Creating Urgency: Takeaways from our October CTM Event

This week, our community tackled a challenge every B2B marketing leader faces: how do you turn interested prospects into buyers who are ready to act? During a conversation with Steve Kahan, best-selling author and marketing advisor at Insight Partners, leaders explored why even the strongest solutions lose to inaction, how to make the cost of waiting tangible, and what marketing can do to create urgency that moves deals forward.

💡 5 Key Takeaways on Creating Buyer Urgency for Marketing Leaders

1️⃣ Your biggest competitor might be "doing nothing”

In many B2B deals, the real competition isn’t another vendor. It’s the status quo. Prospects can always choose to wait, stick with an incumbent, or continue managing a problem the way they always have. As Steve’s discussion highlighted, the status quo only needs to convince buyers to delay. Marketing and sales must give buyers a compelling reason to change now, not just a reason to choose your solution over another.

2️⃣ ROI isn’t enough. You need to quantify the cost of inaction

Showing the potential return on investment is only half the story. Buyers also need to understand what happens if they do nothing. That could mean lost revenue, wasted time, operational inefficiencies, increased risk, or missed opportunities. The challenge is making those consequences tangible and credible with customer examples, benchmarks, and data that buyers can trust.

3️⃣ Urgency starts with helping buyers understand their own problems

Buyers don’t always recognize the full impact of the problems they face, especially when the consequences are long-term or difficult to measure. Rather than simply telling prospects why they need a solution, marketing and sales should ask better questions to help them uncover the risks of waiting. Before a sales conversation can move forward, buyers need to understand that a problem exists, that leaving it unresolved has meaningful consequences, and that your company has the expertise to help.

4️⃣ Make the case for change easier to sell internally

In complex B2B sales, the person who discovers a solution often isn’t the person who approves the purchase. Technical champions and internal influencers need help communicating the value of change to leadership and other stakeholders. Marketing can support them with clear business cases, relevant proof points, and messaging that connects the solution to the priorities of different decision-makers. The goal is to help champions explain not just why a solution is valuable, but why it matters now.

5️⃣ Marketing should create buyers who are ready to act, not just generate leads

More leads don’t necessarily mean more pipeline. If prospects don’t understand the consequences of inaction, they can engage with your content, attend your events, and still decide to wait. Marketing has an opportunity to build urgency earlier in the buyer journey by educating prospects about the risks they face, demonstrating the value of solving them, and making the case for change before a sales conversation even begins.

The through line: Creating urgency isn’t about pressuring buyers into a decision. It’s about helping them understand what waiting really costs. When marketing makes the consequences of inaction clear, backs up the business case with credible evidence, and equips internal champions to advocate for change, buyers have a stronger reason to act.