The New 'Sense of Urgency': Creating Tension with Content

For as long as I’ve been in sales, one of the best ways to facilitate a prospects’ interest in your offerings has been to create a sense of urgency around a specific need. If you sell cloud security software, this might mean creating a concern about the risk of a data breach. If you sell phone systems, it might mean focusing on the real costs of poor call quality and reliability.

Whatever the case may be, urgency often translates into sales results.

This is particularly true as prospects are increasingly influenced by content. By writing great content that hits on your target market’s biggest needs and issues, you’ll almost always find it easier to grab prospects’ attention, make them aware of your expertise, and lead them into your sales pipeline. Simply put, great content (and similarly great promotion through effective nurturing, lead generation, and social media campaigns) is the fastest route creating a sense of urgency and achieving Recognition ROI.

Makes sense, right? Sure. And, in theory, it sounds easy enough. But you know grabbing prospects’ attention through content isn’t easy at all.

In fact, creating a sense of urgency with content is similar to creating urgency in cold calling. With content, just like a cold call, you have about 30 seconds to snag a prospect’s interest—whether it’s to read an email, click on a blog article, or retweet a social media post. If you fail to create a sense of urgency in that time frame, then you’ll likely lose the prospect’s interest.

So, how can you maximize that small window of opportunity? One way is to create tension through how—and what—you write. Here are three ways to do that:

Ultimately, your goal isn’t to be overly dramatic. It’s to open a prospect’s eyes to the importance of a particular issue they might not be considering, and to create tension around the risks of not addressing it. When you do that, your content will create a sense of urgency, prospects will feel compelled to respond, and your sales pipeline will grow.

Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert, author of the award-winning books, “The Sales Magnet” and “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the small and midmarket business (SMB) segment.