April 18, 2026 | Read online​

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Creating Urgency & Adding Value

It's the question I get asked the most when I do training: "How do you create urgency?"

My answer is: "You can't."

We, as sales reps, can't create urgency. We can try to manufacture it with discounts, but that's sad.

Side note: proactive discounting (when the client doesn't even ask) is one of the saddest and most frustrating things in sales. But that's for another post.

What we CAN do is uncover and drive urgency. And the way you do that is by adding real value.

Now I know what you're thinking. "Add value" is the most overused phrase in sales. Every trainer says it. Every LinkedIn post tells you to do it. But nobody tells you HOW. Especially if you're a 22-year-old SDR reaching out to a CISO. How exactly are you supposed to "add value" to someone with 25 years of experience who makes 10x your salary?

I'll show you. This week gave me one of the best examples I've ever had of what uncovering urgency and adding value actually look like in practice.

I was working on a deal with a prospective client. I knew the CRO from his previous role at another company, so he was already familiar with my work and what I can do.

He told me his team was behind. Reps were doing the spray and pray thing. 300 calls a week, low engagement, no real process. He needed help.

We had a few conversations, and then he wanted me to talk to his head of Enablement. We had a great conversation, and everything seemed to align, including our approach and values, which is always important to me. He said all he needed to do was reconnect with the CRO, and we'd be good to go next week.

Then I got the email a few days later: "We recently lost a team member on the enablement side. We'd like to pause for 90 days."

Now, most reps do one of two things when they get an email like this.

Option one: accept defeat and then "touch base" and "check in" a few times a month, and then ping them in 90 days saying, "Are you ready yet?"

Option two: they fire back with something like "But I thought we were aligned on this?" Trying to hold the prospect accountable for what they said. Playing the blame game to guilt them into moving forward.

Neither works. The first one is passive. The second one is desperate. And both add zero value. You are giving them nothing they didn't already have.

And let's be honest, when somebody tells you they'll reconnect in 90 days, you might as well close it as a loss and move on. That deal is gone.

Unless you give them a reason to come back sooner. And the only way to do that is to show them something they can't unsee.

Here's the thing. The problem didn't go away because they lost a person. If anything, it got worse. Their reps are still spraying and praying. Their pipeline is still weak. And now they have LESS enablement support than they did before.

That's not a reason to wait. That's a reason to move.

So instead of accepting the pause, I decided to show them what they were missing.

I sat down with my Claude co-pilot and, in about five minutes, did the following:

1. Analyzed their business, their industry, and what their CRO is likely measured on right now.
2. Identified the specific gaps that were getting worse, not better, while they waited.
3. Built a sample deliverable showing exactly what their reps could be doing right now using my methodology.
4. Put it all together into something tangible they could see, feel, and react to.

No inside knowledge. No access to their internal systems. No conversations with their reps. I did it with what AI could find publicly and my own expertise.

That's the part people miss. AI did the research and the heavy lifting. My experience and methodology made it real. The combination is what made it valuable.

I sent it to the CRO with a simple message: If your team is already doing stuff like this, no need to respond. But if they aren't, we should keep talking. I can show them how to do this and fill the enablement gap while you hire.

Got an immediate response. "Love this. Let's talk next week."

That deal went from dead to active in one email. Not because I created urgency. Because I added so much value, he couldn't justify waiting.

The urgency was already there. Their reps were still struggling, the pipeline was still thin, and they still had a gap on the team. I used AI to make the cost of inaction impossible to ignore.

Now here's the part nobody talks about. The only reason I could do this in five minutes is because my systems are connected. I use Claude as my co-pilot, and it has access to my CRM, my conversation history, my training content, my account research, all of it. When I asked it to analyze this company and build something for them, it could pull from everything I already had and combine it with public research in real time.

If that stuff was scattered across spreadsheets and email threads and random docs, I'd still be digging around at hour two.

That's the real unlock. AI is only as good as the data you feed it. The reps and teams getting the most out of AI are the ones who have their systems unified so AI can actually access and use the information.

If you're a smaller team looking for a system of record that AI can actually plug into, check out Insightly (sponsor). They've built a unified CRM with an AI layer that lets you query your data and automate workflows in plain language. Solid option for teams that need the foundation without enterprise complexity.

Back to the play. Here's what I want you to take from this.

"Adding value" is not some abstract concept reserved for people with decades of experience. It's a process. And AI made it accessible to everyone.

Here's the framework:

Step 1: Understand their world. Use AI to research their company, their industry, and the specific person you need to reach. What are the trends hitting their space? What is someone in their role measured on? What keeps them up at night? You need to understand their world better than the other 200 reps in their inbox.

Step 2: Find your value-add. Ask AI to give you 5 specific ways you could add value to that person right now. Not a pitch. Not a feature dump. A real insight about the business they didn't have before you showed up. A competitive analysis. A trend report. A risk assessment. Pick the one that hits hardest and build it out. This is how a 22-year-old SDR adds value to a CISO. You don't need 20 years of experience. You need AI and a process.

Step 3: Send it with confidence. Attach what you built and keep the message short. No "checking in." No apologies. Lead with what you found and make the cost of waiting obvious. If they're already on top of it, they'll tell you. If they're not, you gave them a reason to move.

The reps who figure this out are going to eat. Because most of your competition is still sitting in the "checking in" cycle, waiting for permission to re-engage.

You don't need permission. You need proof.

I put together this prompt framework you can copy and paste into any AI tool to do exactly what I did. It walks you through the research, the person analysis, the value-add, and the send. Works regardless of what you sell. Stop waiting for urgency to show up. Go find it.

Make It Happen.

How did I do with this edition? Amazing - can't wait till next week It was okay Needs work