Two Ways to Add Urgency to Your Sales Process

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,410 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 3 minutes to read.

Today, I’m going to show you how to add urgency to your sales process.

Buyers are contacting you because they have a problem they need solved. But unless you add urgency to your selling process, they will have to reason to “act now” and buy from you. Instead, they drag their feet and blow up your capacity projections.

Buyers taking forever to actually buy can be very frustrating.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t add urgency to our sales process because it feels gimmicky.

Here are 2 ways we add urgency at our firm:

Guarantee Start Dates

If starting quickly is important to a buyer, building urgency around start dates will improve your close rates.

Stop ending sales calls with “okay great, I’ll send you a proposal and just let me know if you have any questions.”

Instead, end it with a dialogue like so:

You: Okay so if I can get this proposal over to you by tomorrow morning, when do you think you’ll have time to review it?

Prospect: Probably by Friday afternoon.

You: Great - I’ll follow-up Friday afternoon if I don’t hear back from you. And just wanted to be clear that I have you slotted for a December start… does that work for you?

Prospect: Yes that would be great!

You: Okay - as long as you sign by Friday afternoon, I’ll make sure to hold that start date for you. But I have to be honest, I have 4 more sales calls this week and I anticipate some of them will sign. So if you can’t sign by Friday, you’ll be looking at a January start date.

Prospect: I’ll make sure to sign by Friday.

Disclose How Many “Spots” You Have Left

Providing a countdown ticker/timer of sorts adds urgency.

We did this one year when we were trying to lock clients in for tax preparation. We sent out weekly emails in December and January showing how many spots we had left for that upcoming tax season.

Pro tip: DON’T DO THIS.

It was gimmicky and our clients roasted us with well-deserved negative feedback.

We now do this in a more professional manner. Each year in November and December we invite clients to submit their current year tax information to receive a quote for the upcoming tax season. We are a fixed fee, upfront pricing firm, so this allows us to get a jumpstart on scoping and capacity planning.

To encourage clients to get moving, we tell them that we limit the total tax prep projects we take on (which is true).

While we don’t give them a specific project number, and don’t have a countdown ticker, we do tell them that our total project capacity includes current clients BUT we expect we will be totally full by end of January… so let’s get locked in now to avoid awkward conversations later.

In this way, we are “softly” adding urgency to the process by setting expectations: if you wait until late January to sign on, we might not be able to work with you.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Whenever you're ready, here's how I can help you.

→ Work with me 1:1 to grow your firm (now accepting waitlist coaching applications)

See you again next week.

Cheers,

Brandon

If you're enjoying this newsletter, please share it with your connections and you'll get rewards:

• 5 referrals = shout out in the next newsletter issue

• 10 referrals = shout out on Twitter

• 25 referrals = 1-1 Zoom meeting with me

You can easily share by clicking the button below.