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 second 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 previous post (point-of-view and priorities), you can read it here.
Today, we’ll cover current state and blockers.
Current State
A common mistake is covering current state too broadly. Technically, current state could include everything your buyer spends their time on.
But you don’t care about how they spend all of their time. You only care about how they spend their time working on a priority that you might support.
If you successfully execute part one of discovery, you already know their top priorities. And, you’ve isolated the priorities that your solution addresses. So we can get right into relevant current state with a question like this:
“Now that we’ve established [priority], I’d like to better understand how you are addressing today. Can you walk me through your current process?”
Make sure to thoroughly understand their current state. Ask clarifying questions and dig deeper using follow-ups like:
“Can you tell me more about…”
“I want to be sure I understand – can you further explain…”
“That sounded like a big part of your process. Can you go deeper into…”
Done well, we are only a few minutes into a discovery call and you understand how they currently solve the problems you solve.
You’ll find this much better than asking, “Can you tell me about your role?” and having them list irrelevant tasks while you pretend to care.
Blockers
After you understand their current state (will likely require follow-up questions and clarifying questions) it’s time to uncover blockers.
Sometimes the prospect will clearly label problems with their current state that you can dig into with clarifying questions. Sometimes you need to dig a bit.
If you need to dig tactfully, here’s a sample question:
“Thanks for helping me understand how you solve for [priority] today! You’ve got a great handle on things – where do you feel the most friction is in the process?”
If you can be more direct (based on their openness) you could just ask:
“Where are you seeing blockers?”
By now, you are likely somewhere between 10-20 minutes into the conversation. You know their priorities, how they are trying to solve them, and where they are getting stuck.
In the next email, we’ll cover translating blockers to negative consequences worth solving with money.
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!
