You win and lose deals in the discovery process. This is part of your audition for a prospective client, when they will verify that you can create value for them as they pursue a change to improve their results. Most salespeople do a surface-level discovery, as they have been taught to elicit a problem and the client’s pain points.
While your world and mine have become increasingly complex, many still believe that identifying a problem is the high-water mark in discovery. Nothing could be further from the truth. Buyers and decision makers are looking for the salesperson’s ability to create value above and beyond what most salespeople deliver. This poses a challenge and an opportunity to distinguish yourself and your approach, should you choose to do more than ask about their sources of dissatisfaction.
Advanced Discovery
Any advanced discovery approach will start with finding the truth about the client’s problems and result in identifying the root causes. Asking the client about their problem and its implications is a shallow approach that will almost certainly prevent you from seeing the entire picture.
There are four areas you need to consider if you want to do an advanced discovery that creates value for your clients. Unfortunately, most salespeople haven’t been taught or trained to do real discovery, so they are not consultative and address only one of the four areas needed to be effective.
The External Environment
Longtime readers of this blog will know that you need to do the reading and the research necessary to understand how the external environment impacts your clients and sales prospects. Without assessing the environment, you miss the headwinds and tailwinds in their industry. This area of discovery explores the trends and forces that are impacting your prospective client. In our methodology, we use this to provide an executive briefing. See Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition.
Sales Champions and the Subjective Truth
When you sit across from your sales champion and ask them questions, you are accessing the person’s subjective belief. Some part of what they tell you is true, but a large part is subjective. If you accept everything they say as the single, complete truth, you will miss much, possibly even the root cause of the client’s challenges.
The Objective Truth
I would be surprised if you have been taught or trained to acquire the objective truth of the client’s situation. To do this you must ask your client to provide you with the data that helps you determine what or why your contact is failing to produce the results they need. Here is an example I might use when talking to a sales leader: What is your average win rate? Their answer tells me something concrete about their sales force, and it also illuminates how the sales organization operates. A simple, clear metric like win rate offers an objective truth.
The Collective Subjective
More often than not, in B2B sales, you will need to build consensus. In some cases, you will need something like organizational consensus, which means each business function weighs in on any significant change. One question that might help you is: How prepared is your team to make the change, and what will we need to do to make sure they have the help they might need?
The Discovery Compass
You are trying to follow a path to the root causes of the client’s problems. By asking your clients questions in the four areas described here, you can follow the path to discovering what is true. In the industry where I learned to sell, my clients would tell me about their presenting problems, but most of the time, they didn’t disclose the root causes. For example, the client may have underinvested in the results they need or created a toxic environment. On occasion, the client would avoid sharing what they knew to be the root cause. Other times, they were unaware of the true source of their problem.
The discovery compass allows you to ask the questions that will eventually lead you to the root cause. But there is still more to understand in advanced discovery.
Our methodology requires the salesperson to create value for their client in every interaction, especially in discovery. You may have been taught to ask questions to acquire information, but it is less likely that you have been told questions designed to help your client discover what they need to understand about their problem and improve their results.
By creating value through your questions, you position yourself as a potential partner in your prospective client’s change initiative. Your client needs you to be consultative and ensure they make the best decision for their company to reach the better results they need. If you need help improving your discovery, See Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative.
Navigating Toward Value
In every sales pursuit, you need to navigate toward value for your client. In early discovery, you create value in the sales conversation by helping them identify the root cause by asking questions and sharing your insights. At some point, you create value in discovery by helping your client learn what they need to know to make a decision.
Unless you are consultative enough to recognize that your client is interested in discovering what they need to know, your discovery will be rather pedestrian, creating little or no value in this most important sales conversation.
When you explore all four areas of discovery, both you and your client learn from each other as you navigate toward value in the sales conversation. Later, the value you create will come from a solution that will address the root cause of the problem and speed your client to the outcomes they need to succeed with their change initiative.
Leaving this article, look back over your last couple of deals and identify the root cause and what your contacts need to learn to solve their problem.
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