KEY POINTS:
The 14th of February. The 25th of December.
You know these dates well, because inevitably these dates create a sense of urgency. And if you've got an event that has a looming date, urgency is not hard to create.
So a workshop will have an earlybird or cut-off date. A software release will have queues of people lining up to be the first ones to buy.
But what if you don't have an event? Do you just roll over and play Rover? Well, you could, but how about creating an event out of nothing at all?
Here are three ways to create urgency, plus a few examples:
The impending price increase.
Extra bonus.
Creating an "insurance" situation.
First, the impending price increase. So, you don't think your clients would be happy with a price increase? Well, I didn't suggest you increase the prices. I suggested you tell your customers that the price is going up. Now they've been given fair warning.
This kicks in the urgency factor, and the impending price increase will get many, if not most of your customers reasonably motivated to buy products or services from you.
Example: I go for a therapeutic massage every month. And the prices of each session were going up by just $5. If I wanted to avoid the price increase, I'd have to buy five sessions to get the existing price.
And I did. The pain of having to pay more in the future causes us to fill up our tank with petrol, to buy reduced-priced clothing and do all sorts of such silly things.
This takes us to method 2: bonuses.
Let's suppose you have some bonuses. These bonuses are valuable to the customer but will either be sold in future or not be available to the customer. Again, the temptation of getting "more for less" is irresistible.
The more yummy the bonus, the greater the chances that your customer will feel urgency, thus creating an "event" of sorts with a deadline.
Example: Buy consulting services before (fill in the date) and you get three bonus consulting sessions on (fill in the topic) worth $ (fill in the amount).
And, of course, it doesn't stop with the bonus. Because there's a third way to create urgency where none exists:
"insurance" situations.
No matter what you sell, you're solving a problem. But often, there's a problem bigger than the one you're offering to solve. So if you're selling consulting on "how to write white papers" for instance, the client may not feel any urgency, although it's more than established that white papers do increase sales.
But bring up the topic of the "impending recession" and suddenly urgency slips in through the front door.
The client is aware of the big problem and wants insurance against that problem - even although the event may or may not occur.
Example: You get insurance against medical problems, house and contents, life and all types of wacky insurance. You'll probably never see a storm, no one will break in, and you may even live forever, but you take the insurance anyway.
Customers take "insurance" against predictable situations, and the change in the state of the economy, or any such change, are more than likely to create urgency.
The upshot of all this? Urgency doesn't need to be driven by pre-defined events. You can create it.
Sean D'Souza is chief executive of Psychotactics and is an international author and trainer.
www.psychotactics.com
