How can you create urgency in messaging to convince prospective buyers to buy now?

Great question. Ultimately I think this depends on your target audience, product, and buying cycle. If you sell enterprise software that has a long sales cycle then you can apply copy tweaks to incentivize behavior but it may not be realistic to convince a prospect to buy now for a large informed purchase that has many decision-makers. That said, a lot of this urgency is at the intersection of design and messaging. The design of specific pages (like a product page) need to be compelling and highlight how you want the visitor to convert using key CTAs. At HubSpot, we’ve put a CTA at the top of our product pages, and then have pricing information within the page that leads to a conversion CTA as well. I’d focus on making sure you have the right conversion opportunities on the page — like CTAs, and Chat — then match the messaging to what a buyer will expect there (like “Get Started” for a free/low-cost tool as an example. The best advice I can give here is do some testing. Change H1/H2 copy, test different CTA copy and or live chat messaging and use that data to inform what convinces buyers and shortens your sales cycle.

If it is a new product or feature, we use promotions to get customers to adopt asap. The other tactic we look to weave throughout our messaging is the promise of what their workloads could look like if they adopted this new system, tool, feature, etc. If we make it about them, about what they could have or achieve - as opposed to just what their larger business can have - we have found it resonates better and creates a greater sense of urgency. 

You HAVE to answer "why now" with every piece of messaging you create. This is a question I ask to draw this out with my team: why didn't our prospects need this last year and this year they must have it?

It's always helpful to look at macro trends and themes in the broader world + economy. Generative AI is a great example from today's market. So many vendors are just saying Gen AI without addressing the "why?" Sure it's cool, but why do I need it? Are your prospects dealing with budget cuts and Gen AI helps them deliver the equivalent of one new hire? Does an LLM do something specific for the industry you're addressing?

The biggest competitor to your product or service is almost always "do nothing". You have to create urgency or someone else will.

Hi all -

Ever feel like your customer messaging lacks a sense of urgency? Then this post is for you!

https://medium.com/unusual-ventures/why-buy-now-the-most-urgent-question-your-startup-needs-to-answer-1492e1bc2ea0

Sharing the first of three posts covering a new enterprise storytelling framework for product marketers looking for a simple but effective way to create their company's narrative. This framework is built from personal experience leading product marketing at Okta, Citrix, Microsoft, and most recently, messaging for several dozen companies within the Unusual Ventures portfolio, a new VC firm started by John Vrionis (Lightspeed) and Jyoti Bonsal (AppDynamics and Harness).

The framework aligns to the ‘three why’s’, short for Why Buy Anything, Why Buy Now, and Why Buy You. Seasoned sales professionals use these three questions to facilitate their consultative sales conversations, so the goal of this new framework is to align our messaging to answering these 3 questions completely.

This first post covers Why Buy Now - the most urgent question that companies need to answer. Having wrapped up 2019 working with dozens of startups in our portfolio, we’ve found that ‘finding your Why Now’ is the question most often left unaddressed by entrepreneurs - and product marketers? - today. We may be great at problem/solution messaging, but it’s the urgency factor that’s often left out.

In January, we’ll complete the framework with posts on Why Buy Anything and Why Buy You and then the full framework with guidance for customer meeting presentations, website messaging, etc. For those interested, I have the full framework in a presentation format that I’d be happy to share with product marketing teams who’d like to learn more. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]. I'm in the Bay Area so always happy to do a lunch n learn with your team or video call if outside SF.

Please let me know what you think - would welcome the feedback and your own experience creating urgency in customer conversations!

Urgency is relative. You have to deeply understand your target audience(s) and the market conditions under which they're operating. Urgency isn't manufactured, it's reflected in what you understand to be the current condition of your target audience and their environment; it shouldn't be a reflection of your company's urgency for more revenue. Let your audiences see themselves in the stories that you're telling and engender interest based on the fact that they see more of themselves and less of you in what you're putting forth. Nike did this very well during the recent US Women's Soccer tournament. I believe that from a B2B perspective, Salesforce does this very well in how they leverage client stories in many of their marketing programs.