One of the best ways to increase your sales is to highlight the cost of inaction in your prospects.

Cost of inaction refers to the monetary or livelihood loss your potential customer has if they do nothing. In other words, it's the costs associated with not buying your product.

Humans are naturally resistant to change.

They will prefer to stay in their comfort zone even if it's not serving them well. Your job when selling and marketing your offers is to make leads come to the conclusion they do in fact, need, to take action.

Think of cost of inaction as the opposite of return on investment (ROI). Most people don't believe fake ROI claims, but when they start considering all of the negatives that are associated with inaction, they indirectly view the purchase as high ROI. They'll even start selling themselves on your product.

Let's look at an example...

Think of a graphic designer, let's call her Sandra. She's running her business and tracking all of her tasks manually. Sandra is performing her own bookkeeping, answering all of her emails, handling customer support and spending an hour every day engaging with her audience on social media.

Sandra estimates she spends 15 hours per week on admin work.

Sandra really needs a virtual assistant, but is hesitant to do so because every VA that's approached her so far is focused only on saving her time.

But they aren't highlighting — in Sandra's own words — what saving that time could open up for Sandra.

Here's 2 example questions a VA could ask Sandra that would make her see her cost of inaction.

1 | Based on the 15 hours per week you're spending on admin work now... How would you spend that time if you didn't have to do that anymore?

Sandra might do a few different things:

+ Spend more time on client work
+ Spend a handful of hours resting
+ Spend more time on business development

Then you start digging into each of these so Sandra ends up selling herself.

"How many more clients could you get with that extra time on business development?"

"How many more clients could you serve if your time shifted to client work?"

You can see where I'm going with this... If Sandra has the time to go get 5 more clients, and can help 5 more clients every single month, what's that worth? 

Likely waaaaay more than what she'd be paying the VA, yea?

To quantify this let's say the core service Sandra offers clients is $2,000 per month. 5 more clients at that price point = an additional $10,000 per month in revenue.

Seems like some good ROI on hiring a VA to me...

Here's another question type you can use to highlight the cost of inaction:

2 | If we fast forward 6 months from now and nothing has changed, how would this impact your business?

These type of forward looking questions build urgency in your buyers.

They begin visualizing feeling stuck and stagnant. Rather than you trying to force an image in their brain, they create one themselves.

In Sandra's case, she may look ahead 6 months and realize her revenue hasn't increased and she's more burnt out than ever.

Again, making her more likely to hire this imaginary VA.

Takeaway: get your prospects to visualize what their future pain looks like and communicate that for you.

In summary...

The quick tip today is to highlight the cost of inaction in your leads to generate more sales.

When you ask the right questions, you can make them sell themselves on your product or service, without having to promise the world or make B.S. fake ROI claims.

P.S. We have a full 85-page sales flow eBook available. If you'd like access to this so you know exactly what to say on every sales call, get on the waitlist for our business owner membership, the Laptop Lounge.

It's the only place to acquire the sales book (and we add new resources like that multiple times every month).

This is the best way to build your network as an online business owner while getting all the skills and knowledge you need to grow your business faster.

Check out our remote business owner community.