We're losing most of your sales deals, not to competition, but to indecision. And that indecision stems from their fear of failure. Dialing up the FOMO backfires 87% of the time. They're not afraid of missing out, they're afraid of messing up.
Fear of failure blocks more deals than competition
Growth → Acquisition
Anywhere between 40 and 60% of the average salesperson's qualified pipelines will be ultimately marked as closed loss, no decision.
Matt Dixon defines FOMU as "fear of messing up" to contrast with the widely known FOMO (fear of missing out).
The FOMU actually matters more than the FOMO. The FOMU is the fear of messing up. If you are trying to scare your customer into action, you're using scare tactics, but you're trying to scare somebody who's already afraid. The problem is they're not afraid of the thing you think they're afraid of.
80% of customers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk as opposed to increased upside, which is a good thing for startup founders to understand. We all love to talk about the art of the possible, everything we're going to enable in the future, but that's often really a sale that's going to resonate with another founder. For everybody else, particularly enterprises. You're avoiding the risk of not making your revenue target next quarter.