How many deals are you losing in discovery? 

If you don’t take the time to dig deeper into your prospect’s challenges, key drivers, and company to understand how you can help them achieve their goals, then our guess would be, a lot. 

Without being on the ball in discovery, you can have the world’s greatest product but lose your sale to an AE with better questions.

But in a rush to get to the demo, companies often skip this step altogether, which wastes precious time and resources and leads to prospects dropping out of the sales funnel because they were never truly a good fit.

Too many AEs make prospects sit through a call only to give them a vanilla demo that doesn’t specifically address their problems and pains. 

We sell to salespeople, so we know all about how challenging discovery is.

The sales discovery process is an essential step in learning how you can bring value to your potential customers. But all too often, in a hurry to get to the demo, it’s rushed through as part of qualification or even skipped altogether. 

Biiiig mistake.

As Jacco van der Kooij, says, “Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice,” and this couldn’t be more true in sales. 

Trying to pitch a product without first understanding prospect pain or how they’ll use your solution is a crutch that lower-performing salespeople lean on way too heavily.

A crutch that will come back to bite you when prospects drop out of the sales cycle without buying. Or worse, sign up, find the product doesn’t meet their needs, cancel the contract at the first opportunity, and badmouth you on review sites. 

“Everyone is in a rush today to get to the punch line,” says Vincent Burruano, President of Vince Burruano Consulting Services. “Successful selling requires a time investment.”

How can you avoid these pitfalls?