Creating Urgency

"Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value." --Jim Rohn

Let me repeat that because it's a building block of persuasion: without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value. That's an incredibly powerful statement and is absolutely spot on. In persuasion, once you've created trust and a feeling of rapport with your prospects and clients, and once you've removed all doubt about you and your product and service, what then? Are you going to make the sale if there's no sense of urgency on the part of your prospective client? Are you going to get ahead? No, you won't.

Some sales people and commercials create a false sense of urgency-- you know the ones, 'act now, only available to the first 100 callers'. . . We all know as a result of our advanced B.S. detectors that this is simply not true. We know that there are more than 100 Thighmasters or Magic Bullets available for purchase and even if you were caller 100,000, you would still have one in the mail to you before the call was over.

Now if it's true, if you only have 12 seats left in your seminar or 12 condominiums left to sell in a particular building, then by all means, use it. Then it's fantastic. There is actual scarcity involved in that case, but for example if you're selling insurance or if you're in real estate, what are you going to say, 'I've only got 12 houses left' or 'There are only 12 more insurance policies available'? I seriously doubt anyone would bite at that.

It depends on your industry as to how many places are left. If you're selling seminars you could genuinely only have a room that seats 50 or 100 or 10. A good friend of mine ran a seminar a couple of years ago, he sold it for $25,000 or $30,000 a head. They sold out. They had 10 spaces, 10 people, that's it. They put an arbitrary limit on the amount of space available because they did not want to give it to very many people. It was a very, very high end, hush, hush marketing strategy and they did not want the world to know about it because it would blow it, but they also wanted to get paid heavily for being able to give that skill that they had proven results with, so they limited it to ten.

How many of you have been on e-mail lists and you see subject lines that after a while they just look like all the other marketing subject lines? They're like, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, the best thing since sliced banana bread, the best thing since sliced cream cheese banana bread. It's like they're always one upping. It's the best this or that, or the most powerful this or that. I'm guilty of some of that myself, thought I try my best not to. When people do this they are trying to use urgency, they're trying to develop urgency.

We have to create urgency because without it, there's no movement. In other words, they have to believe that their needs are going to be met, that there's some compelling reason to do it now and that's called 'the offer' in sales or in marketing. You've got to come up, what's the offer that would move people that connects to their dreams and values and that moves them off of center.