Weekly Tip: Crisis Trumps Everything

It seems that without a crisis, there is little real motivation to change. Decision-makers are often only moving when the fire is hot and they are being chased. This is great if you are the incumbent provider but decision inertia is torture if you are selling a change to a customer.

Either….

• Find a crisis – You need to spot a compelling current crisis. It does not have to be within the company but it does need to be relevant. Regulations, competitors, market conditions or shifts in pricing are good candidates.
• Re-frame a crisis – Often the crisis is already on the horizon, just not on the radar. Your job is to make a future problem more clearly a “now” crisis to solve.
• Create a crisis – I am talking about urgency. How can you create urgency inside of one or more of the members of the Buyer’s Table so that the issue you solve becomes most important to someone….ANYONE at the table.

The truth is that often customers wait until much later than they should to make decisions that had the decisions been made earlier, the problem would be a lot smaller now. What you are looking for is urgency, because without it, changing will always be a buyer’s “B” priority. Crisis = urgency.