How to Close More Sales by Leveraging the Law of Diminishing Intent

Written by Craig Elias

How many times have you invested your time, energy and money chasing an opportunity only to lose the sale right before closing the deal? In previous articles, I have talked about establishing yourself as the Emotional Favorite (www.emotionalfavorite.com) to get buyers to call you first and using First Call Effectiveness - to prevent buyers from calling your competition. Now, I will discuss maintaining your preferred supplier status and completing the sale with motivated buyers.

Losing the Sale

After everything you’ve invested in a buyer, your first priority should be completing the sale. Getting the buyer to call you first and using First Call Effectiveness to prevent them from calling your competition puts you one step ahead. At this point, the sale is yours to lose. I say yours to lose because you still have an opportunity to lose the sale. The buyer could decide not to buy, find a different solution, or even worse call your competition. Whatever the reason, many sales that make it this far are lost as a result of one simple principle: urgency.

Diminishing intent When was the last time you neglected a small sale that was about to close in order to chase a larger deal? The temptation to abandon everything to chase the big sale is overwhelming. Managing sales priorities is a challenge for sales professionals. Unless a new opportunity has a short sales cycle and you’re the Emotional Favorite, stay the course and complete your other opportunities first.

Completing the sale seems to be a pretty obvious priority, but we all know of other sales professionals (it never happens to us – wink, wink) that skip the critical last step only to wind up back at square one or worse, losing the sale to a more attentive sales professional.

Urgency and Competing Priorities

Let’s talk about buyer behavior for a second. Every day buyers manage competing priorities: customer service, order fulfillment, operations, sales, product development, etc. Priorities are addressed according to urgency – number one or two on the priority list puts the buyer in an urgent Problem Solving position, and makes them a motivated buyer. Obviously, the best time to complete the sale is when the buyer is in the urgent Problem Solving mode. I refer to this situation as a motivated buyer in the Window of Dissatisfaction™.

The Law of Diminishing Intent

“Odds are what does not get done NOW will not get done”.

The Law of Diminishing Intent is a simple principle of urgency and action: as the time between decision and action increases, the likelihood of action decreases to the point where action is extremely unlikely. In sales, the Law of Diminishing Intent means completing the sale while the buyer is still motivated and is in the Window of Dissatisfaction. Because the longer you take to fulfill your promises, the likelihood of completing the sale decreases.

It’s simple: buyers make decisions quicker and talk to fewer suppliers when they’re in an urgent state aka Window of Dissatisfaction. If you give the buyer too much time to act, they can become distracted with other urgent priorities and lose focus or even worse, connect with a competitor. We do it all the time: ignore the ‘should do’ tasks for the ‘must dos’ that are causing us the most inconvenience or pain.

For example: Imagine you discover the release valve on your hot water tank is broken and hot water is pouring down the basement drain. When you first discover it, it’s your top priority and you say to yourself ‘I need to get this fixed right away.’ If at that moment, a plumber knocked on your door, you would hire them immediately. But instead, the phone rings and it’s your spouse asking you to pick up the car before the shop closes. The car is now your first priority. Until a month later when you get the gas bill and it’s twice what it usually is: fixing the valve is again your top priority.

In sales, acting with urgency is critical. If you act with urgency while the buyer is in the Problem Solving mode – Window of Dissatisfaction – you will increase your close ratio, shorten your sales cycle and increase your selling price. Every day you lose decreases your likelihood of making the sale.

Using Urgency to Complete the Sale

Understanding the Law of Diminishing Intent will help you focus on priority opportunities. In general, focus on the opportunities closest to completion, the ones where you are the Emotional Favorite and you’ve invested the most effort in building the relationship and crafting a solution. Then move down the list in order of probability of completion.

Using urgency goes beyond prioritizing opportunities; it means working diligently within the buyer’s timelines and getting a commitment from the buyers by asking questions like:

• What happens next?
• When should I expect an answer?

You can ask the buyer when you should call to follow-up if you haven’t heard back from them. If the buyer says Tuesday, you call Tuesday morning (first thing). Sales are lost when a buyer perceives a lack of interest in winning their business, or an inability to deliver within their timelines. So, failing to meet a deadline, even if it will not impact the project timelines, sends the buyer the message: ‘I have buyers that are more important than you.’

If you irritate the buyer at this point in the sale, you will have to double up your efforts to win them back. The reason is simple: when the buyer emotionally commits to buying from you, he considers the problem solved (and breathes an internal sigh of relief). Failing to deliver means the buyer now has to worry about you delivering the solution and the dissatisfaction directed at the problem is now directed at you for prolonging his suffering. The buyer may give you one more chance in the form of a phone call, but after that, he’ll move on.

Success in sales is seldom an accident; It’s the result of getting to motivated buyers first, preventing them from calling your competition, and using urgency to close the sale while they are still motivated.

Craig Elias -
	Craig Elias is a leading Trigger Event expert and the creator of Trigger Event Selling™. Craig has received coverage on NBC news, in the New York Times, Sales and Marketing Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Business 2.0. You can contact him by phone (+1.403.874.2998), Skype (Craig.Elias), or web (www.ShiftSelling.com/contact ).Read More >>
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