How Do I Create Urgency in My Sales Calls?
Most founders think urgency is about timing. It isn’t. It’s about tension, and tension is yours to create.
That’s the question.
I get some version of it almost every week. A founder is doing five, ten demos a week. People show up. People nod. People say it’s interesting.
And then nothing.
So they ask the obvious question. How do I create urgency? How do I get them to move now instead of “let’s reconnect in Q3”?
It’s a good question. But most founders are answering it with the wrong assumption underneath. They think urgency is something the buyer either has or doesn’t have, depending on timing. It isn’t. Urgency is something you create. And when you don’t create it, the buyer hands you a reason that sounds like timing.
Here’s how it usually goes. I ask a founder how many demos he’s running. Five to ten a week. Good. How many is he closing? One. Maybe.
So I tell him what he already knows but hasn’t said out loud: you don’t have a pipeline problem. More demos won’t fix this. If you’re not closing what’s in front of you, getting more is just more of the same thing not closing.
Then I ask why the deals aren’t closing. And the answer is almost always the same.
Timing.
“This is interesting, but let’s circle back next quarter.” “We’re heads-down on a big internal project right now.” “Love it, just not the right moment for us.” The founder has a folder full of these. People who saw the product, believed in it, and walked. He’s convinced the problem is timing. So he works on timing, building more pipeline, chasing more in-market buyers, waiting for the calendar to line up.
But there’s no timing problem.
That’s the part the founder can’t see. He’s treating “let’s come back in Q3” as a fact about the buyer’s calendar. It isn’t. It’s a fact about the call. The buyer says “timing” because nothing on that call made them feel they have to solve this now. They could act. They just don’t feel like they have to. So they reach for the most polite exit available, and “the timing isn’t right” is the politest one there is.
You didn’t lose to timing. You lost to a comfortable call.
Here’s the part most founders don’t want to hear. The reason there’s no urgency is that the calls are comfortable.
Most founders who’ve never sold before want to be liked. So they run a friendly call. They educate. They answer questions. They let the buyer drive. And at the end the buyer says “this was great, really interesting,” and that’s the sound of a deal that isn’t going to close. The buyer sold the founder on staying in touch, and the founder politely agreed.
Your job on the call is not to be agreed with. Your job is to create tension. To make the buyer a little uncomfortable. To make them see their own situation clearly enough that doing nothing starts to feel like a decision, not a default.
That’s what urgency actually is. It’s not a deadline you invent. It’s not a fake discount. It’s not the buyer’s calendar finally cooperating. It’s tension. The buyer feels the cost of staying where they are, and they feel it now.
No tension, no urgency. No urgency, and the buyer calls it timing.
So when a founder asks me how to create urgency, the honest answer is: stop waiting for the buyer to bring it. You bring it. And you bring it by being willing to make the call a little uncomfortable, which is the exact thing most founders are trying hardest to avoid.
And here’s why this matters more now than it used to. The methodologies most founders reach for, SPICE, MEDDIC, all of them, were built for a different market. When they were written, you had two or three competitors and a known set of gaps. You sold against the product.
Today you’re competing with vendors you’ve never heard of, an incumbent that can close its gaps in a few weeks, and a buyer who quietly thinks he could just build it himself. Nobody said that five years ago. Everybody thinks it now.
When the product is hard to differentiate, how you sell becomes more important than what you sell. And “build more pipeline, run a clean discovery call, follow the framework” doesn’t touch this. You can run flawless SPICE and still have every deal die on timing, because the methodology was never built to create tension in a market where everyone looks the same.
So no, you don’t have a timing problem.
You have calls that let the buyer stay comfortable. And comfortable buyers don’t buy. They circle back.
Tension is a skill. It’s learnable, and it’s faster to learn than most founders think. It’s the core of what I work on with founders in the SPRINT GTM Reset: five days to rebuild how you go to market, so your calls create urgency instead of waiting for it.