Sales
April 21, 2022
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?
We asked our sales team and other sellers to tell us:
Ready to find out? Let’s go.
Here are our sales discovery must-haves:
First rule of sales prospecting: more haste, less speed. (Second rule of sales prospecting: You do not talk about Sales Prospecting Club.)
Proper sales qualification makes discovery much easier: If you know they’re qualified, you can use discovery to go deep into their pain, etc. If not, you could end up confusing them, selling into the dessert, and wasting everyone’s time discussing problems you can’t actually solve.
The biggest challenge with discovery is often the sales professional’s desire to skip it and get right to the solution.
Huuuuuuge mistake.
Even if the problem and solution are obvious to you, that doesn't mean they’re obvious to your prospects.
It's easy to talk about what your product does. You're trained to do that from day one. It’s more difficult to understand what your customer wants and needs (and why they're even talking to you), then align your offering to meet that need.
Finding out what your prospect cares about allows you to become a trusted consultant who helps solve their problems. But you can only do this if you’re completely selfless about discovery.
That means not driving your own agenda. But instead being curious and many questions about their business so you can put together a tailored proposal. Having a solid, repeatable sales process that puts the prospect front and center also helps.
Bottom line, selling and building relationships is an uphill battle if you don’t genuinely care.
And the best way to demonstrate you care is:
Prospects don’t buy product features; they buy a solution to their problems. So it’s up to you to create an association in their minds between your product and a cure for their pain.
“People aren’t motivated by facts or logic, but by emotions,” says Vincent Burruano, “If you want them to change, you have to get them to see how changing will make them feel better.” It’s your job to uncover and quantify pain, make sure they recognize it, and understand how your value proposition relieves or eliminates it.
Of course, it helps a lot if you believe in your product. Sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be amazed how many salespeople don’t.
This is really all that matters: Is there alignment between your solution and their problems? If you end the discovery call knowing how you can help them, congratulations. You just ran a successful sales discovery process.
Remember, though, your prospect doesn’t necessarily know at this point that you can solve their problems, because you haven’t done a demo or solution validation yet. So we’re back to that whole it’s-not-about-you-it’s-about-them thing.
“A strong discovery process involves a flowing, back-and-forth conversation with the prospect about their issues and circumstances,” says Daniel O'Dowd of Sales Enablement Collective, “You want to avoid it feeling like an interview, or worse, an interrogation.”
At this point, it’s all about asking the right sales discovery questions to get them to open up. “Develop a list of questions that elevate the conversation,” says Vincent Burruano, “You need to demonstrate that you have expertise and experience in the area you’re selling in. Be properly prepared to have a business conversation with stakeholders that demonstrates your higher-level understanding of your role–to solve business problems–not simply to sell something.”
“Don't be afraid to ask hard questions right away,” says Jesús Vargas, Founder & CEO of Low Code Agency, “Those are usually related to price, timeline, and expectations.”
It can help to use a discovery call checklist or sales framework to get valuable insights into your prospect’s needs if they match your company’s criteria for what makes a sales opportunity.
Some sales discovery frameworks include:
This video from Pipedrive nicely explains how the MEDDIC framework can help you run an effective sales discovery process.
That said you should always:
Good discovery–and good sales in general–is never about checking off a list of open-ended questions prepared by your sales manager, marketing VP, or SDR manager. It’s about understanding your prospect’s business drivers and personal motivations. That means you need to keep it a bit loose and be prepared to run with things (without completely losing control of the conversation, of course).
Successful selling is all about building trust and rapport, which is easier to do if you don’t sound like a robot reading discovery call questions from a script. Sales prospecting techniques like listening more than you talk, and coming over as natural and conversational will get you a lot further.
Which brings us to…
Occasionally in B2B sales, you’ll meet a prospect who’s resistant to doing discovery. They get annoyed about having a second call after qualification, and just want to move forward to the product demo. When this happens, you can thank every sales rep they ever met who put them through a 30-min discovery call only to follow up with a bland, un-personalized, vanilla, one-size-fits-all demo they could have sent over as a YouTube link.
Result? The prospect feels discovery was wasted time that brought them zero value. And they’re right.
Colossal, nay, gargantuan mistake! (Stop us when that gets old.)
Of course, we know you’ll pull out all the stops to ensure a good discovery call where they see the value and feel heard.
Which involves:
Before Beyonce played Coachella, she reportedly rehearsed for eight months.
Let’s take a moment to think about that. Eight. Whole. Months.
Why are we telling you this? So you can’t complain when we tell you to rehearse your discovery meetings.
Running through your questions and the agenda in advance will make you feel more confident, which helps build rapport. You can also work with a mentor or partner, and listen back to previous discovery calls (your own and others’) using a conversation intelligence tool like Gong to analyze performance.
If you think you need to get all your discovery done in one 30-minute phone call early in the sales cycle, you’re going about it all wrong.
“People won’t want to make a significant investment if they don’t like and trust the sales professional,” says Vincent Burruano, “This often takes time to develop. Depending on the size and complexity of the product or service you offer, the discovery process may require multiple meetings with various stakeholders over many months or longer. Each sales process is different, but the need to build mutually beneficial relationships is consistent.”
Discovery isn’t a single event at a single point in time, but a process that runs across the sales cycle, right through to customer success and renewal. Think beyond just closing the deal, and focus on what will make this a lasting, mutually beneficial, long-term relationship.
You can even open every call with mini-discovery style questions to identify problems and new opportunities, especially when new people are looped in.
Here’s how to run a great discovery call the Mixmax way:
If you’re an AE and the SDR did the qualification, you still need to do your own pre-call research to understand their challenges and go into discovery ready to understand the business, their drivers, and how you can help.
This should include:
If you’re using the MEDDIC framework, check out this cool video from Zen Lenon showing how to use Mixmax to send a follow-up email that covers all the framework bases.
Skip to 12:00 mins to see how Zen Lenon uses Mixmax customizable email templates to create a repeatable MEDDIC follow up summary
Running a successful sales discovery process is an essential step in finding out how you can bring value to potential customers.
Here’s how you do it:
Say “salesperson” to a lot of people and the first thing that comes to their minds is a sleazy old car vendor who’s only interested in tricking them into buying something they don’t need or want. Often, by lying or hiding something during the sales process.
Now, we know this beautiful profession of ours is waaaay better than that. Good salespeople don't need to fool their prospects and can negotiate in good faith because they've earned their trust.
It all starts with a solid sales discovery process and sales reps who go outside their comfort zone to put the buyer front and center, understand their problems, and be eternally curious about how they can help. They know you can’t skip or rush this essential step, or pitch before you understand a prospect’s pain and needs.
They also know running a successful sales discovery process is a lot easier when you get a little sales engagement help from Mixmax, especially if you’re operating out of a fast-growing company using Salesforce and Gmail.
A discovery call in sales is a meeting between a sales representative and a prospect that happens after qualification. During a discovery call, the seller gathers information about the buyer’s pain, needs, decision-making process, and other factors to determine whether they are a good fit for their product.
The core elements of an effective sales discovery process are pre-call practice and preparation; asking the right open-ended questions; having an agenda for the meeting; establishing context and next steps; making it about the prospect, not the seller; and timely post-call follow-up.
The sales process has a discovery stage because it’s essential to understand your prospect’s pain, needs, and challenges to identify where you can bring value. And so you can tailor your proposal before you pitch your solution. The purpose of a discovery call is to build on the qualification stage and establish whether the opportunity is worth pursuing.
You can run a sales discovery call by summarizing previous meetings and information gathered; asking open-ended questions to delve deeper; using a framework or checklist to get the information you need; asking for confirmation or validation along the way by summarizing in their language, and agreeing on the next steps / booking the next meeting before ending the call.
Thanks for insights and inspiration to:
Jacco van der Kooij, Founder of Winning by Design
Vincent Burruano
Jesus Vargas
Yang Zhang, Co-founder of Plasmic
Allan Stolc, Founder and CEO of Bankly
Daniel O'Dowd Copywriter/Content at Sales Enablement Collective