If You Start with Urgency, Everything Else in The Sales Process Gets Easier

At a startup, the more prospects you speak with and the more you try to close, the quicker you learn what markets need and what customers desire. And whether you have what it takes to build a great company.
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In other words, the faster you learn, the quicker you get to a rinse and repeat sales model that drives predictable revenue. And an accelerant to this learning is urgency. An urgent problem moves the prospect to act. Without it, selling gets harder - meetings do not happen, deals drag out, or they do not get done at all.

In a startup, anything that speeds up the sales cycle speeds up learning and helps a company zero in sooner on their ideal customer, helps them understand how buyers make decisions and how to attract them, and what the company’s real product superpower is.

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So, if a young firm initially targets markets and prospects where there isn’t an urgent problem to be solved, their ability to learn will be slowed at the outset. And initiating and bringing deals to their conclusion will be challenging at best. For this reason, every startup’s first market should be one where the prospect has a need that requires urgent resolution. If it does not exist naturally, the startup must learn how to manufacture it or pivot to a market segment that does.

The Buyer’s Journey Quickens with Urgency

The buyer’s journey quickens when trying to solve a problem that needs urgent resolution. And AIDA, a concept made famous by a professor of applied psychology at Stanford University circa 1920, helps us understand why. AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. And it is a simple framework for thinking about the stages buyers pass through when making a simple business-to-business purchase.

Urgency transforms the buyer’s journey from a simple stroll to a high-speed race to find an antidote to their problem. And this increase in clock speed transforms any ensuing engagement a sales team may have with such a prospect.

From a sales perspective, organizations worldwide spend lots of time and money trying to create attention, interest, desire, and action within their target markets to generate sales. But, startups don’t have a lot of time and money and can’t market and sell to AIDA like established firms. So, they should look to urgency to help short-circuit this process.

From a sales perspective, by targeting buyers with an urgent need, you do not have to invest heavily in creating attention because they are already attentive and looking for a solution. You just have to be somewhere where they can find you. Prospects trying to solve an urgent problem are already active; they are already in motion. They already care and are interested in solving their problem and ready to make changes and act to make these changes. They need to change, and they need to act now. Therefore, the last part of this, action, is where you engage this buyer.

By addressing an urgent problem, a startup compresses its sales cycle down to two things:

1. Make prospects aware that you have a solution to their urgent problem,
2. Help them see how your solution is the one that will solve their urgent problem.  

If you are a startup or young company, a faster sales cycle means speedy growth. In turn, growth makes everything easier - fundraising, learning, hiring, and brand building. 

Remember, make sure urgency is attached to the problem you are solving for your customer and everything else in the sales process gets easier. 

Click here, to learn more about the Exponential Boot Camp for Startup Sales, 

​Written by Tim Bates

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