How many times has this happened to you?  You have a prospect that you’ve already spoken with and when it’s time to follow up they don’t take or return your phone calls.  What’s up with that?

What’s up is a lack of compelling reasons for them to buy – now.  You may have provided them with some compelling reasons, but those are yours, not theirs.  You may believe they were interested and they might have been – before.  But in order to assure that your prospect is able to maintain their interest from one meeting to the next, they must have one or more compelling reasons to buy what you have or you’ll be in chase mode again.

What is a compelling reason?  It’s a motivator that creates urgency.  Interest in your product or service, a feature, a bell or whistle is just that.  Interest.  But interest won’t cause a prospect to open their checkbook or meet with you a second time.  There must be something more compelling than interest.

Like what?  Like the mounting cost of an unresolved problem. But make sure your prospect is the one who cares about that money.  Someone may tell you about the money being lost but if it isn’t their money it may only be a fact – not an ongoing painful reminder of the problem.

What else? Downtime can be a compelling reason, but only if your prospect is the one getting the calls from screaming customers threatening to take their business away if the problem doesn’t get fixed.

Anything else? Fear is a great one. But be careful here too.  There are several kinds of fear.  The only one that is compelling is the fear of something bad happening.  But even that isn’t enough unless your prospect would be unable to cope with the consequences of that event.

Anything can be a compelling reason.  The key, as stated previously, is that it must be compelling to your prospect.  Identify the compelling reasons why they would by something, and even better, why they would buy from you, and you’ll keep your prospect coming back for more.