Creating Urgency is Impossible

A grossly overused saying in sales is this notion of “creating urgency”.

Once and for all, let’s put this to rest.

Sales folks: You can’t create urgency. Period. End of story.

You can accelerate deals, for sure. But outright creating urgency for your prospects is a farce. But it begs the question — why?

When sales reps and their managers talk about driving urgency with their opportunities, they’re often talking about bringing a close date closer to the here and now or leapfrogging steps in the sales cycle with what often amount to “tricks”. In doing so, they extend discounts and incentives, reasons for acting now as opposed to waiting.

Now, in certain instances it feels like it works. A deal that was supposed to close at the end of the month instead closes two weeks earlier, a next quarter or end-of-year opportunity closes today, etc. But as we spoke about in a previous post, if the deal was truly solid, all you’re doing is hurting yourself — sacrificing deal sizes and putting you and the broader sales organization at a disadvantage as opposed to playing from a position of strength.

There are other downsides as well. We see these tactics lead to:

• Increased Churn

• Decreased LTV

• Devalued Solutions

What all of these speak to is that by trying to create urgency, you’re actually just selling for the wrong reasons.

Uncovering Urgency

Especially for companies with recurring revenue models, the exciting stuff happens when you can not only acquire new customers at scale, but also when you retain them. In this regard, sales is the tip of the spear. There are so many positive things that happen when you simply sell the right way.

And one of the core tenets of selling the right way means we throw out the idea of creating urgency, and instead simply uncover it. You see, creating urgency means projecting our priorities onto the prospective client:

“Our quota is $x, and we’re going to push incentives that get us there.”

Uncovering urgency, on the other hand, puts the prospect’s priorities at the center of how we sell. Flipping this equation turns the sales cycle from a self-fulfilling process into one that seeks to solve problems instead. And when you solve problems — real, meaningful problems — you are no longer a vendor, but instead a critical player as to how they get business done.

Vendors have to sell on price.
Partners sell on value.

There’s a difference.

Less Telling, More Asking

In order to effectively uncover urgency, you first have to throw away your assumptions. Align your communication structure with prospect’s in a way that does less telling and more asking. The only way to uncover urgency is to ask great questions.

Start with a comprehensive understanding of their goals and challenges. Goals and challenges worth achieving/solving for are timebound. If they don’t have a specific point in time in which they have to be completed by, then they aren’t meaningful. Think of a project versus a strategic imperative. Strategic imperatives have to get done. Projects can have moving goalposts.

When you’re able to map those strategically important initiatives to a point in time that your solution solves for — BOOM! You’ve uncovered urgency.

Need Help?

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We’re standing by with the knowledge and wherewithal to help you go-to-market the right way.