Hurry up and buy!

How well did you close your quarter? Do you have the impression buyers are interested in your product but you have difficulties closing? Are buyers procrastinating too much? If yes, then probably creating urgency is what you need to speed up the sales process and increase conversion rates.

How annoying is it when you naively sign up your email on a website not knowing that you will be constantly hammered by their latest, discounts, bonuses, sales, products, services, buy-now-or-else-you-will-loose-the-opportunity-of-a-lifetime-and-die-miserably emails? In a way, and a very nasty one, this is what marketers define as urgency. Fortunately though, there are other less invasive and obtrusive ways to create this emotion in buyers, helping you speed up the sales process and increase sales without being hated upon by your clients and future prospects.

I defined it as an emotion, because urgency is emotionally driven though it needs some sort of intellectual justification in order to fully attract, convince, and push the buyer to say the magic words: “ok, where do I sign?”. If the buyer is not already interested in your product, urgency will simply drive him in the opposite direction. Now you might be thinking, ok then what do I do?

Rule # 1: it is important that you don’t push a client into purchasing, but rather push him out of his state of procrastination. Make them understand that the more they wait to act upon their pain, the more it will cost them in the long run, money and resource wise.

Rule # 2: Buyers are smart and well informed, they can easily smell manipulation from far away, therefore urgency should always be genuine and truthful. If you’re not honest with your clients, you will quickly lose their loyalty and respect.

Rule # 3: Remind customers why it is important for them to act at this specific time. Though it might not be urgent for them, they must understand that not doing anything can have negative and expensive consequences.

Rule # 4: Time is money. Add a time-related incentive to drive action; an offer that will expire in a couple of weeks, an early price that provides a discount for whoever buys before a certain date and so on.

Now you might think, “great, and now what? How do I put all of this into action?” This is all easier said than done, but there are some tricks sales reps use to speed up the cycle and sign the client. We’ve asked a few of them and this is what we’ve gathered:

- Call all the people involved in the buying and get their approval, then ultimately call the decision maker letting him know that he is the only one that has yet to sign, making everyone wait.

- Study your clients’ agenda by heart: comex, rush periods, budget dates, quarters, other planned projects, holidays etc. Doing so, you will always be one step ahead, knowing exactly what the buyer has planned.

- Use empathy, puppy eyes included. Ex. “ Please sign now, this would help me close my quarter…”

- Calculate an approximate cost of the wait for the buyer, telling him how much he is losing everyday if he doesn’t sign.

This one more of a gamble but it has been proved to work sometimes: - Call the decision maker to tell him you want to arrange another long meeting with everyone who is involved in the process, to fully discuss if there are any obstacles in the signing. “No I don’t have the time, I’ll sign right away” is the answer you’ll want to hear.

As with every sale, understanding the clients’ needs is essential and fundamental when creating urgency. Focus on gathering as much insight as possible, because the more specifics you can draw, the better you will be able to customize a proposal that creates urgency by putting a solution within easy reach.

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