B2B Marketing Micro-Lesson: How to Drive Urgency—And Why You Can't Fake It

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Hey everyone, Matt here with another B2B marketing micro lesson. Every week I'm going to try and bring you something small that I've learned working this week at Exit 5. Something I've learned from Dave, Dan, Danielle, Anna, our customers. Something that I think will help you become a better B2B marketer and grow your career. And my topic for today is on urgency in marketing and sales. You know, we've all been told or read somewhere that as marketers we need to drive urgency in our marketing. But the thing I've learned about urgency is that you can't fake it. Urgency is not something that you can create out of thin air. Urgency is something that you need to embed into your go to market plan. And basically, if the urgency isn't legitimate, it'll never work. So let me walk you through a couple examples of how we drive urgency at exit 5. And hopefully that'll help you think through how you can be driving urgency in your own role. So Exit 5 is doing an event in Austin on November 13th called Meet the Marketers Austin. And here's how we're driving urgency for that event. So the first thing you know, and this is the easy part about driving urgency for events, is that there is a start and end date. So you literally have to be pushing people to take action by the start date or they can't attend the event. But the second way we did it is we reduced the amount of tickets that we're going to sell to 100 tickets total. So we made the thing time bound and we reduced supply of the thing. So that's how we drove urgency. Now keep in mind in the background, you know, we have pent up demand for our events. So part of our urgency and our ability to do things like reduce supply to drive urgency is predicated on on the fact that we have demand in the background. But that's a topic for another day. I'm going to assume that that's more or less the case in your situation too. And notice how with this situation, we didn't fake the urgency. It was just baked into our plan. It's from the initial go to market plan. We had the date of the event locked in and we had the number of tickets we were going to sell. So it was baked into it up front. Another example is that we recently launched a marketing leadership accelerator which was in, it's still ongoing, but it was an eight week long course to help B2B marketing leaders get smarter. And before the launch, you know, we were teasing it a bunch on LinkedIn and in our podcast and an email and we let people know that within the first 48 hours of launching, if you sign up for a wait list, that the price will be ridiculously low. It's gonna be 50% off what the price is gonna be after that. And we weren't kidding. After the 48 hours with that super low pricing, we raised the price. After that it went up to almost double and it drove a bunch of purchases in the first 48 hours. There were even people who missed the 48 hour window and were emailing begging to get that special discount. I can go on and on with examples of how we do that at exit 5, but the principle stays the same here, which is that you can't fake urgency. It has to be embedded into the go to market plan and it has to be real. So before I wrap, I know what you're probably thinking because if I, you know, rewind my life a year ago when I was in B2B marketing, I'd be thinking the same thing. I'd be thinking, you know what, Matt, it's really easy for you to say this because you work at exit 5 and you sell a product that has high demand and it's a, you know, B2C product, an easy purchase. And this won't work for my B2B product. But honestly, I think this is where marketing creativity comes into play, right? Is can you take these fundamental principles and learnings and embed them into what you're doing right now? For example, you know, if you are a, I don't know, B2B marketer who works at an HR software company that needs to book 50 meetings for the sales team from now until the end of the year, instead of just saying, oh, for anyone who signs up before the end of the year, we're gonna give you a good price. Because that doesn't always work. I mean, how many times have you heard the sales team or seen the sales team drop the price at quarter end or year end just to get some more deals in? I think that that can work when somebody already wants to or is going to potentially buy. But in order to drive some urgency and build some pipeline, I don't think that that's a play. You know, what if you did something like the first 50 people that book a meeting with our sales team or you know, if you book a meeting with our sales team before the end of the year, you're going to get a free 1500 dollars ticket to big conference in our industry, XYZ or the first 10 people who book a meeting with our sales team in November, they're going to get, you know, free one on one mentorship with this legend in the industry that we've paid to do these sessions with our customers so you see how you can create things and then you can limit the supply of them. Another thing that I used to do in a previous role to drive urgencies to get people to sign up for our webinars was to offer the first 25 people who attended the webinar a free lunch. So I would do them around lunchtime and I would say for the first 25 people who sign up, we're going to send you a pizza to your front door. We use this cool service to do that. And it drove way more than 25 registrants and it drove something like 60 to 70% attendance rate. People would rush to sign up because they wanted to be part of the first 25, and they didn't always know right away. So a bunch of people would rush to sign up and then we would just Let the first 25 know that they're getting the free lunch. And the other a hundred that signed up, we would let them know, you know, you didn't get a free lunch, but maybe we gave them something else in return, like a $5 gift card or something else. Uh, that was cool. So drove a bunch of registrants and drove really good attendance. Cool. So I hope you enjoyed that one. Uh, I'll see you guys next week. If you like this style, let me know. Hit me up on LinkedIn. Share the episode on LinkedIn. I don't know. Let me know you're enjoying these and I'll keep doing them. Thanks.

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