How To Create Urgency In Sales
If you don’t know how to create urgency in sales conversations, it will be difficult to motivate your prospect to buy from you when it comes time to ask for the sale.
As you proceed through each part of your sales pitch with a prospect, you should increase the level of urgency by gradually adding formality, directness, and excitement to your speech patterns and tone of voice.
It’s like going on a first date. You don’t want to come on too strong, but you also don’t want to seem bored. When you make it onto the dance floor, then it’s time to make some moves.
Here are 5 steps to increase urgency throughout your sales pitch:
- Introductions should be calm and casual.
- Formality and directness increase during qualifying.
- Get excited when you start your pitch.
- Make sure to match your prospect’s tone.
- Pause after you ask for the sale.
1. Introductions should be calm and casual.
At the very beginning of the call, your highest priority should be building rapport.
If you can make the prospect feel comfortable talking with you at the beginning, then it will be easier to handle objections and get answers to tough questions later on.
For the first 3-5 minutes of the pitch, forget your agenda. If the prospect wants to go on a 5-minute tangent about their fishing trip, that’s great.
It’s worth your time to listen patiently. It’s a weird thing, but people like you more the more they talk to you (even if you say nothing).
Better yet, find a common interest with your prospect and strive to have a genuinely pleasant conversation, as if you were talking to a friend.
Click here to read more about building rapport.
2. Formality and directness increase during qualifying.
As you start to qualify, you need to stick to your agenda a little more closely.
For example, if you ask your prospect about their budget and they brush off the question and try to go on another tangent, now you need to reel them back in.
You can do so by asking direct and clear follow-up questions.
It shouldn’t feel like an interrogation for the prospect, but you need to “dig in” if they give you an answer that’s unclear.
If you were aiming to be friendly with your prospect during introductions, now you should be transitioning to a more professional conversation.
3. When you start to pitch, it’s time to turn on the excitement.
If you’re on the phone, you might stand up from your chair in the office and start to use hand motions.
It sounds silly (because your prospect can’t see you if you’re on the phone), but there is a noticeable difference in the passion and conviction in the tone of your voice when you’re standing.
If you’re at an in-person meeting or on video, your body language is even more important. Gesturing with your arms and hands is a proven way to show excitement with your body.
Raising the volume of your voice and the tempo of your speech at key moments in the pitch are two other ways to show excitement.
The most important part of your pitch to show excitement with your body language and the tone of your voice is when you’re speaking about the value/benefits of your product/service.
4. But make sure you don’t “steamroll” your prospect.
You can’t keep increasing urgency and raising your voice if your prospect isn’t along for the ride.
If you’re getting more excited and your prospect is staying monotone and flat—that’s a bad sign.
Make sure to match your prospect’s tone.
To match their tone, start by listening.
Similar to a musician who can hear a note and tell you what key on the piano is being played, a salesperson needs to be able to discern their prospect’s emotion just from hearing the tone of their voice.
And then make sure you’re matching your prospect’s tone with your own voice.
Click here to read more about tone-matching.
5. Pause after you ask for the sale.
This all builds up to asking for the sale.
You should be able to hear a pin drop for the first few seconds after you’ve asked for the sale.
Click here to read more about the power of the pause in sales.
If the prospect viewed you as a friend during rapport building, they should now see you as a professional who has the power to help them solve their problems.
After you’ve asked for the sale, you shouldn’t let the prospect go off on any more tangents.
You don’t want to let them blow wind into the sails of their own objections. Your answers are short and stern, almost like a parent talking to a child (without coming off as patronizing).
Are you ready to handle objections?
Okay, now you know how to create urgency in sales pitches.
But are you ready to handle objections?
Click here to learn how to handle objections.