COMMENTS
I agree that successful salespeople create their own sense of urgency, but I disagree with your perspective. Urgency is event triggered, not date triggered. Your focus on End of year business is not old school, it is Caveman Style.
Business men like you have "trained" your customers to wait for those end of year discounts. Top sales people know that if they have an event trigger - ie, they have uncovered the true sense of urgency - they can wait thorugh the Dec negotiations and not give their profits away.
What does this mean to companies that need to make their end of year numbers? Choose carefully on those deals you "choose" to discount in order to make your number, sign non-disclosures for those customers who receive more than a 10% discount and do not allow desperate sales people to do any discounting (they probably can't close the business anyway).
I like to reserve discounting for only the best on-going customers and I insist on getting something for every point I give over 10%. IOW - if I give 15% away, I want 5 referrals, or 5 reference calls, or 5 site visits. It has to be a give-and - take situation.
Becky,
Thanks for your thoughts and perspective. If you read some of the other posts on urgency, you'll see that I believe urgency is neither event nor date driven. It should be a state of being - an ever present sense of urgency. The post that you commented on just happened to be written right after New Year's Day in January 2007 and dealt specifically with the lack of urgency in getting business closed that should have been closed before they went on vacation.
Dave -
I was talking about the customer's sense of urgency - not the salesperson's. We attempt create "urgency" in our customer's buying cylce thorugh discounting. More often than not, the customer still does not buy and they use that price to start the negotiations in future quarters.
If a good sales person understands the "compelling event" in a buying cycle, they can avoid end of quarter discounting and patiently build their value proposition until the customer really "needs" to buy, avoiding the deep discounts that salespeople have trained them to ask for.
Becky,
I just want to be clear for my readers. It's lousy salespeople that use discounting to create urgency. I don't believe in that!
Let's go back to my original point about getting business closed before the vacation. I'm referring to closable business, not simply any opportunities in the pipeline. If a discount is required to get somebody closed, the real, compelling reasons for them to buy have not yet been discovered by the salesperson.
As far as "patiently building a value proposition until the customer needs to buy", when the salesperson identifies the prospects' compelling reasons to buy, the urgency is created right there, as well as the value proposition - the value is in how the solution is positioned to address those compelling reasons.
It would help my readers if you identified yourself. You write with authority, as if you see yourself as a sales expert. If you are, you should let the world know. If your comments simply reflect your opinions, you should let the world know that too. If your experiences and opinions have been applied in mutliple industries, that would help to validate what you say. In this blog we work really hard to make the points applicable to all industries and not just one or two.