How to Create Compelling Events
Sometimes customers need a little help in buying. By creating compelling events you can give them reasons to buy today.
What Are Compelling Events?
If you have a prospect who likes what they see and is happy with the price, but just can’t seem to place the order, then you need a Compelling Event. A compelling event is something that forces a decision to act and helps you get your sale over the line.
Understanding The Consumer Decision Making Process
Starting off, your compelling events need to consider your prospect’s decision-making process.
Consumer decision-making is the step-by-step journey where your customers first become aware of and identify their needs, then research information on how to resolve these needs, eventually evaluate their available options, then make a purchasing decision, and finally review their purchase.
Understanding the above is important to any business, but how do you optimise this process?
The answer lies in creating compelling events.
Aiding Customer Decision Making
As already mentioned, many of your prospects have a process in mind when they are looking to buy:
Research
Evaluate
Select
Agree on the price
Purchase
If you’re lucky, your prospects may have a deadline as to when they need the product or service, or they may want it “as soon as possible”. Everybody likes these prospects because they know what they are doing and don’t waste anybody’s time.
Other prospects are not that organised and may challenge your sales technique. They may not have a deadline. They may not even know what it is they need, or if they even want your product at all. Their budget may be ill-defined. These prospects need help making the final decision to buy – with ‘help’ coming in the form of “a compelling event”!
Customer Compelling Events
Getting back to the subject, some prospects will create their own compelling events. Here are a few examples:
The start of a new financial year: sometimes they will want the solution ready, or at least decided, by the beginning of the new financial year.
A management target: The purchaser has been given a target to get the solution implemented by a certain date.
A current issue: the prospect and their business have an ongoing issue that is causing pain and needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Their existing supplier has terminated their contract or has had it terminated, and it expires on a certain date.
The budget year is ending: they need to spend the money by the end of the fiscal year, as it is in this year’s budget but may not be in next year’s. Large companies and government agencies, in particular, have this issue, if they don’t spend the money before the end of the financial year, they lose it.
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Actioning Compelling Events
But what if the date of their compelling event is nine months away? Then you can try to bring it forward. Here’s an example for you:
“If you want the CRM system to go live on January 1st, then you need to allow one month for user training, another month for beta testing, three months for set up. And we need to book our consultants another three months in advance. And it is going to take you one month to get a purchase order approved by your purchasing system. So that is nine months from today – you’d better start working on that PO right now!”
Of course, none of the above is relevant with SpotlerCRM, we get customers up and running by the end of a week!
How to Create Compelling Events
If the customer has no deadline to make a decision and doesn’t seem motivated to order in the near future, then you need to create a Compelling Event for them. What exactly that might be will depend on what your business does, but here are some ideas:
There is a price rise next month, if you can send me the order by the end of the month, I can let you have it next month at today’s price.
It is our year-end this month, we have some special incentives to close business by then, if you sign now, I’m allowed to offer you a 12.5% discount.
The model you want is being replaced by a new model in two months’ time, I can let you have this one at a discount.
End of Season Sale! Everything 25% off!
The exchange rate has moved, next month it will be more expensive.
I can’t book out the service staff without a PO from you, and they have some big projects coming up. We need to get them allocated to your project or we’ll lose them.
The factory is closing down for the annual summer break, so we need to get your order in a month before that.
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CRM Helps Identify Compelling Event Opportunities
You now know how to action compelling events, however, identifying these opportunities becomes much easier when you utilise CRM.
As an example, using SpotlerCRM, you can:
Manage and track your sales opportunities to effectively prioritise your sales efforts.
Implement Sales Force Automation so you get visibility of your sales team’s pipelines right through the sales process.
Create sales opportunities showing the value of the deal, its history and any sales updates.
As a result, our intuitive CRM system will help you guide your prospects through every step of the sale, letting you create compelling events at the right time.
Before You Go
Beware of simply offering a discount without a plausible end date. If you can offer 10% off now, why can’t you offer that next month or the month after? You need a believable reason as to why the offer won’t last. Same for quarterly discounts, the next quarter-end will only be three months away.
If you think creatively, you’ll be able to come up with some plausible Compelling Events for your unique business. The prospect needs your product, do them a favour and help them get off the fence!
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