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.
This is the third email of a series where I’ll walk you through the outcomes (and example questions) that may help you improve your ability to quickly engage in deep discovery.
If you missed the first email (point-of-view and priorities), you can read it here.
If you missed the second email (current state and blockers) you can read it here.
Today, we’ll cover negative consequences.
Current State vs. Negative Consequences
The most common mistake I see in discovery is mistaking a negative current state for a negative consequence:
“They have siloed data.”
“The app frequently crashes.”
“Teams are wasting time on manual work.”
These are all descriptions of what’s happening (current state). Just because they are negative definitions doesn’t make them negative consequences – negative consequences tells us why the current state matters. Here’s how it might transform:
“They have siloed data” -> “They can’t make decisions fast enough to capture market share when the market shifts”
“The app frequently crashes” -> “They are losing users to their competition”
“Teams are wasting time on manual work” -> “Launch deadlines are missed because engineering capacity is wasted on non-differentiating work”
Put differently, negative consequences answer the “so what” of the current state.
Note – you can ALWAYS ask more “so what’s.” Because you can doesn’t mean you should, if you get to the point where you are asking “So if the app keeps crashing, you lose customers to the competition, and the CTO decides to fire you – so what? What’s the impact?” you’ve gone too far.
We’ll talk more about quantifying and deepening negative consequences in the next email to help you find this balance.
While it’s possible to go too far with negative consequences, it’s much more common to not go far enough.
Uncovering Negative Consequences
Here is how I recommend uncovering negative consequences after you’ve pulled out priorities, current state, and blockers:
“You mentioned [blocker] – have you measured the impact on your [priority]?
Notice how you can’t do this stage of discovery without first successfully executing the earlier phases. If you don’t know current state, blockers, and priorities, the negative consequences you uncover will be annoyances your customer is unlikely to address.
Then, a follow-up question to help you better understand the breadth of the negative consequence:
“Who else across the organization is impacted by [negative consequence]?”
If all goes to plan, and you’ve successfully executed the first steps outlined in this email series, you now know:
- Priorities
- Current State
- Blockers
- Negative Consequences
- Who else should be involved in the deal
Not bad for an initial discovery call.
In the next email, we’ll go into uncovering goal current state.
Until then,
Kyle
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.
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