Compelling Event

Having a compelling event supercharges your sales campaign. It drives urgency at your prospects, accelerates your sales campaign and makes you close value deals without much delay.

What do we mean by a compelling event?

A compelling event is associated with business pain containing a date or deadline and consequence for the business and/or its stakeholders – if not reacted upon.

Why care about it?

You might be thinking “so what?”. We all closed deals without compelling events or at least for some we did not know about it. However, knowing the consequence of inactivity paired with a deadline allows you to align your campaign with the deadline. The consequence will drive the customers’ urgency almost pushing you to get the deal sealed and dusted. 

A sales person’s paradise!

I was able to close my first deal with a large multinational company at a list-price in just 48 hours including technical proof of concept, legal paperwork and vendor onboarding with a 0 % discount!

The reason was a huge penalty for failing to deliver on a deadline for an issue that my offering was able to fix immediately.

How to uncover Compelling events?

To uncover the compelling events, try to identify the pain and the potential trouble it causes to the business.

Whoever is familiar with the SPIN selling methodology can discover the implication of the problem paired with the needs and pay-off questions like. 

How does the pain impact your work, teams work, the business, your customers…?

What would fixing the problem mean to you, your team, company, business…?

What would be an ideal time-frame to solve/address?

What happens if you don’t fix the problem (in time)?

Click here to find more SPIN questions from great blog entry by highspot.com

If you are selling to 

Sales teams :

A yearly kick-off event or quartern ends, this drives urgency.

IT-Operations:

A renewal of a contract with a service provider or software solution.

The launch of a new platform or apps.

Planned transitions of on-premise solution into the cloud.

End of year budget remainders.

Planned business service to customers.

When you don’t have an obvious deadline, date or consequence that your prospect needs to act upon, then you need to create it.

No, I don’t mean special discounts at the end of the quarter. This has been used excessively in the past and will at best devalue your offering and will not help if your client does not have any urgency.

How to co-create a Compelling Event?

For co-creating a compelling event you can plot it with your ally at your prospect and understand what could be compelling for a stakeholder to take action.

Possible areas you could create a compelling event

Human resources: If you need resources to plan, implement your solution on both sides you could use the allocation of resources to create urgency.

Example: I have allocated an implementation team for you, however we have a lead time of x weeks, if you want to start implementing by January we need to confirm by ..

Budgets: Client budgets are often due to change. Check potential compelling events with your champion. In general early in the fiscal year, budgets are safer than in the second half of the year.

Potential price increases:  Planned increases or repackaging on your product after the quarter/year end.