Close More Sales Deals With Urgency and Patience

Written by on January 25, 2019 / Behavior

Each day I help people with tough decisions. I know you hear a great deal from me about sales, because that is the focus of my communications plan, but the bulk of my work is in counseling business leaders on strategy.  The come to me for fresh eyes and clear thinking.  While I often preach the need for urgency when working on growing your revenue, the opposite is true when it comes to sales closing strategy.

How do you know when to follow your natural sense of urgency and when to exercise patience?

In this video I describe the relationship between urgency and patience.

Close More Deals with Urgency and Patience

If you want to close more sales deals, you need to apply each of these two factors – urgency and patience – when appropriate.

Here is a transcript of the video. Please note this will read like spoken word because it was transcribed directly from the video.

Two Factors that Close All Deals

I’m Dave Lorenzo here from the video studio where I shoot most of my videos, and you’re getting kind of a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what we’re doing, but that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about today.

I’ve got a couple of things that seem to be working in opposition to one another that really work together. And, this has come up a few times in the last couple of days, so I wanted to make a quick video to address it.

I talk to my clients all the time about two particular driving forces that close all deals. These two forces are really essential. You have to understand how they work, and you have to leverage them and use them to your advantage, so I want to make sure I shoot this quick video and cover them with you. We can get into more detail about them as our discussions continue.

The two driving forces that close all deals are urgency and patience. Again, I told you they seem like they’re in opposition, but they’re not. They’re actually like two sides of a coin.

You have to have urgency when it comes to your sales activity and your habits. If you are doing the three things we talk about all the time, you’re out there being visible and generating new interest in you, generating new interest in the value you provide, that, you have to have urgency for that. If you are deepening your credibility and your relationships with your existing clients and your existing evangelists, you have to have urgency for that. In differentiating yourself through demonstrating your expertise and creating a lot of content like this, writing a lot, giving a lot of speeches, creating that essential content that makes you an expert, that makes you sought after, that you have to have urgency for.

So, visibility, credibility, differentiation, you have to have a lot of urgency and you have to always be doing that. Every day you need to reach out to at least one evangelist and write them a note. Reach out to, a handwritten note, reach out to at least one evangelist with a phone call. Reach out to at least one evangelist with an email. Touching them, letting them know you’re interested in them. Each day you should be reaching out to one client with a handwritten note. You should be reaching out to one client with a phone call to check in and see how they’re doing. You should be reaching out to one client with an email to check in and see what’s going on and see how you can help them.

Each day you should be looking to connect with another group or association to which you can speak or offering to speak to a group or association or, at minimum, doing research on a group or association that you can get in front of and do a speaking engagement for. Or if you’re not into speaking, writing for. Each day you should write something. You should write a blog post for your website, write an article to post on your website. Or write an article to send to a publication. Or write something that you’re going to send out to everyone in your database. You should have urgency for those things.

Where patience comes in is in looking toward the results for all these processes because what happens is we, I’m going through a period of time right now where I’ve produced 80, between 80 and 90 different videos and pieces of content in the last 30 days. I’ve put it on my website. I’ve put it on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. I’ve received two calls for this 80 or 90 pieces of content that I’ve put out in the last 90 days. I feel anxiety about that, and I shouldn’t. I should be patient because I know the process works. You’re going to send out email every month. You’re going to send it out weekly.

If you’re following my system to the letter, you’re going send out email every week, and months will pass by, three, four, five, maybe six months before you land a deal as a result of the email that’s going out. You may get feedback from people telling you that they’re excited to receive your email or they love reading your email or they love seeing the videos that you produce or they love receiving the content. That’s great, and that will keep you going in the short-term, but that six-month period where you’re sending out the email and you haven’t received a deal yet, you’re going to go nuts, you’re going to be pulling your hair out, and you have to have patience.

Patience is easier when you’ve seen some initial results, but in the first period where you’re doing all this work and there’s all this activity, and the activity is correct because you know you’re following the system and you’ve seen other people follow the system and get results, that first six-month period where you’re not getting results, it can be frustrating. You’ve got to take a deep breath and just be patient because the system works and the time will come when you don’t just get one deal. You don’t just get two deals. But you get three, four, or five deals.

And it works on the opposite end, too. There was a period of time where we were going through, a lot of different things were happening, and I was very, very busy. It was the summertime. It was three years ago. I fell off my regular schedule of communicating with people, of doing the program that I had been such a big advocate of. That time period I was doing other things. This is actually five years ago now, time flies. We moved, I put my son in a new baseball program that I was heavily emotionally invested in, our kids were going to new schools, so I was concentrating on that. Basically, life happened. I invested these three months in my life, and I did some stuff for my business. I had client work that I was doing and I was doing a little bit of traveling for speaking, but I wasn’t investing the time in being proactive for the things that would happen in the future. I didn’t have urgency about that. My urgency was focused on my day-to-day life and not in my business. Work came in and it was great.

During that time period when I was doing other things, all I had to do was answer the phone, go through my email inbox, and work was coming in, and the money was continuing to flow in. It was the six months that followed, because I hadn’t been moving in the direction of doing everything to lead to the business, that lag caught up with me six months later. And again, it was like starting over. I had to get on the phone again. I had to write my handwritten notes again. I had to write my letters again. I had to write my emails again. I had to send out all the emails each week over and over and over again. Had to get back into the habit of doing it, and then I had to wait again the six months for the flood of business to come in. It doesn’t come in like a flood. It comes in like a trickle that leads to a flood eventually. But the backend, the six months when I wasn’t, the three months when I wasn’t doing the work, the work was still coming in, and it still sustained me, but I didn’t keep the pipeline full.

The main point I want to make to you is you have to have urgency for activity. You have to have urgency in doing the work that we talk about all the time. But then, you have to have patience in waiting to receive the results. Nothing happens overnight. This is not the kind of program where you do something today and business will come in tomorrow.

When you first start, if you call everyone in your database and you ask them how they’re doing and you see what problems you can solve for them, that will result in business. You’ll get a nice jolt of business. You’ll get two or three deals. If you’re a professional, you’ll get two or three new matters right away. If you’re in sales, you’ll get two or three deals depending on how many people you call. For every hundred people you call you get two or three people who say, yeah, Dave, I remember you, we worked together great. I forgot all about what you did. Let’s work together again right now.

For every hundred people you’ll get two or three people. Or maybe in your industry it’ll be five people or 10 people. You’ll get between two and 10% of the people who will connect with you and will invest money in your right away. But then, that dies off and you have to put in the work to make sure that the trickle starts coming in, the trickle of better business, the trickle of deep, lifetime value relationship business comes in. Urgency for the activity, and then, patience for the results. Urgency for the activity, patience for the results.

Last point I’ll make is if you try and force something to happen, it will damage you.

And what do I mean by that?

Let’s say somebody calls off your email list and it’s been three weeks since you closed the deal, somebody calls off of your email list and they say to you, hey, I’m interested in that thing you talked about, the audit of my business. I want you to tell me a little bit more about it. You tell him all about it and you’re excited, they can hear the excitement in your voice, and then they say, okay, well, what does it look like? Send me a proposal.

And you say to them, well, you know, typically it costs about seven to $10,000. In your case I’m going to give you three different options. One option is going to be 7,000. The other option’s gonna be 9,000. The third option’s going to be 10,000. And the person says, well, that’s great. I definitely want to move forward. I need to talk to my wife and discuss which option we’re going to choose. And this is on a Friday.

The person goes off to talk to their wife, Monday rolls around, you don’t hear from them. Tuesday rolls around and you don’t hear from them. Wednesday you get on the phone and you call him. Thursday comes around and you call him again. Friday comes around and you call him again.

You scared him off, that’s it, it’s over. Maybe life happened and they had a couple things they were doing and they didn’t get a chance to discuss it. Maybe they decided they were going to put it off a week and then have the discussion a week later. Maybe they’re just not good at communicating with you and you’re taking it as a no deal, and what you’ve done is you’ve taken the urgency and you’ve misplaced it. You’ve been urgent, you’ve applied urgency when you should be applying patience.

So, in that case that I mentioned, you don’t hear from him Monday, you don’t hear from him Tuesday, you don’t hear from him Wednesday. A week goes by and you don’t hear from him, after the week, you ping them with an email and you say, subject line how would you like to proceed, and you say, dear Joe, I know we were on the phone a couple weeks ago. You mentioned that you were going to discuss with your wife which of the three options was right for you. I haven’t heard from you in a week, I’m assuming that life just got in the way. Please let me know how you’d like to proceed. Doesn’t seem desperate at all. You send that email after a week.

Let two more weeks go by, and if they haven’t responded to you yet, you reach out and you make a phone call and you say, hey, Joe, I’m just checkin’ in. I know life gets in the way sometimes. Let me know if you want to pick up the conversation where we left off.

And then, finally, after another two weeks goes by, so it’s now seven weeks since you’ve spoken to this person, email the subject line, I guess it’s over. Dear Joe, I guess you’ve decided that this wasn’t the right time for us to work together. I understand that life gets in the way sometimes. I’m always here for you if you need me. Warm regards, Dave. You send the email and you move on.

Patience in that sense is gonna pay off because Joe will come back to you years later whenever he decides the moment is right. Now, I’m not saying that that’s the appropriate approach for every business.

I’m not saying that that’s the appropriate approach for every sales person. What I am saying is if you have urgency in going out and establishing new relationships, and you have urgency in deepening existing relationships, and you have urgency in delivering value to your clients, you don’t have to worry about having conversations or sending email like the ones I just sent because you’ll be able to be patient on the end ’cause you’ll have enough business coming in in the long-term. So, urgency and patience, two sides of the same coin.

Two critical, two key factors, two key elements in how you need to think in order to move forward and close more deals. I’m Dave Lorenzo and until I see you again, I hope you do this and sell more.