Creating a need to have in Sales
In the last post, we have discussed that effective sales propositions have two things in common. They score high on both importance and urgency for the customer. How to reach this position?
1. Creating Importance
If you want your proposition to become relevant and important, you have to know what is important for your customer. It might be of no surprise that companies have made this explicit by their strategy, and more specifically, their strategic projects and their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Most companies share their strategic projects and KPIs in their annual reports or other publications. Connecting your product or service to these projects and/or KPIs is the way to create importance. This may sound too obvious but most sales professionals do not spend (enough) time to discover this.
2. Create urgency
In most companies, time – and more specifically – attention is more scarce than money. Change without urgency will lead to long sales cycles.
Some companies try to create urgency inside out: offering financial incentives for faster decision making. But quick fixes like discounts and early warnings of price increases are ineffective if they are not addressing the real customer issues. Let me suggest 5 ways (or combinations) for increasing urgency:
3. Solve customers’ pain points
First, you have to identify the pain points of your customer. Examples are customer dissatisfaction, financial bleeders, loss of reputation, scarce capacity and/or high risks in critical processes. As a next step, you have to connect your offering to these pain points.
4. Highlight Opportunity costs
The biggest competitor for most tech propositions is inertia, e.g. leaving things unchanged. In B2B sales, opportunity costs serve as a powerful motivator by emphasizing that failing to act carries a cost of its own. It’s the price of inaction, a reminder that every day without a solution is a day of potential loss, missed opportunities, and unrealized gains.
5. Use Social Proof
Using social Proof can accelerate your sales process twofold. Either by providing the trust for making a decision or showing that competitors and peers are already onboarded. No one wants to be left behind.
6. Create Scarcity
Scarcity is one of the most effective ways to accelerate decision making. Options are to limit your offering by using a (temporarily) exclusivity. Or to offer a limited time window for decision making because of limited capacity of implementation support for your customer.
7. Validate Business Case
When you present data-driven insights that demonstrate the positive impact of your product, you’re essentially showing the prospect what they stand to gain. This creates a sense of urgency because they realize that every day without your solution translates to missed opportunities and/or potential cost savings. By quantifying the benefits, such as a 25% increase in efficiency (for example), you make the potential ROI more tangible and compelling. The prospect begins to see the financial implications of not taking action promptly.
So, if you’ve ever wondered why some sales teams consistently outperform others, the answer is simple: They know how to move the sale forward, even when prospects seem to be stalling. Accelerating sales is the key to unlocking revenue growth, and it all begins with understanding the power of importance and urgency.