One of my three priorities for Q3 is to improve my organization’s discovery conversion rate.
To help move this priority forward, I’ve spent several hours working with our enablement, marketing, and operations teams to create a “First Meeting Deck” to drive meaningful, value-based conversations early in the sales process.
This exercise has forced me to consider how discovery can be taught and executed at scale.
Over the following few posts, I’ll walk you through the outcomes (and example questions) that may help you improve your ability to quickly engage in deep discovery.
Today, we’ll start with point-of-view and priorities.
Point-of-view
When discovery begins, the buyer’s immediate bias is, “The seller doesn’t understand me or my business.”
Without overcoming that bias, your buyer is unlikely to open up.
My immediate priority is to overcome that bias by sharing what I’ve learned about them in a quick summary:
- Company objectives
Company focus areas my research surfaced (public reports, recent news, industry trends, etc.)
- Team objectives
Team-level focus areas my research surfaced (LinkedIn profiles, job descriptions, tools used, etc.)
It might sound like this:
“I wanted to take three minutes to validate my research with you and then isolate your priorities. If your priorities align with anything we can help with, I’d love to discuss how you are working towards those priorities today.
The goal would be to end the call with a general understanding of if/how we could help you, and you can let me know if it’s worth further conversation.”
Then, I’d take 2-3 minutes to highlight what I’ve learned for those categories.
This shouldn’t be a lecture. Just enough to show that I’ve come prepared to have a meaningful conversation and overcome the initial bias of “this guy doesn’t know a thing about me.”
Priorities
Every business has a massive number of problems, most of which go ignored. If you tie your deal to an “ignorable” problem, you’ll run long sales cycles that often end with you being ignored and the problem neglected in favor of more painful issues.
I want to quickly narrow the conversation to the buyer’s most meaningful priorities to avoid this outcome.
I might ask:
“What did I get wrong or miss from my research?”
“How would you stack rank these priorities?”
If these two steps are done right, we are only a few minutes into the discovery, and we’ve earned (some) credibility while getting a customer-validated priority list ranked in order of importance.
If you can’t help solve one of their top priorities, it’s a great time to end the conversation so you can spend time with customers prioritizing a problem you solve.
If your solution can help solve one of those top priorities, we have something worth further discovery.
That’s it for email one of three on this discovery topic!
In the following post, we’ll explore the questions you can ask to quickly uncover their most relevant current state and pain points.
p.s. My goal is to help more than 100,000 AEs sell more, whether or not they purchase my products. I’ll keep sharing the best of what I’m seeing work through email, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
If you want all of my best content at once so you can accelerate your success (and grow your commission checks next quarter instead of next year), join more than 4,000 motivated sellers at hitmyquota.com!
