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Create Urgency With a Little Anxiety
By Julie Thomas
Don’t let end-of-the-year sales quotas cause you to panic. Use that anxiety to create a sense of urgency in your prospects and close those deals before the end of the year. Anxiety can be used appropriately to generate action in a sales cycle. Anxiety is positive. Panic is not. Webster’s Dictionary defines anxiety as “A force or impulse that impels someone to act.” So how do we create anxiety if that is the force that may compel action? It is important to remember that our prospects and customers are motivated for their own reasons, not ours. We must uncover the individual motivations that each of our prospects has in order to create motion and closure. As we go through our sales cycle with each prospect, we are working to uncover what their motivation is so that we can tap into it. We do this by asking specific questions about how the solution or service we are proposing to provide will impact them. What happens if you are stonewalled or denied information through this questioning process? Do you walk away? I suggest that you ask a different type of question. You want to surface conditions that your prospect may not have considered and open up a conversation that they may not have been willing to enter. We do this by asking Anxiety Questions. As we evaluate and forecast our opportunities for the balance of this year and beyond, we constantly test our prospect qualification process. Historical data demonstrates that an average of 30 percent of the deals forecasted by sales professionals will end in no decision. Are those in your pipeline and forecast? To keep an opportunity from becoming the one out of three that end in no decision, you must objectively evaluate your sales process. Have you uncovered the business and personal issues that must be resolved by your prospect? Has the prospect confirmed that you have differentiated your offering? Is your prospect the person with authority to act? Have you built trust and rapport? Are you working on a mutual, written plan to do business together with a realistic timeline for closure? Once you have evaluated your process and what you know to be true with your prospect, you should ask yourself: Will this person act in the timeframe we have agreed? If you think that the answer is “no”, or an open answer, you may want to consider creating urgency with your prospect. You can create a sense of urgency by leading the prospect to momentarily experience the consequences of not having your product or service. Ultimately, your prospect’s urgency can and will shorten your sales cycles and have a direct impact on your success. An effective tool to leverage when attempting to create urgency is the Anxiety Question. It opens up live dialogue, and can be valuable in getting your prospect to act. Well-placed anxiety questions can move a client from a status quo or even-keel position. Always avoid telling your prospects the consequences they will experience; rather, ask a question in a way that leads them to recognize the negative consequences of their inaction on their own. In the two seconds it takes for them to consider your anxiety question, they will likely consider their own personal motivation for taking action. Inevitably, some nagging concern will rise to the surface. The personal driver to your solution may be different for each prospect. Specific key words or phrases will help to understand the anxiety, because if you don’t understand exactly what their anxiety is, how can you address it? An anxiety question can look like this:
By reshaping the prospect’s perspective of what they need and want, they will focus on an urgent future with you. Begin with the end in mind – in other words, what you believe your products or services can solve for the prospect is the way to building a successful future. |
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