How to Create Urgency in a Sales Conversation, Without Sleaze
Rachael Howourth 
Top tips for how to build and scale your online coaching business with ease, not sleaze!
Sleazy Scares!
One of the questions that my community ask me a lot, is “how can I close more sales calls without being pushy?”
And when you ask, I love to deliver you a high-impact answer.
So, I’m here to share some tips with you on how to drive the urgency in your sales calls without increasing the pressure unnecessarily.
You’d be forgiven for wanting to pull out the out-of-date scarcity tactics to get those sales over the line quicker, but I can assure you pressuring your potential clients into buying then and there often leaves a bitter taste.
I’d class the following examples as ‘sleazy’:
- Forcing a potential client to buy on the discovery call. Talking about your offer and saying that it only stands during that call, they have to buy it now or not at all is sleazy.
- Not giving them time to think about it.
- Telling them that they shouldn’t discuss it with a partner or friend and not affording them the time to consider.
- And anything that goes under the banner of ‘fear selling’. “You do realise if you don’t buy today then this [insert implication] will happen?”
You do not want to spend time and effort on the Discovery Call (not to mention the time/effort you’ve already gone to, to get them on the Disco call) and have it become confrontational.
Create relationships of understanding, trust and good communication.
You don’t want to have them thinking you see them as a walking wallet. They are a person with needs, wants and objectives and our goal is to help them to achieve them.
So, my top tips for creating a sense of subtle urgency are:
1 - Urgency vs Importance
Ask your ‘client to be’ to give you an indication of how urgent it is to achieve this ‘goal’?
How important is it that they achieve this goal?
Ask them to weigh up which is more important, is it urgency or importance or both?
Get a deadline - ‘what is the date that you are aiming for this goal to be achieved by?’
This will get them opening up and help you to understand how easily you can get them there.
2 - Visualisation
Ask your client to visualise what life might be like when they’ve achieved their goal. Ask them to paint you a picture with words of what they are visualising.
-How it looks
-How it feels
-How it sounds
Once you know they’ve visualised and described it, they’re then in a much better place to think about whether they might want to invest in it.
When the visualisation exercise comes to an end you can say “now how do you feel?”
“How excited do you feel to get started on this?”
“When shall we begin?”
They’ll be in a place of excitement and reassurance that you now understand where they’re going and you’ve agreed that you can take them there, and now they’re ready to buy.
3. Expectation
Ask them “if we were already working together what would expect of me from the word ‘go’?” Then you can hear in their words (the most important words) what the work you’ll be doing together will be like. As they describe it to you it starts to become real in their mind. It starts to become a reality that you could start working together so easily.
⚠️ Creating urgency can go wrong. ⚠️
It can sometimes cause some friction, or you can end up with a potential client walking away all together.
Pressuring them into buying just doesn’t sit right with me. It’s better to maintain that integrity and authenticity and have them 'buy' when the time is right for them (which could be months or even years down the line) and have them willingly on board.
No bull in a china shop here thank you 😜
There’s nothing wrong with asking in what circumstances would they be happy to go ahead?
By this point you will have hopefully built up a trust element in the relationship and you’ll be able to invite them to share their fears or concerns.
Be empathetic and inviting of them telling you the truth about why they’re not happy to move forward at this stage. Hopefully you’ll be able to appease any of their concerns and you’ll still be in with a chance of them going ahead.
Finding yourself up against sales objections??
Wanna book 9 (or more!) calls in the next 3 weeks??? I've created my proven 9-step blueprint for results-driven coaches and online service providers who want a fast-track to results and who are willing to take powerful and committed action. Is that you?
P.S it’s happened to me before where someone has said ‘no’ on the sales call and an hour later they’ve rung back to say “I’ve changed my mind, I want to do it.” Curiosity and FOMO can get the better of people.