Create a Compelling Event & Get Customers to Buy Now

• Customer-Driven Events – these are events driven by the customer’s own business activities and processes
• Manufactured Events – these are events that are created by the salesperson to create urgency and action

The most effective and convincing solution is to leverage customer-driven events where you possibly can. I want you to become an expert in spotting them, perhaps even doing research to uncover them if necessary. Examples of these events:

• Customer must have a project completed by a certain date.
• Leverage a major upcoming event like the holidays, product launch, start of the school. year, trade show or conference.
• Find an opportunity that the customer might miss out on if they don’t act.
• Use a legal deadline or upcoming audit.

However, when leveraging a customer-driven event is not at hand, it is time to get creative and manufacture one, for instance:

• Create an expiring discount at the end of the month or end of the quarter.
• Create a sale with a specific end date.
• In a services business, leverage the fact you will have a resource constraint if they do not act by a certain date.
• Use limited inventory or limited product available for sale when appropriate.
• Get multiple offers on a one-of-a-kind product, service or investment opportunity. Those offers can be used to motivate someone to act and bid up the price.

Especially important to note…if you say there is a deadline, there must be a deadline, otherwise your credibility, along with the power of the compelling event, are lost.

A great example of a company that excels at creating manufactured compelling events is Apple. They are amazing at creating urgency based on scarcity…for instance, only X number of iPhones, and people are lined up around the block in the middle of the night to score the newest version.

One compelling event I have used myself many times in my past eCommerce services business at MarketLive, is a resource constraint event. We would create a compelling event by letting customers know they needed to sign by X date because we could not guarantee we would have available resources if they delayed past a certain date (which, by the way, was true).

Finally, a great compelling event to use if you are looking for investors is the multiple offers event. Venture capitalists are notorious for only moving on a deal when other investors want to take the deal away from them. So, when you are out trying to raise money, do everything you can to secure more than one offer on your deal. When you go back to the VCs to let them know, watch how fast they move. Now, remember you must have multiple offers for this compelling event to work.