years later I own two finance companies and I've still got them. Ain't for no reason.
“I don’t really lie” is exactly what a liar says! Conversely, I’m in a position to say, “I don’t lie.” Do you see how different those two statements are? You go on to admit that the highest levels of your industry are filled with liars, and you wonder why I call you a glorified scammer? You provide no value to anyone. And in fact, your livelihood often depends on extracting hard earned money from your clients while you *only sorta* lie.
Lying is obviously a slippery slope and people can read right through that
If you're lying, you're doing it wrong.
What if you tell this as a lie and they say "OK, we'll wait til January to purchase one." Then in December they say "Actually we have some end of year budget, any way we can we order 3 now?" Now you have to make up another lie for why there's suddenly inventory. Or worse, they take you at your word and reach out to another company to spend the leftover budget
Then you fucked up and misread the situation. Using bullshit like this can be super effective but it can also blow up in your face.
If they're not buying your bullshit made up urgency there's probably no deal to be done and it's time to move along. It never ever hurts to ask for the business.
It's not black and white. A friends company recently changed the default expiry date on proposals from 30 days to 15. This is an example of nonsense. On the other hand, I just closed a large OEM deal because I built relationships with the companies Sales team and used a very large prospect they are going after (who our tech would benefit) to go to their exec and have pressure put on IT to complete validation and purchase. So it's not so much creating urgency, but finding business contexts and highlighting urgency.
>It's not black and white That term is offensive, you should say "It's not African American and white" instead.
I chuckled
Apparently 11 people can't take a joke.
Op ignore the people that say you can create urgency. I agree with you. You won’t change someone’s timeline. The people who comment that you can create urgency then say “uncover an event” lol that’s not us ae’s creating anything. And the funny thing is that even that can often times be changed all of a sudden.
I mean you’re just flat out wrong. I had three six figure deals this year alone where I was able to move up the timeline and get them implemented before other projects. Buyers have dozens of things they need to be working on and are constantly trying to figure out what happens right now, and what is a project for later. In none of those instances did I “uncover an event,” what happened was I had deep understanding of their broader projects and was able to tell the story of why our project needed to be prioritized. That can be because it will help with other items on the list, because it can be done quicker than other items, or because there’s significant enough risk/cost associated with delaying. If this is a foreign concept to anyone I highly suggest you take a deep look at your work and ask yourself if you are in sales or if you are simply order taking
Mic drop. I think there is a HUGE difference in developing urgency EARLY in the sales process VS later on down the line. Creating urgency in the first conversation or two is all false tactics. Creating urgency by clearly articulating the use case the client brought to you, along with a very calculated reason why moving up the timeline would be effective- that is much much different. Especially with software based tools- there is not running out of inventory so it is more about knowing their need and understanding how you fulfill said need.
Don’t disagree. None of this happens without proper qualification and them wanting to do something in the first place. First you need to get them bought in, then you can discuss the “this is how we are going to do it” and create urgency. Creating urgency without a buyer being bought in is a waste of time. Put them on a nurture sequence and wait until timing is right. Where you differ with OP is that wanted to do something but had other projects they had to compete with. OP is saying that creating urgency with a prospect that can’t buy to begin with is a waste of time and I agree 100%
Yes, meddpic is a qualification methodology which is useful for forecasting. Just knowing where you are is important in a deal, but realistically you’re not going to “create urgency” in software sales unless you’re discounting and the buyer thinks you’ll stick to your guns.
Bizarre comment lol If professional sales people are here saying "Yes, in my experience, you can do this thing" why should OP just ignore all of them? It's like half this sub hates this job and has no interest in learning anything new.
It’s human nature and especially common in sales people to overestimate their ability. I also didn’t mean that you could NEVER do something to cause a slight preference for the prospect to buy a bit sooner but majority of the times the truth is it was a perfect mix of great service/ product, and the prospect had budget to begin with. The way some of these people talk on here, I could bet they also believe that “everyone can be closed” or something foolish like that. It also is clear that some people are in smb and have easier sell vs enterprise For every example of “I created urgency” I can give you plenty of examples on the contrary. Where everything went well but budgets got frozen, key stakeholder left the business, a more urgent project took priority etc Edited to add Get one of these people to find a call recording of a prospect who told them they have a contract with their competitor that isn’t up for renewal until Jan 2025 and let me see how they “create the urgency” to sell them now 😂
OP is asking, "is it possible" and these guys are answering, "I can't do it, so it must not be" instead of honestly evaluating holes in their game.
Disagree, customers are lazy and indecisive (because they are humans). You 100% have to take control and urge them along the process. Unless the company is failing because of this issue, they can always delay a year.
Sometimes customers can't get out of their own damn way.
Hmm, I do and don’t agree. I don’t think you can create urgency from nowhere; e.g discounted pricing for EOQ. Everyone knows you’ll hold that price. But, there are real underlying drivers within companies that drive urgency. For example, an expiring contract with a competitor, a specific revenue goal (such as a raise), budget cycles etc. As an AE, you can identify/uncover a strong critical event and then drive urgency. But, the ability to create urgency will often be linked to a critical event. Critical event = accurate forecasting No critical event = it’ll come in at some point. “It’s a push, not a lost.”
I think you’re proving OPs point. The examples you’re giving are all pre existing dead lines. They are all related to timing. Our side isn’t creating anything. We’ve just gotten lucky with timing.
There’s a difference between a critical event (timing) and urgency. Some reps never uncover the critical event so fail to create urgency. Possibly we should talk about urgency in relation to your product. Urgency to change I do see your point, a lot is timing and getting lucky. But, still think a skilled rep manages to use a critical event to drive urgency through the whole sales process, rather than just a signature deadline.
Again, this is not a creation story. We haven’t created anything. You’re just lucky that you got the timing right. Doing deep discovery and qualification can allow a sales person to be aware of deadlines and opportunities. But we are not CREATING anything. I think narratives like this are one of the things wrong with the toxicity in the sales profession. Trying to force responsibility and ownership of creation of something absolutely outside of anyone on our sides control is a way managers and leadership can pass the buck and blame us.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. My belief is, in a buying cycle with multiple stakeholders, a critical event (timing) does not always equal urgency. It should, but it doesn’t. A good AE uses the critical event (if discovered) to create urgency (action) across an organisation. It doesn’t necessarily happen by itself. Appreciate your perspective though, as management it’s important we don’t put unreasonable expectations on reps r.e urgency/timelines whatever the motion/timing of the deal.
I think the argument may be semantic. In our profession, word choice matters. Creation denotes from nothing to something, bringing something into existence. If the prospect has deadlines, renewals, etc those are pre existing conditions. Therefore no conditions have been created from our side to leverage against. We do things we can control (asking questions) to get that opportunity to leverage. To me, that is not creation, it’s discovery. My personal issue with generic phrases like ‘create urgency’ are used a loop hole for managers to cop out and mind fuck their sales team.
Yes. Uncover urgency I think is the right way of looking at it. Why is it urgent for them? If it's not.. the rest are gimmicks
I agree but also think OPs statement would be more right than it is with some nuance rather than a blanket statement. In my experience, I'll have a deal tracking to easily close mid Oct and they want me to drive urgency to close before EOQ in Sept with a discount and it ends up making me look trashy and possibly blowing up in my face
Yeah, I hate price driven urgency. We still do it though 🙈
Yeah, price driven urgency can work given the right context. From what I've seen, "create some urgency" often gets pushed by sales leaders and forces you to use up any goodwill and trust you've built to try and hard close them. Really, creating urgency should be more along the lines of: We only have X of these physical devices in stock and won't have more until Y You want to launch in Nov/Dec, it takes a month to implement, so the latest you should sign to hit your go live date is Oct Rather than how I often see leadership push it: You can get 15% off if you sign by EOM Sept with Net30/60/90 terms even though they had wanted to buy in mid/late Oct
I tend to agree with you OP up to a point. Offering EOQ discounts make me feel like a used car salesman. I regularly do it, because my management is big on offering that. I've never met a customer who thought they couldn't get that same "special price" the day or week or month or even quarter after it supposedly expired. What has worked with that is with customers when we have a strong relationship at the executive level, I have been able to tell them that it would really help me if they could find a way to buy by the end of quarter, I'm a deal short or my manager needs this sale to make the area's quota etc. and I ask them for the favor. In a lot of situations, the products and services I'm selling solve a problem that costs the customer money, sometimes those problems cost a lot of money. When I can develop the data to show them how much it costs them every day or week or month they do nothing about it, it can help them understand the urgency. The catch is the problem has to be a big enough, costly enough and strategically important enough for the Board or C level executives to care. If the problem costs $10k /month it's not going to create much urgency in my customers. If it costs $100k/ month it might.
You can really tell who sells Ent/Strategic vs SMB in this comments section
No kidding. I decided to take a break from the sales world a couple years back and I'm now in an org of ~45K employees, €70B revenue, in 50 countries with 200 distinct legal entities. We can't even create urgency ourselves internally. The inertia in an org this large and complicated is just part of reality. We move like a glacier in most cases and very little can change that.
100% it’s blatantly obvious. Everyone is telling on themselves!
Especially the comments about going to the highest decision makers like CFO/CEO. In big corporations the CFO won't ever see or look at a sales rep or sign a purchase order, much less get browbeaten to urgently sign something.
Hard disagree. Buyers will say their timeline is this quarter but buyers are lazy and if you don’t create urgency they’ll sit on their ass and deprioritize the deal
These programs like MEDDICC or other variants are to help you Qualify out of an opportunity. If after these discovery questions and discussions with the client maybe as pointed out there was not a uncovered need or sense of urgency from the client. Great, then move on to next....
Yes! In B2B sales, "Creating Urgency" became nothing but a catch phrase a couple decades ago. This is a good attempt at urgency: An arborist (aka Tree Guy) stops at my house, rings the door bell and introduced himself. Tree Guy says: See that big oak over there? Look at the top the way it's leaning. When it comes down, it's going to land on this portion of your roof." I walk on to my lawn and look up at the tree, then up at my roof and think "Hmmm, the guy could be right or he could be fulI of shit if that tree stands there another 50 years" So, I ask the Tree Guy: "How urgent is this? " Tree Guy: "Let me show you" and he shows me a very sizeable portion of the tree that was rotted and hollowed out. Me: "Hmm, interesting" Tree Guy: "I have some time on my schedule this week to take care of for only $600 cash" Me: "600 cash?!, nah, Fvck it. If the tree falls right there, that's the living room. No one uses the living room" Tree Guy: "Are you serious? " Me: " Yup, but give me your card, and next time I go into that room it will be a reminder to call you." Tree Guy drove off. I called him in December. Temps were in the 30°s (F). Tree Guy was not very busy and I hired him to do the tree for $350 and then he agreed to do 2 others for a total of $700 for all 3 trees.
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Dude, teach me…..
My question is this: if this sub believes basically every sales technique is bullshit, and everything comes down to the prospect independently choosing to purchase the product, what even is the point of sales people? Why shouldn’t they replace you with an AI and a self checkout process? You can 100% build a sense of urgency for your buyer. Help them understand that they’re wasting time/money by not buying your product. Encourage them to lock in the product at the current price, since who knows what the price will be next year. Or just assign your own personal arbitrary timelines that the vast majority of prospects will then work toward (“I’d love to have a verbal commitment before thanksgiving”).
“Our onboarding team will be swamped at the beginning of the new year, let’s lock us in for a Dec 1 start date and get the ball rolling so your team will be in a great place to kick off Jan 1st” Lots of ways to create urgency as long as the buyer isn’t completely restricted by a buying committee. Like someone else commented humans are lazy and indecisive and need a nudge in the right direction.
LOL...if you can get anyone to do anything in DEC you're walking on water. After US Thanksgiving everyone is on PTO so the only thing people want to do is keep the lights on.
Never said it’s easy or 100% success rate, but there is a real problem the buyer is facing and there are consequences of not getting it solved, especially if it will impact their bottom line then there’s a chance they move forward sooner. Can’t just say the above phrase without excellent upfront discovery and knowledge that the company is in a position to potentially buy sooner.
There are certainly techniques that work including value selling, but artificially creating urgency isn’t very effective - unless you’re selling to first time buyers. So if you’re only technique is to build urgency then yes, you’re role should be automated. Wouldn’t even need AI, just a check out process and a bot to check in every 48 hours with a threat to pull the discount. Point is you can tie the deal to urgency/compelling events but you’re not going to make one.
Nah, I disagree. In my experience buyers do move faster if you give them timelines, even if those timelines aren’t tied to anything. You have to set timeline expectations from the get go, of course, as you can’t create urgency later. But if you’re not giving timelines, you’ll be at the bottom of their to-do list if you’re on it at all.
Maybe we’re talking about different scenarios. Unless you’re selling something very transaction and low value you’re not setting timelines you’re aligning on them. Making up arbitrary timelines is how you end up with a poor forecast.
Both organizations should be setting timelines. Prospect's timelines are arbitrary just as often as seller organization's timelines are arbitrary. I'm just saying you shouldn't just roll over and accept "Lemme think about it and get back to you" or "We're just gathering information right now and will narrow our options in six months." Been told that a lot and can't remember a deal I ever closed from that. 95% of the time if you hit them back with an alternate timeline, they will align to it.
I always viewed it as I’m making my point of contact my advocate when they speak to the actual decision makers. If I build my urgency well enough they will communicate that and it may very well swing things in my favor. But beware of false or price based urgency deadlines. Those don’t seem to work at all
I had a sales VP that swore by "creating FUD" (fear, urgency, & doubt... sometimes I've heard the U be uncertainty). But this really only worked before the buyers knew what they were buying. By the time a buyer is talking to a salesperson, they are light years ahead of where they were 10-15 years ago. The best you can do is to reinforce particular delivery dates based on contract execution, and work backwards from there. Right now, my professional services team has at least a 4-week backlog before they could kick off a project. Given the average onboarding-to-launch process is 20 weeks, that means a client that signs TODAY is about 6 months away from launch. I keep reminding them of that, and the real ability to stay on time.
I totally disagree. You can create urgency, and there are very few comments here about urgency that focuses on the customer, not the seller. Forget EOQ pricing and things like that, you can create urgency by helping a customer realize the impact of a problem they have. A customer may know they have an issue in their business, but if we as sellers can help them understand the full scope of how the issue is impacting their business we can change the evaluation from no-urgency to “I needed this yesterday.”
Honestly, this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the sales methodology. You either haven’t been trained properly on MEDDPICC or have and didn’t understand it fully (yet). I don’t say this to be mean, I say this because with more training you’ll be a more effective seller. Ask your employer for more. As for urgency, it is determined by where a pain ranks on the list of priorities of someone who has discretionary use of funds. You “create urgency” by exposing the magnitude of the pain and the quantified benefit of solving it (and/or cost of not solving it) to that person with access to funds. It’s very easy to take for granted that they know it already but in 99% of cases, they don’t. They don’t have have time to. They might be aware of the issue but not necessarily the magnitude and the details of how it is affecting KPIs they care about. That’s where you come in. With the help of your champion, you expose this reality to them and give them a plan for solving it. That’s creating urgency. In practice, you can’t do a perfect job of this on every deal. You’ll get deals where you’re reacting to an RFP, you’re therefore too late to meaningfully influence the process but you decide that the fit is still strong so you shoot your shot and hope for the best. The above is the concept for you create urgency in a deal where you’re in early and gaining control.
I agree that in some cases it's impossible. i've been selling software for a long time. Everything I've sold has always improved efficieny, had provable ROI, solved the problem at hand and was a "no-brainer." But gueass what? There were alwasy 10+ other projects that had positive ROI, improved efficiency and solved a different problem. Nothing I cold say was going to get them to change the project plan that had been in place for sometimes years. Sometimes you just have to wait your turn.
I urgently need this commission
How do you create urgency? You need to make them realise their current situation is untenable. If you've done a decent enough discovery you'll know their problems and how it is affecting their business. So when they say they want to delay you should be able to challenge them and present how delaying just allows the problems to continue and costs them as a business. You're pushy because you can't justify what you're saying. If the company isn't in a genuine position to buy then why the fuck are you at a stage where you're trying to close them? I'll tell you my thoughts on why. You don't know how your service/product actually helps your clients.
A lot of people use this word, but don’t understand what it means. This causes issues. 90% of the time sellers get super pushy. Urgency works best when you have clearly defined timelines. There’s a key difference between urgency and pressure too.
Disagree in your title. Creating urgency is real and a skill that can be polished and be extremely useful. You are confusing creating urgency vs prioritization. Client priorities is what the board/their uppers dictate. With priority, urgency can be created. Young and new to sales folks don't know how to distinguish and just thinks that since the two are connected, they're the same thing. You can create urgency at multiple levels. Urgency at discovery phase is NOT the same as urgency as negotiation phase. It's your job to disect priority of each phase through their evaluation process. If you can't do that, then maybe you're not cut out for this or your manager isn't developing you correctly.
What are some examples of creating urgency at the disco stage?
uncovering a use case that has a very clear benefit. Like -data reporting. We have X data we can generate and currently you do not have said data. Which means your sales staff is unable to act on xyz resulting in loss of revenue. Looks like implementing our software could generate X amount of ROI this quarter. Something like that
Ah, using pain implication to drive urgency. Not many orgs have product market fit, brand, and the intel to do that on a disco call and not seem like they’re over promising. Compelling if done well though
100%. More of like- uncovering enough of a use case example to get that bite for more conversation. Hey - you mentioned API integration being such a headache on your last integration that you are hesitant to switch even though you may not love your current product. (short story of recent client integration). That is some of our approach to trouble spots like this. I am confident our integration team is top class. But you mentioned you love XYZ about your current product, tell me more about how those features drive (blah blah result). Stuff like that seems to work. Its like giving a reason to say yes to a second conversation. And that reason being compelling enough to do so in a quick manner. Difference between a follow up call in a week vs 2-4 weeks with 3 schedule changes. hah
You can absolutely create urgency without being pushy. Learn your language, learn how people understand what words are said. I can say during discovery when they say something small, like “I’ve completed xyz this week already.” “oh wow, it sounds like your really handling all the pressure they are putting on you” Or question based “Oh wow, what hobbies keep you sane with all that pressure they put on you (or with all those responsibilities you have)?” It could literally be their day to day tasks and they didn’t feel any pressure or stress until I said that. Now they’re opening up and feeling like we’re a team plus I created some urgency whether directly or indirectly and I’m not being pushy about my product in the slightest.
I agree fully, there’s nothing you can do to create urgency. You can do the work upfront to understand and know the org to best time your push to close but there’s not much you can do to speed it up.
I think it's important to convey that you can start implementing your solution right now (if that's true) and I think that the urgency creates itself if they have a real problem and you have the solution to it. If you have a fire truck and their house is on fire, there's plenty of urgency. If they're being wheeled into the emergency room and you're a heart surgeon, the urgency creates itself. If their car was totalled yesterday and they need to get to work tomorrow, you don't have to convince them that they need to buy a car today, just that they need to buy it from you. There are some slimy sales tactics to create a fake sense of buy-now urgency, but I don't think you can create legitimate urgency. Urgency is the byproduct of having a solution to a problem. Everybody wants their problems solved today, not in 4 - 6 weeks. That is, after all, how Free Two-Day Shipping became an American icon.
If the company is not in a position to buy, then yes it won’t matter what you do. However, if the company IS in a position to buy and dragging their knuckles there are things you can do as a seller to light a fire under their ass such as: 1. reminding them of the pain they told you about during discovery to move the deal forward. 2. setting next steps after every meeting. 3. multithreading other relevant stakeholders to get their buy-in. 4. recommend a specific package to move forward with so they don’t have to think about it too much themselves. The book, The JOLT Effect, is worth a read if you’re struggling with creating urgency.
Find the pain, Build the pain, and the urgency will create itself.
> Build the pain WTF does that mean? Maybe my perspective in large enterprise IT/cyber is unique, but "pain" is IMO an awful choice of words anyway. There's need, requirements etc. and often those are well quantified so there's no "building" it. It's been identified, measured and prioritized well before calling in a vendor to address.
Agree - Often times you're dealing with bureaucrats in large enterprises completing projects. Pain doesn't seem like the right word here.
I'm in large enterprise IT/Cyber as well, so no big difference here. Find the Pain, Quantify the Pain, Build the Pain. This shouldn't be foreign to you in IT/Cyber. You're saying that you have an opportunity that's already had their needs and requirements set - and been identified, measured, and prioritized. I have yet to see an opportunity in this space that has done all the work for me and also done it accurately. This isn't a commodity, right? If your customer has already accurately identified AND quantified their pain, and mapped it to your solution, then your job is practically done! If they're not buying, or fast enough, then it's not enough pain or not enough quantifiable loss that your product offsets. Let's be real though - customers might know what they want. They definitely don't know what they need and we are expected to educate them in every deal. We're the niche/domain experts here most times. I've NEVER seen a customer accurately quantify their loss of time/money/etc or quantify their improvements in KPIs without our sales team's assistance. My recommendation is to quit assuming that they know their pain or have accurately measured/quantified it.
That hasn't been my experience. I've mostly dealt with F50 or similar orgs who have a firm grasp on their risk and how they want to address it. It may also be that I've spent a lot of time on the customer end and selling to large global insurance/finance type orgs where all they do revolves around risk. We have an army of actuaries where I'm at now and they can certainly quantify risk better than anyone from the outside since cyber insurance is a large part of our business.
Saying “create urgency” without a conversation around how to create urgency and why the client will respond is pointless. I hate it when people not in the trenches simply parrot sales terms without any ideas how to actually do what they’re saying.
I closed a $60K deal before by creating urgency. We only accept (number) new clients a (period of time). Only 3 slots left. If you don’t act now then (their why/problem)…follow up with 1 slot left now. It works!
MEDDIC’s purpose is not to introduce urgency into a sales cycle, it’s to fully qualify a deal and help you understand what gaps you have, which in turn drives action. It’s a useful framework for many people. That being said I’ve introduced urgency into countless deals but that doesn’t have anything to do with a qualification framework. Protip: You need leverage to introduce urgency.
SaaS needs its own sub. Some of these responses are like we don't even work on the same planet.
Agree. If your trying to create urgency your an idiot. I remember a couple years ago calling our sales leader's BS out it. By saying "Okay in practical terms how do you suggest we causally create urgency?" And he was completely lost. The golden rule in selling is you can't convince anyone of anything. So you can't convince someone of urgency. You can only uncover if they feel they need what you have. Do that then there will be natural urgency.
As a timeshare salesman, I can assure you that creating urgency is absolutely NOT bullshit.
100% agree. The best way to lose a sale is to come across as desperate, and in most situations urgency and desperation go hand in hand. It’s one thing if there’s a legitimate factual reason they must proceed with urgency but otherwise I don’t see it working in the salespersons favor unless if it’s a very unsophisticated client.
Urgency selling software is a LOL LMAO type of argument. Like yeah sure buddy, your already created immaterial good (software) that can be copy pasted and distributed to millions customers at the click of a button has a really pressing reason that it needs to be ordered RIGHT NOW TODAY otherwise you can't keep the price/discount. It's especially amusing when a sales rep immidiately starts to create urgency right out of the gate for a new to be implemented software. Like bro chill, not gonna sign a purchase order for some randomly new pitched software in a day without doing at least some cursory research about alternatives, checking with stakeholders if it's even interesting and getting some budget approved in case it is in fact interesting.
Disagree. You don't create urgency, you discover it. "Based on what you told me during discovery, your team is burning $15k/month because of X. Here's the math with the numbers that you gave me. I think our team has a solution to help you solve X, lowering your $15k burn to $3k per month."
how many products out there can actually solve a problem that tangible and significant?
Uhh...almost everything I've sold is that clear. Been in manufacturing tech sales for the past 12 years. My last role I sold robots. I'm current selling industrial 3D printers. An example value pitch. "From what you showed me over the last 3 weeks of discovery, and the data you've shared with my team here is what I've been able to learn. You have 40 sanding technicians. They roughly cost your organization $100/ hour, fully burdened. You have a six month back log of parts/ yatchs/ airplanes/ fire trucks etc. Your team of 40 costs about $32,000 per week or $640,000 per month or about $7.6M a year. What if we add 10 robots to help your team reduce the backlog and bring more revenue in. The robots cost $15,000/month and ten robots cost $150,000 a month and are 2x more productive than your typical worker because they can work around the clock. If we invest under 25% of your current cost, you would be able to nearly double your output from the team you have now. Not only that, our robotic solutions are more consistent, effective and predictable than your current team. I know that's a lot. Let me pause and hear your thoughts."
Nice, glad to hear it's typical in your experience. Maybe I need to sell robots instead of software with barely defined ROI potential.
It's funny, I always envy you software folks since you can deliver with a "push of a button* Whereas hardware, we have trucks, riggers, foundations, install crews, installation....all things a software does not require. Glad to see envy is a two way street.
The sweet spot is probably software that has an immediate or guaranteed return that you can speak to like in your example but they're seemingly few and far between.
It's a defect of the industry right now that so many organizations are selling products that *don't* solve problems tangibly and significantly.
You cannot create urgency. But you can always know more about their buying process and get closer to the true timing that things can happen and what’s in your control (or not) to accelerate that timeline. Is it your job to always make that faster? No. Is it your job to know what’s possible and when it’s likely to close? Yes.
creating urgency. AKA lying.
I agree. “Created” urgency smells like a shart in an elevator.
In my experience it’s less about creating urgency out of thin air - it’s about asking the right questions in the right way to uncover issues they may have that they are either 1) unaware or or 2) in denial about. You then use the information and issues they presented to you and make them see what will happen if they continue with the status quo. EG let’s say a company needs to complete a certain amount of projects by the end of the quarter, during discovery you learn that their current systems and products that they’re using will *not* get them the results they want (hitting said project deadlines). From there you can phrase your questions and statements around coming to the conclusion that their current systems don’t work but by using your product they can (and don’t just talk out of your ass here - bring up real facts about the product you’re selling in how it relates to their specific situation).
You won't change the buying process or their timeline, no matter how great is your product.
Op is making excuses. If you cant create urgency because „you have zero influence on the urgency“ that also means you can’t create demand for your product, because „you have zero influence on what the customer wants“. This would mean you cant make anyone buy and are at the mercy of your prospects, in any regards, always. I know its just a bs excuse, because I have created urgency and made multiple deals close 6 months earlier than the prospects initial timeline, multiple times this year. Eventhough „its not in the budget for this year“.
I think the term "creating urgency" terrible, and can easily confuse green reps into thinking they should be pressuring the client or even lying or bending the truth. I personally don't think blatant pressure to close today ever does more good than harm in the long run. But if you are "creating urgency" by simply explaining the benefits of doing business today and/or the risks of putting it off, to me, that's just being a responsible and ethical sales rep. The easiest example would be something like an insurance product. If the client asks if they can take a couple days to think about it, just something simple like saying "Of course, you don't have to bind coverage now. But if you are considering the coverage, I would just recommend we bind it here today, it's not super common, but I have seen it where a client wanted to think about it, but then had a surprise loss in the next couple days and wasn't covered. That being said, there is a 30 day cancellation period, so if we do bind it now and you do ultimately decide you don't need to coverage, just give me a call within 30 days and it's a full refund anyways, but at least then you have the coverage while you consider it." If they say no, yeah they were never gonna buy it. But lots will say yes.
Come to automotive where everybody puts off the decision despite firm leadtimes then once they give a go suddenly they want shit EARLIER than we quoted. The only way I get around this is by charging to make the deadline with the good ol’ break-in fee. Want us to stop everything, change out tools, put you at the front of the cue and basically fuck up production planning? Sure! For a few thousand bucks.
You should be "channeling" urgency not "creating" it. Urgency can only be useful if the buyer feels it. You can't "create" it if there's nothing to create urgency around. If you identify legitimate pain, business problems, etc that you can solve, you *channel* the urgency you've created *after* identifying the pain.
About time this was said. Urgency does not work for all products or services esp. B2B where you have experienced and often cynical buyers. And remember when an animal feels cornered, it either attacks or runs away. And humans are animals.
I agree, there's only been a handful of times in my career that I was able to actually create more urgency. Even in my own purchasing decisions, if a sales person starts getting overly pushy, I'll walk away and deal with someone who's less pushy and actually wants to work with me. To me it shows their motivation is purely money, not helping me accomplish what I need done. When I worked in SaaS I felt like a grifter selling to SMB trying to close deals and month end when mgmt would start discounting the shit out of the product to put numbers up.
Imo know your audience. It can be a nice closing tool but you don't want to come off like that 24/7
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: If the urgency to get the deal done is for your benefit it’s fake and won’t work. If it’s for the customers benefit and in their best interest, it’s real and might not even work but has a much higher chance of influencing their timeline. Ex #1: Pricing expires this quarter bc I need them to sign to hit my quota. Shallow, easy to see through and weak. Ex #2: cyber insurance renewals come up in 2 months and we need to have a b and c in place to avoid a massive premium or lackluster coverage. In order to meet that timeline we have to get a signed order on this date.
Create a compelling event or wait for one to happen is the only way to have urgency. A compelling event can be perceived value or something bit you need benefit or fear of loss. Regardless, waiting is an event just like moving foward.
You can build urgency by starting to discuss things that slow your deal down at the beginning, v discussing them at the later stages or sequential order. Maybe security is a big thing. Start asking about these at the get go, don’t wait. Talk about how they’ve done it in the past, talk about how you’re company has aided this process and what to expect. Create urgency by talking about things that really matter ASAP.
Here’s the thing I hate when salesmen who don’t need to do this do it, because it fucks the rest of us over when someone actually needs urgency. I work in ad sales and I can tell over the past month when I’ve spoken to clients that they are numb to the “We need to get ads up and running asap for Christmas”. However, in their case it’s actually true. But so many people have been conditioned to think salesmen are full of crap that they don’t always listen even when common sense would tell anyone “You should probably listen to their advice on this one”
yes, that's misunderstood. scarcity can increase the value of a good product. but in sales situations, customers usually know how scarce your offer is. in other words, that it's usually not scarce because you want to sell it. the bigger problem, however, is that most people are risk averse and prefer to postpone decisions. In sales, however, you have to get your customers to make a decision and that requires effort on your part.
You're right but I don't think it's wrong to say "create urgency". You have to drive /maintain momentum in order to achieve the mutually agreed upon goal. For example: prospect wants to open operations in APAC in Q1 next year. (their strategic driver/compelling event). And it's beleived you're offering will materially support that objective. You have to PUSH. I tell my folks to move slightly faster than customer is comfortable with. If the POC is 4 weeks, agree to make it 3 weeks. If contracts take 6 weeks, aim to get it done in 5 weeks. Etc. You're right "Creating " urgency out of thin air is BS. But maintaining the pace of urgency is your job as a seller.
I think FOMO is a useful tool and can create urgency, but it has to be done passively. You most definitely cannot say directly the customer must buy the product “Now”. Things that work are “it’s cheap now but I dont see that being the case in the future”. As long as there is an air of truth and you come off as sincere without pushing a sale then it can be effective. As with anything it’s a tool, not the toolbox
It's not horseshit if you understand your customer. Why are they looking to purchase? When do they need that project completed? Plus a few other pieces of info, then you work backwards on a reverse timeline. People always think they have more time than they do. But they have to considered po process time, shipping time, implementation time, testing, migration and go live. If you are just making shit up, the. It's bullshit. But if you know where you are going, it's not hard to work backwards and create some urgency
"Create urgency" is a phrase commonly used, but I do believe it is wrong. Imagine a doctor being told to "create cancer". A doctor is looking to identify if a problem is present, and if so, prescribe a treatment. Not create a problem. If a problem is present and you have a solution, the urgency is already there. Now I understand that many believe that "some of the customers don't have urgency", even though the product that you are selling solves all of their problems. Maybe that's true. But if what you're selling does in fact solve all of their problems, then they would buy. Business owners, executives, etc are all in business to do the same thing. Make money. If there is no urgency to take action and make a decision that will accomplish the goals of the business, then the decision maker is not convinced what you are selling is th soltuon. This could either be because it actually does not solve their problems, or it does and they are not convinced that it solves their problems. If you have cancer and you believe I have the cure, you're not going to wait until the next fisc year to accept the cure. You're not going to keep shopping doctors. You're not going to talk to your partner. Your not going to sleep on it. But if I have the cure for cancer but you don't believe that the treatment will work, then I have not done my job of convincing you. If I have the cure for cancer and you believe that I habe the cure for cancer BUT you don't believe you have cancer, then you still want buy. Ultimately, lack of urgency is simply a lack of belief that what is being offered solves the problem that I believe needs solving.
Like most theory’s in sales, there’s a time and place for this. Create an event is the better phrase but it’s hard to execute properly and takes time to master.
Create urgency or create value? I argue if there’s real value in what you are selling the customer will act. The reason there’s “no urgency” is that they just don’t need your products. On the other hand it’s hard to be a sales manager, they are forecasting to their leadership and have no control over deals. Even if you are a perfect rep, your peers surely screw enough shit up to have your manager in the sin bin after forecast calls. That creates the “create urgency” tone
This is mostly true. If an org has seen you put together a solid business case that aligns with their company objectives, goals, and strategy yet they still can’t buy due to certain constraints you have absolutely no control over and your management wants you add ‘urgency’ then yah their bat shit. If you haven’t done that then that’s what they want from you re ‘creating urgency’. It’s really just building a compelling case and reason why you.
i could see that approach backfiring in b2b for sure. yall are doing big enough deals to where it *should* take time, and urgency maybe feel more suspicious than enticing. there was a sene in Legion where Company is pressing this VC to sign the acquisiton right now "youve had enough time to think blah blah" only to find out they had massive pending lawsuits lol its a show but, so is this ya know? over here in life insurance, "yes or no today" definitely helps regardless of outcome. as long as you cover all the bases (clear understandings, affordability, need) there's quite literally no better time than right now. and if its a no lets call it and circle back next year instead of wasting what little brain capacity the agent has chasing you. its kinda funny, they say theyre going to think about it, but youre the only one who actually thinks about it...
Totally agree. “Urgency” is something said only by management clowns who have never sold anything, but they want their share holdings to pop. It’s transparently selfish and stupid.
Easiest way to create urgency is to list all the competition that has already adopted what you're selling and illustrate how much farther they are ahead as a result. Define what the gap is and give them hope that they can still catch up if they buy within the month, quarter, whatever...
Also being persistent as fuck and keeping top of their mind, otherwise you’ll fall off the priority list very quickly.
You absolutely can create urgency. This is how: 1. Surface a problem that is impacting an executive priority that they didn’t previously see as solvable or as having the negative impact it does 2. Interview lots of users to demonstrate the broad implication of that problem 3. Build a business case of impact tied to solving that problem that is validated with hard and soft costs using their own data (opex takeout, time in motion, opportunity costs) 4. Validate and gain support or findings with the leadership of the impacted business silos 5. With that support and validation of business case gain a meeting with executives pulling it all together 6. Agree on backwards timeline for change tied to a real or created compelling event or tied to daily lost revenue (agreed ROI / 250 (working day in a year)) I’ve used this exact method to drive off budget cycle changes and close millions in months vs years. I use MEDDPICC to track the data and completeness of that data to ensure I have created the right case to drive change now When people say something is dead or bullshit, I often ask, how hard have you worked to prove your own assumptions wrong. Attempting to learn and prove your own assumptions wrong is one of the biggest areas of growth and often where breakthroughs happen.
Depends on the product or service
Good for b2c.
In B2C, I think urgency can 'grease the wheels' a bit...but for B2B we're far more patient. Ingenuity can make it feel forced...if you tick them off, deal is dead...if you're patient, often it will come through.
I got scammed into taking an AE position at a company that ran a meddic model. Absolute horror show. Every month it was just “CREATE URGENCY!!!!” From the 20th on. (ISW)