The question you need to ask when selling to businesses and enterprises is how you can move the sale forward when a prospect is stalling.
Accelerating the sale is the best thing that you can do to help make more money.
Why are sales failing today? Here’s what’s holding back your sales team from making a sale:
Not enough time is the single biggest reason why salespeople get stuck in a deal.
You need to understand your prospects, spend enough time with them, and that they will buy from you.
You need to understand what your customers want.
There are essentially seven ways of creating urgency in SaaS sales.
1. Limited alpha
If your product is new, or you release a major new plan, you can invite them to a limited alpha.
You could limit this to 10 seats.
Tell your prospect:
- “This looks like a great fit, but we are only going to let 10 companies try it out.
- We currently have around 40 companies interested in participating.
- “We’re now trying to identify which ones will be the best candidates for this alpha, so that we’ll be able to support and turn them into massive success stories.
- “You’ll have to make a decision within ____ (the next x days/weeks) because we’ll launch the alpha on ____
- “It’s first-come, first-serve. So whenever one company that we believe to be a great fit decides to go ahead, it gives them the next limited
- We only have four more places left, let’s make sure we don’t lose this opportunity.
Here’s the information and support that will help you make a decision as quickly as possible.
By limiting access to your product, you create scarcity, which makes it harder for you to make a decision and increase the perceived value of your offer.
2. Upcoming price increases
As your product matures and adds more value, you’ll probably have to raise your price.
There are a lot of SaaS companies that have done this, maybe once a year or sometimes even multiple times a year.
It’s a great incentive for them to make a quick buying decision, so they can lock in at the current (lower) pricing.
When Amazon Prime prices went up, they gave new subscribers the opportunity to beat the price increase by buying within one week of subscribing.
3. Make them an offer they can’t refuse
Run a special promotion, or give the prospect a special deal. There are four kinds of incentives SaaS businesses can offer:
“If you buy this week, you’ll get a 10% discount, so you’ll save x00 dollars per seat that you buy now”
Special features or higher tier plans “If you buy in June, you’re going to get the business version of our product for the basic price plan.” The difference is that you increase the value rather than lower the price.
If you buy in June, you’ll get two free seats for every seat that you buy.
If you buy 3 seats you will actually get 6 seats. “Buy 1, get 1 free” works for SAAS business too :
“If you buy this week, you’re going to get our Advanced Customer Acquisition training package for free. Whatever it is, that’s what it is. If you buy their pro plan, you’ll get the $2,000 “Inbound Success Training” package, which is mandatory. Lowering the price of this package, or even giving it away for free, is a great incentive to push a stalling prospect towards a quick purchasing decision.
4. Countdown timers
Countdown timers have been used (and overused) in both marketing and sales for many years already, but they can still be effective when used well. In his blog post How Creating a Sense of Urgency Helped Me Increase Sales 332% Marcus Taylor gave a breakdown of a well-executed use of countdown timers for an online course.
I managed to increase my conversion rate from 2.5% to 10.8%.
While there was a range of factors that influenced this increase, the single largest factor was increasing the amount of scarcity and urgency.
The countdown timer was just one element responsible for this increase, but in the specific test Marcus ran, he saw a 147% increase in conversions.
5. Use questions to focus the prospect on the cost of delaying a buying decision
If a prospect has engaged with you, they’ve probably reached a point where they have a problem they’re hoping you’ll be able to help them solve or see some potential for your solution.
In the sales process, it’s often that the focus on the prospect’s problem gets lost while an overly excited sales rep keeps talking about the features of the product, customer case studies, and so on.
What you want to do instead is make sure that the prospect is vividly aware of their unsolved problem, all the bad that could come out of solving it, and the benefits of solving it.
You can do this by asking questions:
Let’s take a step back and think about what problem you’re trying to solve.
When would be the best time to solve this problem?
What’s the hidden cost of not solving this problem now?
How does this problem affect the revenue [or whatever the metric they care most about is] of your organization?
How many people in your organization are affected by this problem? And who?
How would solving this problem affect you personally?
What would be the best way of demonstrating to your boss that this is a problem worth solving? And if it was solved, what would be the best metric to measure the success of the solution?
What’s the most frustrating aspect of this problem?
6. Leverage seasonality
Use seasonal trends to create a sense of urgency.
Let’s say it’s September and your prospect will typically see a big increase in sales leading up to the holidays.
You can make a point that if they buy now and start getting the most out of their Amazon business right away, they’ll be able to take advantage of that higher demand later on.
Your solution needs to make their processes more efficient, or you’ll never have any time for the things that matter.
If your solution helps generate more value, you can make the case that it would be a shame to miss out on the potential of the next holiday season.
7. Understand their buying process
It’s the most important, and yet most often overlooked part of the sales process.
Virtual close. In a nutshell, it’s about asking the question “What are the steps we need to go through together for you to become a customer?
These are the key 7 ways to create urgency in B2B sales and overall buyer’s journey to make some informed decisions with respect to time. B2B sales require attention to detail and it’s time sensitive therefore it’s really important to make urgency in your buying process to take the lead move!