The great Zig Ziglar said every sale has five basic obstacles. No need, no money, no hurry, no desire, and no trust. When I was a dedicated closer I pasted that quote on the wall in front of me and stared at it on every call. Like a Buddhist disciple.
Over time I turned it into my own negotiation acronym. DEBUT. Decision maker, Entrusted, Bank, Urgency, and Timing. Five parts. One framework that has taken close rates from two percent to over seventy percent in a matter of months.
This is part two. Urgency.
If you missed part one on Timing, start there. https://www.outsold.com.au/debut-part-1-time/ It will change how you think about deals that are not moving and why sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is agree to do nothing.
What Urgency Actually Is
In part one we learned that time is nothing in a sale until it is everything. Urgency is different. Urgency is when timing is not the blocker but the deal still is not moving. The buyer is not waiting on a contract renewal, a budget cycle or some set date. They just have not moved. Something is holding them in place and your job is to find out what that is and remove it.
A friend once said to me that inertia is a powerful force. He was right. Most stalled deals are not dead. They are just sitting in inertia. The prospect has not said no. They have not said yes. They are static, thinking. And static is the natural state of most people when a decision requires effort, money, or change.
Your job as a salesperson is to remove obstacles from the sale. All sales follow a largely linear path from cold to hot. It is why experienced salespeople say that sales is the same in any company. Just different process and product knowledge. If one of your reps cannot spend two minutes in a CRM, pick up another rep’s deal, and move it forward, you do not have a process. You have a collection of individual relationships held together by memory and staples.
What Urgency Is Not
Go and search sales urgency on the internet and you will find a wall of washed out, cringe-worthy advice. Hurry, limited time offer, only three spots left, fear of missing out, create scarcity. While there is a bit of truth somewhere in all of that, the modern buyer hears it and their resistance goes up immediately. They have been sold to their entire lives. They know the moves. Overuse these pushy sales tactics and you devalue your brand, destroy the trust you have built, and turn a warm prospect into someone who will never take your call again.
This is not that. This is the real The art of urgency in sales is subtlety.
The Framework That Actually Works
The basic framework for creating genuine urgency in a sales conversation is four steps and they have to happen in order.
Create the need. This is what modern sales training calls identifying the problem. You cannot create urgency around a problem the buyer does not yet recognise as real. Your first job is to surface the need clearly and specifically. Not your version of their need. Their version of their need, in their language, with their consequences attached.
Raise the need. This is where most salespeople stop too early. Identifying the problem is not enough. You need to paint a picture of the future. What does their world look like with this problem solved? What does it look like in twelve months if it is not? The need has to feel real and felt, not just acknowledged. You are not dramatising. You are helping them connect the dots between where they are and where they want to be.
Create the urgency. This is a loose frame of now rather than later. Not a countdown timer. Not a fake deadline. A genuine reason why acting sooner serves them better than acting later. What is the cost of delay? What opportunity closes if they wait another quarter? What gets harder or more expensive the longer they leave it? This has to be real. If you cannot articulate a genuine reason why now is better than later, go back to raising the need until you can.
Raise the urgency. This is your salt. Used correctly it flavours the whole dish. Used too much and you cannot get it out. A little fear of missing out, a genuine competitive pressure, a real scarcity or deadline, these are legitimate and effective when they exist at the right time. When they are manufactured and the buyer can feel it, you have done more damage than good. The rule is simple. If it is real, use it. If it is not, do not pretend it is.
Empathetic Questioning Is the Engine
None of the above framework works without the right questioning underneath it. The questions that create urgency are not manipulative. They are genuinely exploratory. What happens to the business if this problem is still here in six months? What has it cost you so far? Who else is affected by this? What would it mean for you personally if this was resolved by the end of the quarter?
These are empathetic questions. They show you understand the buyer’s world well enough to ask about the things that actually matter to them. And they do the work of raising urgency more effectively than any manufactured deadline ever could, because the buyer is raising it themselves. They are doing the maths on the cost of inaction. You are just asking the questions that make the maths visible.
That is how you make the prospect think it was their idea. Not by telling them it is urgent. By asking the questions that make them feel it.
The Lost Art of Raising Urgency
Here is the uncomfortable truth about urgency in modern sales. Most salespeople are too weak to use it.
Not weak in a personal sense. Weak in the sense that the culture of modern sales has become so obsessed with being liked, being consultative, being inoffensive, that the salt never makes it onto the dish at all. The result is bland. Floppy. A salesperson who has done great discovery, built genuine rapport, identified the problem clearly, and then at the critical moment asks something like “so what are your thoughts on moving forward?” and accepts a vague non-answer as an outcome.
Jordan Belfort, (the Wolf of Wall street,) whatever you think of him, was extraordinary at two things simultaneously. Building trust fast and raising urgency hard. In a single phone call sale you have to do both, quickly, in sequence. Trust first so the urgency does not feel like pressure. Then urgency, real urgency, raised with confidence and without apology.
In a long form complex sale it is the opposite. Leave urgency completely out of the early and middle stages. Do your discovery. Raise the need. Build the relationship. Urgency applied too early in a long sale kills it as surely as no urgency at all. Save it for the end when the groundwork is done and the buyer is ready to feel it.
Creating Discomfort and Pattern Interrupts
Most salespeople spend the entire conversation trying to make the buyer comfortable. That is a mistake. Comfort is the enemy of success and of decision making, it is the very inertia your job is to create momentum in. A comfortable buyer is a buyer who says let me think about it, sends you a polite email next week, and quietly goes with someone else.
Discomfort moves people.
I once was summoned alone to Google. I sat down with a dozen of Google’s top APAC sales people. Before my ass hit the chair, I looked around the table and said “you guys are fucking idiots.” Then I sat there in the silence. Every head in the room snapped up. Nobody was checking their phone. Nobody was thinking about lunch. Every single person in that room was completely present and wanted to know what came next. That is a pattern interrupt. You break the expected script so violently that the other person has no pre-loaded response. Their defences are down. You have their full attention. Now you and I can actually have a conversation.
In closing, discomfort works differently. It is a calculated challenge designed to surface the real objection hiding behind the polite one.
“You can’t afford this, can you.”
Not a question. A statement. Delivered with confidence and a pause after it. The buyer who genuinely cannot afford it will tell you. The buyer who can afford it but is stalling for another reason will often tell you that reason right there on the spot because their ego will not let the comment stand unchallenged. Either way you now know what you are actually dealing with.
“Are you going to let your wife decide whether you can have a BBQ?”
Uncomfortable? Absolutely. Effective on the right buyer in the right moment? Without question. This kind of challenge works because it reframes the hesitation as something the buyer should be embarrassed by rather than comfortable sitting in. Used badly it ends the relationship. Used well on the right person it snaps them out of the inertia and into a decision.
The key to both techniques is reading the room well enough to know when to use them. They are not for every buyer or every stage of the sale. Remember a dash of salt only. They are for the moment when the conversation has gone polite and circular and nothing is moving and you need to cut through the noise and find out what is actually going on.
The best salespeople have always known that a little controlled aggression at the right moment is worth more than a hundred polished follow-up emails. The buyers who respect you for it become your best clients. The ones who do not were probably never going to buy anyway.
You Need a Little Mongrel
Too many reps these days send a proposal and sit back hoping for the best. That is not sales. That is mail delivery.
You need a little mongrel in you. A little used car salesman. Not the dishonest version, the fearless version. The one who is not scared to ask the hard question, take control of the conversation, and move the sale along. Wear it like a badge of honour because your entire job, the only job, is to move the buyer along the buyer’s journey. If you are not doing that you are a sales ghost. You have the title sales, you wear a suit like a salesperson, you go on meetings like a salesperson, you put notes in a CRM like a salesperson. But you ain’t a salesperson if you wont ask the questions most reps are too scared to ask.
“What can I do to get your business today?”
“Is there any other reason you do not want to proceed?”
“Based on everything you have told me, not moving forward on this is costing you approximately X per year.”
“Look mate, if you don’t buy this someone else will.”
“On a scale from one to ten, with one being no chance and ten being take my money, where are you at?” Then shut up and wait. They say seven. You say “how do I get you to a ten?”
These questions are why people say they do not like salespeople. They are also the vary fundamental reason why deals close. The rep who never asks them is leaving your money on the table because they don’t have the fortitude to look like a salesperson.
Have the beast inside. The pushy used car salesperson. That is your job. Control it. Use it at the right moment. But for the love of god use it.
Part three of the DEBUT series covers Bank. Finding out if your prospect has the money and how to get it. Read it at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
3 Comments
Comments are closed.