5 Winning Tactics for Adding Urgency into the Art of Selling

Creating a sense of urgency drives sales. Prospects tend to say yes more quickly when they view something as important. Even if they don’t realize it, customers usually make buying decisions based on feeling and intuition. This means creating a sense of urgency can be used to take back control of the selling process. And here are five tactics that prove it.
1. Scarcity
A sense of scarcity can help drive sales in the same as water and sunlight help plants grow. In psychology, scarcity bias refers to the idea that people are highly motivated by the thought that they might lose out on something.
In a selling context, this means customers put more value on something and become more likely to buy when they think time or stock is running out. Whether you’re selling physical goods, digital assets, coaching sessions, or any other goods or services, scarcity taps into the fear of missing out.
Businesses can leverage this concept in several ways. One way is to intentionally limit what you produce or deliver to raise demand. A subtler method involves encouraging your sales reps to use time-related phrases in sales conversations; words such as “now,” “rapidly” and “close” encourage prospects to subconsciously think about time urgency.
2. Prospect pain
If you don’t understand your prospects’ pain points, it’s all but impossible to add urgency to a sale. The key is taking the time to understand what makes them nervous or what they want to change. To achieve this, you need sales agents that are happy to speak less and listen more.
This shouldn’t be about using fear tactics against your prospects. Instead, understanding personal pain points can help your agents sell something that will benefit people in the long run. For example, if your prospect fears they are currently overpaying for a service, explaining how you can save them money is likely to be looked upon favorably.
3. Confirmation bias
In psychological theory, confirmation bias is where people seek out information that supports their views and ignore evidence that doesn’t. It’s an error in logical reasoning that means people make decisions based on emotion rather than logic. This can help sales reps connect with prospects that are resistant to selling.
Digging deep to discover positive customer perceptions will help your business target niches in ways that speak to them directly. As such, making the effort to understand your prospects’ confirmation biases ensures agents can sell products or services more successfully.
When adding urgency into a sale using confirmation bias, every claim your agents make will need to be backed up by hard facts and research. This is because making untested claims that later prove false can have an adverse effect by ensuring prospects never convert into customers.
4. Social proof
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that makes people embrace the actions of people they like or trust. A survey conducted by Trustpilot a few years ago revealed that more than three quarters of customers look at reviews before buying online. For local business, the rate jumps to 92% of customers.
User generated content such as reviews, testimonials, case studies and social media mentions are great for creating examples of social proof. If you are lucky enough to have positive examples of each, do everything you can to promote them.
If your customers can see their peers have bought and enjoyed your product or service, you can appeal to their fear of not having what other people they like or respect have. Fear of missing out is a modern-day equivalent of “keeping up with the Joneses,” which makes social proof an effective tactic for adding urgency into selling.
5. Service first
At first thought, this might sound counter-intuitive. However, if you place creating urgency above your prospects’ needs, your efforts could backfire.
Remember, creating a sense of urgency doesn’t automatically mean you need to close the sale first time. If your agents encounter too many roadblocks during an initial call, don’t push too hard and arrange a callback. In between, send articles, news and updates to remind them how your product or service could make their lives better. Over time, this will help breed trust alongside urgency, which usually creates better customer retention rates.
NewVoiceMedia is a leading provider of global contact center and inside sales technology; they were recently named to the 2017 Forbes Cloud 100 list.


