WTF In Sales - Add Urgency To Unstick Buyers

WTF - Where's the friction? Fear = friction. Remove the fear, remove the friction.

Author

Tim Kilroy
05 Mar • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

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In Today's Episode

Uncertainty=Fear & Fear=Friction

I dunno about you, but I watched part of the state of the union (I had to shut it off - sorry…not a fan of the current administration). Between the news of changing political alliances, tariffs going into effect/not going into effect, DOGE chaos & unfettered partisan bitterness from both sides of the political aisle, I felt like there is a lot of uncertainty ahead.

Is the economy doing well? Who knows? Are we going to head into a recession? Who knows? Are there air traffic controllers anywhere? Who knows? Is social security really full of fraud and abuse? Who knows?

These sorts of questions might seem far removed from your day to day…but they are having an impact on your potential clients.

Businesses are funny - they tend to spend money when they are confident in the future. When they are feeling uncertain, they want to hold on to their money because things just might get worse.

It’s really just part of being human.

Our brains evolved in a world of resource scarcity. So, holding on to resources (eg, money) is a natural thing to do when you aren’t sure what’s going to happen next. In this context, some potential buyers might be feeling like your sales process (no matter how good) is trying to take away a resource.

That means you’ve got to add a little oomph to your discussions when you see your potential clients feeling the uncertainty that triggers an evolutionary fear that adds friction to your sales process.

Now that we know WHERE the friction is, how do we break through it?

We have to start thinking about forces that are really powerful - greed and the desire to not miss out. So we need to find ways to adjust our offer (or the context of our offer) to help potential clients break through their fear.

Bust Through Prospect Fear

Here is the situation - you have a prospect and it’s time for the close…and you can see that they are going to give you a noncommittal, “Well, we’ve got to think about it…” Try to add some urgency with these approaches:

  • Discount: This is my least favorite tactic. But it does work. If you need to close deals fast, offering a discount can create urgency. Use this sparingly.

  • Foot InThe Door Offer: If your prospect can’t make the big decision, give them something valuable for a small price. If you are a web design company and the buyer can’t pull the trigger on a $20K site, maybe you offer them a landing page for $1K. That is easier to say yes and you get the benefit of working directly with your client so they are going to yes to the big project if you wow them…

  • The Trial Offer: If you are doing a monthly service (eg, paid ads, etc.) you can give them a short trial - say 30 days - on different terms than you usually offer - perhaps it’s 50% upfront and 50% if they are happy with the 1st month. This is shifting risk on to you for sure, but reduced risk is reduced fear.

  • The Cost of Inaction: This is the best and most effective way to break through fear. Fear creates inaction because your brain likes to know what’s gonna happen next. If nothing changes, there is no risk, right? Wrong! You need to show your prospect the cost in lost benefit by not moving ahead. If you serve architects, and you have some comps, you should be able to tell your prospect that our average client who looks like you has X benefit over Y timeframe. Then apply that math to their circumstances and present the results not as an opportunity, but rather as a LOSS. You are LOSING “this much” by staying stuck. Frame it as a pain that you can help them avoid. This works because you are able to leverage the same mechanism that is keeping them stuck - fear of loss. Human beings are mostly hardwired to be downside averse - that’s why they might choose to do nothing rather than say yes to your offer. But is you can help them see that the benefit you bring will be a loss as well - and the amplitude of that loss is greater than the fees you are requesting - can turn into a real desire to avoid the bigger loss by moving ahead. The fear of the bigger loss (your benefit) can overwhelm the fear of the smaller loss (your fees).

Quick Shoutout To PodPitch

You might have seen that PodPitch was last week’s sponsor. I did a call with them last week and signed up (really - so you are going to hear me blabbing lots of places soon). They make finding and pitching podcasts (for you to guest on) really, really easy. They have some nifty AI search features so you find the right podcasts and the right audiences to share your value. They are offering my subscribers $100 off the 1st month. 

Why should you be on podcasts?

  • Show off your expertise

  • Get in front of someone else’s audience

  • Easily generate authority content for social sharing (just ask you host for the recording and use something like Descript or Opus to generate lovely authority building clips)

  • Because you never call your mom and she wants to hear your voice

Check them out - it is an easy technology solve for an otherwise manual process.

Believe It Or Not, You Are Probably Your Agency’s Biggest Bottleneck

 Entrepreneurs are amazing. They can do so many things well. Sales, marketing, management, service design, recruiting…the list is long. Often, the entrepreneur is way more efficient at things than other folks on their team, so they hold on to business functions too long. Sales is a business function that entrepreneurs have a hard time letting go of…

That’s crazy though - sales is a critical business function that is directly tied to revenue growth in your agency. Founders are busy people - so they are doing prospecting sales work part time (OMFG!). Many founders hold on to sales for, well, reasons… For the most part, the reason they hold on to sales is because they are good at it, its easy for them and they are afraid that someone else can’t close all the business they can. That’s because they have an advantage - founder magic. A founder can 100% close deals that no one else can. They can also f*ck up a deal like no one else, too.

The best agency sales processes mix magic & structure. If you find the “magic” parts of the founder’s pitch (passion, experience, ability to see opportunities, charisma) and mix it with a structured process (like account mapping, lead scoring, timely followups, asking for the next meeting, agreeing on needs before blurting out pricing, etc.) you come up with a truly robust sales machine.

If any of that resonated with you, I’d invite you to check out Fire Yourself From Sales. It’s a new program that I’ve launched. It isn’t new stuff - it’s just that this is the 1st time we’ve offered it as a stand alone thing. It is pricey - but it comes with an ROI guarantee. (And I have serious discounts and an enhanced ROI guarantee for the 1st two agencies to sign up.) Check it out.

Quick Bites

Google is changing things up in search: Via Search Engine Journal, paid search in 2025 is looking more automated, more AI enhanced and more intent driven. Further YouTube ads are looking like they are going to be the star of the show.

YouTube is kicking a**: Via Stacked Marketer, YouTube is the #1 video channel for GenZ and Gen Alpha. YoY spend is up a bunch - it accounts for almost 14% of Google revenues. If you aren’t thinking about offering video ads, WTF?

OK, it’s all video: Via Digiday, Amazon is making video ads on Prime Video easier and more accountable by using AI (seriously, though, who isn’t) in a new platform called Compete TV. Worth paying attention to, IMHO.

Want to Get Insight Into Your Agency Performance? Check out the WTF Agency Assessment. It is a totally free assessment that will help you understand if your profitability is too high or low, if your lead gen sucks, if you should be worried about churn, if you are spending too much time in account management…all kinds of stuff. It’s free, it’s comprehensive and it will tell you WTF is going on.

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