Yes, I’ll buy it… tomorrow.
When you are doing your market research, people will more often than not say your idea is great. When the product ships and you then ask them to buy, you discover they have other problems of higher priority, or that your product is missing a key feature, or, perhaps worst of all, that they would love to buy, but not until tomorrow or next month or next quarter.
That is worst of all because now you have a customer at the bottom of your sales funnel, at the end of your sales pipeline, who lacks a motivation to close the sale today. Until you’ve faced this issue many times, you probably don’t have a stage in your funnel for these potential customers, and thus no tactics for getting them closed.
Fix that oversight. Go back to your funnel and add a stage for “almost closed” or “needs some motivation.”
There are a number of tactics you can use to close these deals. The key is to create an artificial deadline that adds to the urgency of the purchase.
For example, a free add-on. Buy today and we will include _______. An extended subscription. A free trial of the premium service. A gift card. Whatever you can think of that gets the sale closed and that doesn’t cost more than you can afford.
Try a discount. If you buy this month, you get 10% off. Or 50% off the premium service. Or $1,000 in custom services.
Use quarterly price increases to motivate buyers. Buy before the end of the quarter, and we’ll charge you $X. Otherwise, starting next month, the price rises to $Y.
