Creating Sales Urgency

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Establishing urgency gives your customers a reason to act quickly. Their instinct is to take their time and think about the decision. But by throwing urgency into the mix, you’re eliminating the customer’s ability to think too hard or wait too long to buy.

Research from Hubspot finds that establishing urgency is the top challenge today’s salespeople face.

1. Establish scarcity
The more there is of an item, the less motivated we are to go out and get it. But if that item is scarce (or perceived as scarce), its value increases.

Think of the iPhone. How many people do you know who run out to get the newest iPhone on the day of its release? They stand in line for hours, wanting to be one of the first to have the new product, and knowing that eventually the store is going to run out of iPhones - at least until they get another shipment. But that won’t be for months.

That new model iPhone is perceived as scarce. There aren’t many of them, and time is running out to get one, so your purchase decision needs to be made quickly. The same idea can be applied to your products or services. Perhaps you only offer a limited number of products or you only open registration for your event for a limited time. With the window of opportunity much smaller, your prospects will be more likely to buy.

2. Focus on your customers’ needs
Establishing urgency doesn’t always have to be about scarcity, though. You can create a sense of urgency by understanding, from the customer's point of view, why they need the product now. This goes back to understanding your customers’ needs, which you need to know to sell anything to them. You need to get to the bottom of what makes your customers tick and what their pain points are. Then you can focus on how your products or services offer a solution.

The customer is always asking “What’s in it for me?” When they hear how your product or service aligns with their needs, they are persuaded to act. To the customer, their problems are urgent, and if you offer a way to solve them, they’ll be more likely to trust you and buy from you.

3. Show the consequences
As humans, we tend to avoid negative consequences no matter what. This "loss aversion" means we’ll do whatever it takes to avoid dangerous situations, losing the things we love or any other negative consequence. In fact, the desire not to lose is often greater than the desire to gain.
In sales, focusing on the consequences of not buying can have a great effect on a prospect’s decision to buy. You may choose to show how much money the prospect could lose if they don’t invest in your product or service, or how flawed their current processes are and how inefficient their business is. Whatever it is, focusing on the negative instead of the positive will have a psychological influence on your prospects, which will lead them to a purchase decision faster.

1. Offer Something People Want
Urgency only works if your product or service is something that people actively want to begin with.
If someone isn’t interested in your product, all the limited-time offers in the world won’t make them want it.
Urgency amplifies already-present feelings of wanting something – it doesn’t create them.

2. Set a Deadline
If potential customers know there’s no rush to buy your product or service, they’ll probably put off buying it to weigh the pros and cons – and maybe forget about it forever.
Create an incentive to take action by running your sales and offers for a limited time. One effective way to create time pressure is to use a countdown timer on your site.
Show viewers how many days, hours, and minutes they have to make a decision.
Check out how Amazon uses the power of a limited-time offer.
On many of their product pages, the ecommerce giant highlights how soon you’ll have to order something to get it by a specific date.

Amazon tells customers how quickly they have to order an item to get quick delivery, right down to the minute.

3. Use FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
The scarcer a product or service is, the more people want it.
So if you can highlight how scarce your product or service is – or at least create the illusion that it’s about to run out – you can drive people to click the Buy button before somebody else does.
For ecommerce businesses, one common way to do this is to announce that you only have a certain number of an item left in stock.
If you sell a service, you can make the same principle work for you by, for example, only taking on a certain number of clients every month.
Once again, Amazon knows how to put the pressure on when their stock of an item is running low:
Amazon creates a sense of scarcity by telling customers when their stock is running low.

Another way to make your product or service seem scarce is to create a sense of competition.
Booking.com does this well by showing viewers how many other people are looking at a certain hotel and how many rooms are left.
Booking.com ramps up their sense of urgency by making visitors feel as if someone else could book the room they want at any moment.

4. Use the Right Words
Strong ad copy and a compelling call to action can make all the difference between whether your visitors make a purchase or click away.
Time-related words are especially useful if you want to create a sense of urgency.
Try incorporating some of these words into your copy:
Now
Hurry
One time only
Last chance
Before it’s gone
Clearance
Today only
Limited time
Instant
Don’t miss out
5. Offer a Bonus Incentive
In addition to your main offer, give people an extra incentive to act fast.
For instance, offer free shipping for a limited time, or give your first 10 buyers a free surprise gift.
This technique works well when layered with other limited-time or FOMO tactics.

6. Write Powerful Subject Lines for Your Emails
In your marketing emails, use your subject line to establish a sense of scarcity or urgency.
Time-related words, like the ones listed above, or vivid action verbs get people’s attention best.
The more clearly you get your message across, the more likely subscribers will be to open the email (and then visit your site).

7. Use Numbers
Numbers are a great way to get people’s attention and make an offer more attractive
You can use numbers to push a sense of scarcity – for instance, “Just 3 more in stock!”
Or you can boost your social proof with numbers by telling customers how many other people have bought your product or service.

8. Use Warm Colors
Colors and psychology are deeply linked.
Research from HubSpot supports the idea that using warm colors – red, yellow, and orange – for your CTA buttons can create a sense of urgency that drives action.
a red CTA button performed 21 percent better than a green one when everything else on the page was identical. 
Cool colors like blue and green, on the other hand, aren’t as effective at getting visitors to click.
Whatever color you decide to use for your buttons, make sure they stand out from the rest of your page.

9. Customize Your Offers
Make your urgency-driven offers even more compelling by personalizing them.
For instance, track the pages or items that visitors view on your site, and offer them discounts that are relevant to their interests.
Or, if you want to recapture a lead who abandoned their shopping cart, send an email reminding them that they have only a limited time to return and buy the items they were considering.

10. Keep the Pressure On
Take a look at your sales funnel and see where you lose the most leads.
Then figure out how you can increase the urgency of your marketing at these critical points.
For instance, if people tend to leave your site after putting a few things in their cart, you could add a countdown timer to your shopping cart page to remind people that your sale ends soon.

Whether or not you participate, we all know that Black Friday creates a painful sense of urgency in consumers that those of us in the non-retail world battle with constantly. And while thousands urgently indulge in Cyber Monday, we cringe every time a prospect responds with, "Can you get back to me in a month?"
It's very likely that your prospect forgets your name by the time you reach out a month later. At HubSpot, lacking urgency is the number one objection we face in the sales funnel. It's happened to me on numerous occasions -- which is why I'd like to share one of the approaches we've tested and have statistically proven to succeed for our buyer context.

In my experience, sense of urgency is best addressed right after the goal setting phase of the discovery conversation. Once goals are established, explore why it's critical for the prospect to address the pain now. Understand the negative consequences of inaction and the positive implications of moving now.

Role-Play Exercise for Creating Urgency
I'd like to illustrate our approach with an example roleplay. Let's start off right where we have established a quantifiable goal with the prospect.

Rep: “I see, John. So you're telling me that you're adding three salespeople in Q4 of this year. In order for these salespeople to be successful, you need to increase your marketing qualified leads by 20%. Is this correct?”

Prospect: “Exactly.”

Rep: “Excellent John. Thanks for clarifying. We have helped hundreds of companies with that goal. Help me understand one thing though John ... let’s flash forward to six months from now and you're generating the same lead flow as today. Is that really that bad?”

[Probing for negative consequences.]

Prospect: “Actually that would be really bad.”

Rep: “Why?”

Prospect: “Well, we'll have to spread the current marketing qualified lead flow across all of our salespeople and nobody will hit their number.”

Rep: “I see. So the sales reps make a little less money. The company still does well.”

[Probing into negative consequences at the company level.]

Prospect: “No. The company loses too. We increase costs but do not increase revenue. Furthermore, sales will get frustrated. Attrition will likely occur. We could lose our best people.”

Rep: “Okay. That is pretty serious. Can’t the salespeople simply cold call to supplement the marketing qualified lead flow?”

Prospect: “We have tried that, both with the salespeople and with junior appointment-setters. It didn't work. We need to find an effective source of demand generation for these new salespeople.”

Rep: “I see, John. On the flip-side, if you are successful in increasing MQL flow by 20%, what happens then?”
[Probing for positive implications.]

Prospect: “Well, in that case, the sales team should hit its numbers and we'll hit our revenue growth targets for next year.”

Rep: “Great John. Thanks for clarifying. This information will help me as I assemble my recommended strategy for you. It almost sounds like we should have kicked this off last month!”

[Normally here I'd explicitly restate everything to ensure we have it right, but you get the point.]

Prospect: “Totally.”

Rep: “Well, let’s get to work. I can assemble the strategy tonight. Can you move things around tomorrow morning so we can review it?”

Prospect: “Let’s do it.”

Explicitly walking the prospect through this dialogue is important. Now we both understand why this project simply cannot wait. I didn't trick him. I didn't put words in his mouth. I truthfully just understood his priorities and how I can help.

If the sense of urgency doesn't exist, then you may need to challenge the prospect on what other initiatives are more important. You may even need to switch over to a provocative sales approach if you think the prospect is focused on the wrong priorities.

While this process helps me invest my time appropriately, more importantly, it helps me avoid wasting my prospect’s time. We all know that “nice-to-have” initiatives never happen. So, why waste my prospect’s time on an initiative that is not critical to them?

Bonus for Sales Coaches: Customized Coaching Plan
If you're a sales manager and you have a salesperson struggling with a sense of urgency development, schedule a weekly meeting to review all the new opportunities created that week. For each opportunity, ask the rep the same three questions:
Why does the prospect need to buy today?
What are the negative implications if they don't?
What are the positive implications if they do?

If you want to be even more disciplined, you can add these custom fields to each opportunity record in your CRM. For example, HubSpot CRM lets you customize properties and take notes within a contact record, all while automatically logging emails and calls.

Or, you could ask the salesperson to email the answers to these questions to you whenever they move an opportunity record forward. Repetitive cadences are your friend.

3 Ways to Rekindle Urgency in Prospects
By incorporating the strategies above into your approach to sales, you should be able to move more deals across the finish line. But it never hurts to have a few more tactics in your arsenal when a prospect hits you with, "Not now," does it?

1. Illustrate your impact
You should have already done this extensively, but if your prospect isn't seeing the urgency of implementing your product/service now, it should be repeated.
Instead of stats and client reviews, tell your prospect a story of success. Make sure it's high impact, riddled with solved pain points, and, of course, true.
Data points will do little to sway your prospect at this point, but a well-told story can do wonders.

2. Help them see what they will miss out on.
Most of us are motivating by avoiding pain and achieving pleasure, so it's helpful to use this when inspiring urgency in your prospects. So, after demonstrating the ROI and impact of your product/service, talk about the cost of doing nothing (i.e., "We're able to lower new hire onboarding time by up to 50%. That turns new hires into high-impact players in as little as two months. Can you afford to miss out on that immediate revenue boost?")

3. Lower the hurdle
Less investment, risk, scope, paperwork, administration, and effort will always make your offer more attractive. Keep deal momentum up and you'll find the urgency is naturally present. To do this, be timely and immediate with your follow up, always present timelines and next steps after meetings, and push deadlines by days instead of weeks.

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