Ep #266: MVP: Creating Urgency to Buy in Your Business

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey lovies! We’re going to talk about creating urgency to buy. But first, I want to shout-out my client Jamie. She just posted in 2K for 2K.

“Hey everyone, I’ve been following Stacey for almost a year. I joined the 2K for 2K yesterday at 5:30pm and I more than doubled my money back by 10:30am the next day. My most major breakthrough was learning that I haven’t been believing in my potential clients. So I sacrificed some sleep and worked really hard into the night, and I got up early and worked some more in the modules, and them bam. I had a consult and signed a client, and I wasn’t even surprised because I believed so hard that it would happen.”

Jamie, congratulations. I’m so excited for you. And listen, I wanted to read this specific celebration from our 2K for 2K because I think it’s such a great example of what’s possible. You really can watch the consult modules in a day, have a consult, and sign a client. That can happen. It’s totally possible. And I think for any coach, for you listening right now to this podcast, if you’re not nailing your consults, it’s worth the $2000 investment to get in there and figure out what you’re doing wrong.

So I just had to say this on my little soapbox today. If you’re not in 2K for 2K and you are not booking the consults that you want to book and you’re not signing the clients you want to sign, something is missing and that something 100% is in one of the modules in 2K for 2K.

Alright, let’s dive in. We’re going to talk about creating urgency to buy. Here are two thoughts I want you to take away from this podcast before we even dive in. Two possibilities I want you to think about as you listen today to this podcast.

So number one is you don’t need urgency to sell. What if that were true? And number two, the best urgency is selling people on the real possibility of their dreams. The more they believe it, the more urgency they will feel to sign up with you, and you are in charge of that. You are in charge of that in your selling.

So if you’re in 2K, I teach you the step of the sales process, bridging the gap. The better you get at that step, the more you will sell. But for everybody, the simplest way for me to explain this is you can create the space for belief through explaining their problems so clearly that they understand exactly why they haven’t gotten results in the past and then you explain your solution so simply that they feel confident that results will come from the simple math of just following what you say.

So that’s the two things that you can be responsible for. Explaining their problem and explaining your solution and making it so simple for them that if they just follow the math, they will get results. That will create more urgency and better urgency than anything else ever, and you can do this in your marketing and on your sales calls.

So there is a possibility, and I know many of you don’t want to sell because you think selling is lying and you don’t want to lie, but there is a possibility that you can never lie in your sales. And I know that I’m kind of saying that like, it might sound obvious but I do think many of you think you have to do that, lying in your selling, and what I call fake urgency, and you have to do that in your marketing and in your sales, and you have to bump up your – you have to make it seem like you’re more successful than you are, you have to make it seem like your clients are getting better results, or you have to make it seem like you’re working with clients when you’re not, and that feels so off to you and doesn’t resonate with you, you think that’s marketing and selling.

And then you’re like, I don’t want to do that so that just doesn’t resonate with me, and then you don’t even think, you don’t even want to learn sales and marketing because you think that that’s what it is. But you can create only the type of urgency that feels good to you without ever creating false energy, without ever using false urgency. You can love sales and marketing, every second of it, and it can have nothing to do with false advertising and feeling out of integrity.

You don’t have to do any of that. It’s the best news ever. So let’s talk about that for a minute. Let’s talk about the types of false urgency that people create that make you feel off about sales and marketing and many of you think you have to do. And for me, I think there are two types of “false urgency.”

There’s false urgency as in you’re lying, you’re saying something that isn’t actually true, or it’s overly exaggerated and overly used and kind of hammered. The urgency is hammered and both of those I don’t think are necessary.

So let me give you some examples. Limited spots for consults. This is how this comes up for most of my clients. So I’ll see this all over Facebook. I’ll see my 2K for 2K clients post about this. They’ll say hey, I have five spots for consults open this month. That’s what they’ll advertise. There are only five spots. I’m opening five spots for consults. The language is always different, but the idea is trying to sell consults by the limited number of them.

Or trying to sell coaching by the limited number of coaching spots, especially when they’re not limited. It comes up both ways. You see people who talk about their limited number of coaching spots when there aren’t limited numbers, or there are limited numbers but every single marketing post is about the limited numbers of coaching spots and it’s like, it’s too much. It’s an overly exaggerated use and it makes people just tune you out. People, they get the message, they’re like, yeah, I’ve heard it. You have five spots left. Great.

Now listen, if you’re in such belief that there are limited spots, that you want to say ahead of time and throughout your selling that there are limited spots and that feels good to you and authentic and fun, great. But with this podcast, I just want to offer that it’s possible that you don’t need to do that. You also don’t need to sell the idea that there are limited spots on your calendar. I see this also pop up.

That’s selling the idea that you are busy when you aren’t. Your client isn’t factoring in busyness with their decision to buy from you. You think it makes you look more in demand and professional but I think it can also make you look complicated and hard to get in and hard to work with. It’s just a thought.

So a client in 2K recently asked me this. She said what are your thoughts on limiting the number of available spots for people to schedule a consult? Does having less time available create a sense of urgency for people to schedule and show up? Or do we have a ton of open slots to make it easier for them to schedule but increase no shows?

And I think this is really interesting to look at. What if the number of spots didn’t create the result of no shows? There’s an assumption in this question that one equals the other, but it doesn’t. No shows happen in the model of the client and in the model of the coach, and then the number of spots available is just a circumstance. It’s completely neutral.

It’s just what the client happens to think about it and what the coach happens to think about it. And I do think what we predominantly think about is the people we attract, and so they will predominantly have the same thought. And for me as the client, from my experience, even now with coaches, or I’ve recently talked about working to hire a wedding planner, and I wanted to hire a wedding planner so bad.

Her Instagram looked incredible, but every time I talked to her she was just, oh we’re so busy and she had trouble meeting, and she was constantly trying to reschedule and she always kept trying to say she was so busy as a selling point almost. As a way to say she’s very important. She’s a very important person.

And for me, I actually believe I am a very important person. I have a very important business, but I don’t think of myself in an egotistical way of being a very important person and I’m like yeah, we’re all very busy and we’re all very important people, and your busyness doesn’t impress me. And what I really think about it is that you’re hard to work with, and this is what it’s going to be like scheduling calls with you for my wedding.

That is what I thought is like, when I’m your client, it’s going to be hard to schedule with you. It’s going to be hard to work with you. I think you can feel available to your clients, like if your clients feel you’re available, that doesn’t equate to you aren’t successful or you aren’t worth the prices that you’re charging or that you are not in demand. I don’t think it means any of those things.

In fact, I think that is my experience of working with my coach. No, she doesn’t give me all of her time and I do know that she has a schedule that she sticks by and it has certain hours open and not, but the feeling that I have with her is never that she’s overly busy for me. And it actually feels great.

So I think when it comes to these ideas that you all have about the number of available spots makes you seem not successful, I think you just have to question everything and it’s really great to question it from the client’s perspective. Is it true that that is the deduction they will make from looking at your schedule? Those aren’t even the thoughts they’re going to have. They’re thinking about them.

So they’re going to look at your schedule where you’ve left five spots available for consults and they’re going to be like – they’re not even going to have a thought. They’re just going to have a noise with their mouth. They’re not going to want to work with you. That’s my thought.

And maybe they will have the thought, oh my god, she’s so in demand, but I just doubt it. Out of the percentage in the world, my guess is that happens maybe 2% of the time because people aren’t thinking about you. They’re thinking about them. And so I always say make your scheduling process as easy as possible.

My suggestion is to take the calendaring option even out of the equation. How I made 100K is I gave my clients direct access to me. I scheduled their calls directly and I always made it work for what worked for them. Tell me three times that you have, I’ll make it work. And that never made me seem like I wasn’t successful or in demand. It made it seem like I cared about their business and I was flexible, and I would be easy to work with. And those are the things your clients care about.

So another one that I see happen a lot happens on consults, this fake urgency is my clients will say I’ll hold your spot for 48 hours and then release it to someone else. And I think you really have to check this. What is your truth? Because I think a lot of you would definitely take their money beyond 48 hours.

If you have a waitlist, that’s one thing. I’ve done that. I’ve had waitlists before and said you have 24 hours to pay or we’re going to move on to the next person on the waitlist. That was truth. I told my assistant, give them 24 hours. At the 24-hour mark, make an offer to somebody else. That was the truth of the situation. But if that isn’t your truth in the moment, then don’t say it. It’s not true.

It doesn’t mean you can’t say hey, you want to make your payment in 48 hours and here’s why, and make it about them, but don’t make it about you, especially if you will definitely take their money before 48 hours. Don’t tell them they have to pay or you’re going to give their spot up when you know damn well you’re not going to do that. You’ll take their money if they call you a month from now.

So I just think when it comes to creating urgency to buy, here are three great questions to think about. Just ask yourself these questions. Is it true? Is it necessary to sell? And does it feel good for you to say it? Because for some of you it will feel good because you genuinely believe your program or your one-on-one coaching is going to sell out and it will feel great for you to say it and it will be your truth and that’s great, but I think you should question everything because I don’t think any of it is necessary to sell.

And for me, the answer was no to those three questions. Was it true? No. Was it necessary? No. And did it feel good for me to say it? Which is I think the most important thing for you to ask yourself when you’re creating this urgency in your marketing and in your selling is does it feel good for you to say it?

For me, anything that wasn’t my honest truth didn’t feel good. I don’t even like doing a lot of there are this many spots left in the mastermind. Even when there are a certain number of spots left because I don’t want the people taking up that last spot taking it out of FOMO. Fear of missing out. I want them to buy because they want in, because they’re committed and ready to do the work. So I don’t want to convince them with false urgency or even true urgency. I don’t want that to be the reason they buy.

So let’s talk about why people do this. And I think it’s because no one has ever presented and alternative to selling. Most of the selling advice and material we get says to create urgency and create timelines and limited availability, and that is the message we’ve heard. We think without urgency, there is no reason to buy.

What urgency creates is a reason to buy, and that is true, but I don’t think you need to have urgency as the reason to do anything. I think there can be other reasons to buy. And other reasons to buy quickly. And in fact, my business is a shining example of that this year. I have kept the doors open to 2K for 2K all year and my sales have only gone up month after month.

People have told me, for them it doesn’t work if there’s no cart close. But it works for me and I genuinely believe the reason why is because I don’t think it doesn’t work. I don’t have that limiting belief, and because I have belief number two, that what gets people to buy is the belief and the results they could have for themselves. So that’s where I put my time and energy.

And I don’t think even if urgency were needed, it needs to be created through lack and scarcity because again, I think the urgency, if that’s what we want to call it, can be created through desire and excitement to have what we want. And if you want to highlight and give people a reason to buy, it can be created simply by highlighting the tradeoff of not buying versus buying.

Not buying means not getting what they want. Every day that goes by, they don’t get what they want. That is the urgency. I don’t need to even tell them. They know. They know every day. My clients know every day, if you’re one of them listening on the podcast, every day that you don’t work with me, you aren’t making money.

So I do my job of making what my clients want seem so attainable that the urgency is to get what they want. Not to simply miss out. That’s the urgency you want to create if you’re going to create it. So people email me and say when do the doors close for 2K for 2K? When do the doors open? And I always respond with the truth. They’re always open. Sign up whenever you want.

Some of you think oh my god, if I said that they wouldn’t buy, they would take so much time to buy. They’ll never be motivated. That’s not true. Every day they wake up thinking about how much money they want to make. Every day your clients wake up thinking about how much weight they want to lose. Every day they wake up struggling in their marriage. It’s not true that if you don’t give them this urgency, they’ll never do it. It’s not true.

So I tell my clients the doors are always open and the question really is how long do they want to make money? Sometimes I say that to them, sometimes I don’t, but that is the question I think that they have to decide is how long do you want to wait to make money? That’s what they’re really waiting on. The urgency is every day that you don’t join, you don’t make money.

So I don’t need to sell FOMO. They already are missing out. They’re living that life already. That’s happening. And the same is true for your clients. They don’t need a cart close to decide to lose weight or a discounted offer to make that marriage work, and they don’t need special savings for a better life. The better life is the urgency.

And I have found this to be true. When I was selling slicers, and now that I sell coaching, people who are pushed into an impulse buy out of fear or lack and urgency usually are the most high-maintenance clients and usually they are the no’s that were pushed into a yes through that lack and urgency and it lasts for a moment and then their truth sets back in and they go right back to being a no anyway.

It’s almost like they stepped into your energy but it was never their own and they can’t maintain your energy when you’re gone. When you’re not selling them in front of their face, when they’re not reading your emails, when they’re not on the phone with you. This happens a lot on consults.

When they’re not on the phone, if you push them and you convince them with urgency, that’s why you get a lot of yes’s that ghost is because once you’re not in they’re face creating the urgency in the room and creating the energy in the room, and then they’re left with their own energy, they were a no.

When I was pitching, that looked like either set downs, that’s what we called them, where they would pick it up at the show out of urgency, they would start seeing the packages disappear off the table when I was selling, and they’d see all these people grabbing them up and they’d be like, I got to get one too. And then I’d find them in the frozen food cooler an hour later. Like a slicer just sitting next to the ice cream.

Why they felt the need to freeze it I’m not sure. Or it would show up as a return in the store a few days later or a few weeks later. And in my program now, if someone jumps in from scarcity, they approach the whole program that way and they get scarcity as their result. So when I have people tell me they have to make their money back in 30 days or they can’t pay rent, I advice them not to join.

And not because they can’t or won’t make their money back, but when your model becomes I have to make money, the chances are you won’t because have-to energy doesn’t sell. So I know it isn’t going to end well, so I’m not going to push them or tell them anything that fuels the scarcity they already have.

I have someone now that replies to our customer service emails and I always tell her to err on the side of them not joining. I tell her not to hold their hands and convince them. Those aren’t people I am looking to work with right now. And I tell her this, and this has always been the truth. Eventually, they will either convince themselves to buy or not to buy.

And I think the hard sell often creates the definitive not buying in the customer. We’re going to talk about that next week. But no one wants to feel pressured and the more people that do that to me, I can feel their BS. Think about that for yourself. Can you feel other people’s BS when they start trying to pressure you in sales to buy something? Happens at the mall all the time.

Can you feel your own BS? This is also something to think about. Do you have your own BS meter to show you when you’re being false or not? I have caught mine and been like, cut the shit Stacey, that isn’t true. Your brain tries to hard sell you all day long on even things you want to buy. You better buy it right now or there won’t be any left. This is your only opportunity.

And I don’t like to make my decisions that way and I don’t want my clients making their decisions that way either. So going back to the example of you have 48 hours to pay, otherwise I give up your spot, really think about it. No, they don’t. They have a lifetime to pay, truly. Maybe a year from now they will want to work with you and you will be full and your prices will be raised, but that’s not happening in the immediate future. So there’s no need to pretend.

My client Lindsay Dotzlaf said it best. Going back to the – let’s use this example of you have 48 hours to pay. So you’re on a consult and the client either says yes or they need to think about it, and then you tell them okay great, so I’m going to hold your spot for 48 hours and after that I’ll give it up to someone else. Or you need to make your payment within 48 hours or I release your spot.

I want you to really think about if that isn’t true for you, if that isn’t true that you actually only have one coaching spot left and say, 10 consults lined up that week, if it’s not that case, my client Lindsay said and I think this really sums up the entire podcast is you just spent and entire call building trust. Why would you end it in a lie?

So good, right? Why would you lie in that moment? And think about this; you’re promoting life coaching, that you will coach them in life, but then you lie in your marketing. Just a little one. Sneaky. Make it sound just a little extra urgent. Give them a timeframe and tell them it’s because you have limited spots when really you just want them to pay to make you feel comfortable that they’re definitely in.

So what you’re really saying is come learn life from me and let me give you your first lesson, and the first lesson is lie. Think about that. You feel me? There is something wrong with that. And I really think that you miss out here when you do this. You can learn to be way better at sales and never need urgency as the reason to buy.

Value is the reason to buy. Value, they don’t want to spend another day not having. Results are a reason to buy. Wanting those results now, being hungry for change is a reason to buy. And the best reason is because you made it so clear what they are getting and how it will help them that they can’t help but to buy.

I think not creating false urgency or hammering urgency helps your client make the best decision for themselves and helps you have the best clients and help you become so much more diversified in your selling. Now, I do want to say one last thing. This doesn’t mean that you don’t ever offer time sensitive bonuses or that you don’t ever tell people there’s a cart closing when it is, or that you don’t ever have an open and close on your cart if that’s the place your business is in and it works for your business model, or that you don’t tell people you only have two coaching spots left when you actually do only have two coaching spots left.

Just don’t be shady in your marketing. Tell the truth. And don’t overdo it. Don’t send 20 emails counting down spots. Make your sales pitch greater than their objections, greater than just selling urgency, especially the fake urgency. If you’re selling correctly, your clients won’t need it.

So number one, maybe you don’t need urgency at all. You just need to be better at selling. Better at explaining their problem and the solution. And number two, if you’re going to pull the urgency strings, make their results be the urgency you push. Alright, have a beautiful week and I’ll see you on the next podcast.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.