How to create urgency in your B2B outreach

Urgency in B2C is pretty simple.

Communicate a time limit, or a personal cost.

Or both.

When a transaction is easy to understand or the price tag is small, purchases happen.

In complex B2B urgency is different. It’s much harder to create. And even if you create it, it needs to last a long time.

Nothing moves fast in complex B2B.

So instead of time and cost, you convey internal and external stakes.

In as few words as possible.

The good news is, you don’t have to make your thing the most urgent thing your prospect worries about this instant. Just more urgent than the other slow-moving things they’re dealing with.

You don’t need This Moment, or Today.

This Week, Month or Quarter would be enough.

You want to establish internal or personal stakes for the reader, and external stakes too.

Internal could be relief from the pressure of the problem you solve. Or the chance to succeed at work. Or promotion.

External can be either the employer, as in employer vs employee. Or it could be company vs competitor or other external force.

So, examples.

Let’s say you sell injection molding machines. You might include a paragraph like this about a meeting the reader doesn’t want to have:

“Can you explain why you chose this machine? We’re only 2 years in and we’re already replacing it. Now we’re putting more money into injection molding machinery than ACME, and they’ll either pocket more profit or expand faster than us.“

And another, where there’s a disintegrating opportunity (internal stakes) to get peer insight for their company (external stakes) and themselves (internal again):

A lot of COOs used the purchase of our machines to set a new tone at their company. We’ll even introduce you to some of them. Upscaling their firm to the high quality tier paid dividends inside their company and vs competitors.

And yes, you probably already guessed it — we’re using story elements (but not stories) to convey an urgency that has to last a while.

We need to put a movie into our reader’s head. Facts won’t do that. It’s why using the Welcome Distraction approach is so much faster and easier than Urgency in complex B2B.

With the Welcome Distraction, you’re sparking interest with a small accomplishment that an exec can achieve right away.

With Complex Urgency, you’re playing a longer game with durable messaging that includes personal and external stakes.

There’s also a cost difference.

A great Complex Urgency approach will usually cost more upfront. The writing is harder, and there are simply fewer people who know how to do it. The good news is, you can likely use the full messaging sequence, unchanged, for a very long time. Years, sometimes.

This will sound counter-intuitive, but I don’t recommended the Urgency approach for industries where change is constant. Like tech. In complex B2B, Urgency is too slow.

But for companies selling slow-changing products or services, like commercial insurance, big manufacturing equipment, financial services or commodities, Complex Urgency works well.

So, that’s urgency, which I tell clients not to try. It’s doable, but in B2B a B2C style urgency doesn’t work well, and the real B2B urgent style is on a different level.

It’s a fun assignment for the writer, though, if a client is sure they want to try it. ??

-dw

Hi, I'm Dean. I help B2B companies figure out what to say to people to get conversations started . You can reach me at [email protected].