Using FEAR as a Sales Tactic in Promoting Urgency

By Steven K. Haught, MBA

No question about it… this is a tough time to be selling to business customers. The budget allowances simply aren’t there. If you thought it was hard to make a sale before the pandemic decimated the economy—when typically 85% of a customer’s budget was allocated to existing commitments and only 15% remained for discretionary spending—you’ll soon be finding out how much harder it can be, as even that fraction disappears in across-the-board cuts. 

Making matters worse, your customer relationships have lost much of their power. With less money to go around, proposals are subjected to higher levels of review by the buyers, and the managers you’ve traditionally dealt with may no longer be the decision makers.  Decisions to buy could well be coming from the CEO or CFO until companies see their businesses stabilize.

All this would be thoroughly discouraging if not for one fact: Companies have survived downturns before, and some have even profited from them. Rather than resign to hearing the standard “Sorry, we have no budget for that,” some vendors—even some very young start-ups—have found a way to reach their prospects and motivate them to allocate the necessary funds to proposed projects discussed and nearly finalized before the pandemic upset the applecart. 

Sales professionals have to return to the market and to their prime prospects with the conviction that they can persuade them that the solutions they have proposed are not just nice to have, but essential to the future of the business.

For many, this type of selling will be a new experience.  It’s one that goes beyond the conventional consultative or solution-selling approach, whereby the vendor’s sales team seeks out current concerns in a question-and-answer dialogue with prospects. And it differs dramatically from the most common approach still in use—product-based selling, which pushes features, functionality, and benefits, usually in a generic manner. 

I’ll call it what it is… fear-based selling, but without the snake oil characteristics that make you look and sound like a fly-by-night huckster.

Fear is universal for humans. Business is no different -- fear of loss, fear of missing out, fear of competitors leaving you flat in the dust. This is why employing fear is one of the most effective sales tactics you can ever use.

You are still on mission, to close the business.  However, helping prospects understand what the future might hold for them if they delay a decision to buy now, is essential to moving clients beyond the safety barriers they have erected to get through the pandemic crisis and shrinkage of budgets.

Every business fears something in the future.  Your job is to find out what those fears are and exploit them.  You will be helping customers see their competitive challenges in a new light that makes addressing specific painful problems unmistakably urgent. 

This approach isn’t right for every selling situation you’ll face in a downturn, or for every type of product/service, nor does it apply only under challenging economic conditions. But for many companies that see their old approaches losing power, its time has come.

Is the concept of inspiring ‘fear’ in a prospect an ethical approach that will not damage the relationship?  To answer that question we first must understand the emotion of fear and how if affects humans.

We are all chemically wired in our brains to react to fear at a primal level. Whether someone’s putting a knife to our neck or you’re falling short on your sales numbers this quarter, your brain will start pumping chemicals throughout your body to create a fight-or-flight response.  

Marketers and advertisers have capitalized on ‘fear’ for centuries -- everything from warding off various diseases to protecting yourself from cybercrime. 

In sales, fear is often first introduced to prospects by using closing techniques designed to qualify the client for a preferred support tier or early no charge shipping.  It’s using urgency to close a better deal or convince a prospect to open, read, and reply to an email.

But before you go peddling doomsday scenarios to all your prospective clients, it’s important to understand there are correct and incorrect ways to apply fear. Knowing this distinction will help you motivate and inspire rather than scare and paralyze. Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

First… you need to know and understand the other person’s fears. Offering up a bunch of random, scary business scenarios isn’t motivation by fear; it’s just plain old fear-mongering. In order to motivate people through fear you have to understand which fears to focus on. Which problems or pain points are most relevant and urgent to the buyer?

When picking pain points, choose the ones relevant to the solution you offer that you think will resonate most with your prospects. If “fast performance” is your product’s superpower and “slowness” is your customers’ common complaint about their existing system, focus on pain points that result from a slow speed, like higher costs, missed opportunities, and other related consequences they’re likely to also care or complain about.

How you talk about clients’ fears is almost as important as how you prioritize them. You want to express urgency, but the most effective kind of fear is subtle and realistic. 

If the first thing you say to a potential customer is, “Hackers are going to steal all your customers’ information next week,” you probably won’t get very far with that snake-oil approach. 

Claims like that only make your buyer defensive and immediately damages your credibility and any chances of building trust.

Fear for the sake of fear is great in movies, but not so useful in sales. That’s why your pitch needs to begin and end on a positive note, one that offers the buyer an actionable solution to their problems.

Once you’ve made sure your pain points are in line with your offering, it’s time to generate a little excitement. What new discoveries or advantages will the recipient find after talking to you? What does it mean for the overall business? What advantages can the business gain with competitors by addressing concerns about technologies no widely used by competitors?

Even when your aim is not about hitting pain points or insecurities, fear can still be a useful power to wield in sales. 

That’s one of the biggest advantages about this particular tactic: It’s infinitely adaptable. Just choose wisely when and how to use it.

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