Two-Sided Discovery

You are losing deals because you miss this easy win!

Ask top-performing salespeople what they feel is the most important stage of the sales process and they’ll tell you it is discovery. It’s a question I ask in all sales job interviews and I’ve never hired anyone who doesn’t gravitate their answer around the importance of understanding their prospect.

It is a bit of a trick question though. As we know, Discovery isn’t a stage. Despite so many sales processes having ‘Discovery’ as the early stage. The best salespeople never leave discovery.

👑 Curiosity is king!

The term comes from the legal profession where the best lawyers spend most of their time in the Discovery stage and relatively little time in court. Imagine a lawyer turning up to court without doing any discovery. That is how a salesperson should feel about pitching without discovery.

“Yada yada yada we know discovery is important Andy… Tell me something that the 1,000’s of other sales posts on the topic don’t tell me!”

Alright, how about this — You’ve been missing a MASSIVE benefit of discovery even though it was there staring you in the face!

Order takers don’t do enough discovery 👎🏼

Good salespeople always do discovery 👍🏼

Great salespeople go deep on discovery 😎

Uncommon salespeople make the prospect live in the moment of pain 🔥

What does it mean to make a prospect live in the moment of pain? Let’s flip it to something salespeople will relate to — Your forecast call — You know the feeling coming into a forecast call, you’ve got your Salesforce up to date, your talk track-ready, you’re a lean mean selling machine, right? That is until your sales manager starts prodding on your deals. You know the feeling when one of your deals comes under the spotlight and “ooh ouch” I hadn’t quite considered that.. Whilst you went into the forecast call feeling like King of the world 👑, now that the deal has come under scrutiny you are feeling the pressure. The chances are you now can’t wait for the forecast call to finish so you can get back to working on the pains you are feeling on your deal.

What has happened here is that your sales manager has gone ‘deep’ into your deal. The deeper they go the more you feel the pain and want to take action to fix it. What if you could impose that same pain onto your prospective customers? What if your questioning in discovery could make them feel like they need to fix what you are talking about right away?

That is the power of two-sided discovery — Where you do more than just find information that will be useful for your sales cycle, but you actually make the prospect feel their pain as you uncover it.

In the words of sales legend, John Kaplan you have to make your prospect live in the moment of PAIN!!

You have to make them go from feeling as though

Everything is fine.

.

to

‘There may be a problem’

to

I need to fix this IMMEDIATELY!

Top Tips for finding Pain:

Use open-ended questions to allow yourself to go deeper. Use the TED acronym: Tell me, Explain to me, Describe to me.

“Where there is smoke there is fire” — if you find some pain: dig, dig, dig and dig... As the saying goes “you don’t find smoke without fire”. Your goal is to create a raging inferno, so once you find smoke follow it to the fire and when you find fire fan those flames by using SPIN Selling and Open ended questions to get deeper.

Once your fire is burning ensure you get the customer to quantify the magnitude of the fire. This will help your customer to realise the size of the pain as well as setting you up for your value creation and negotiations further down the road.

Turn the pains into a call to action — Whilst it’s great to surface pains, be sure to align actions against them. A good way to do this is to review the pains you have uncovered at the end of the meeting and ask the customer to prioritize them.

Do you feel like you’ve done a great job of surfacing and implicating pain? Are you proud of yourself? Great! Nice job, but don’t stop there! Now is the perfect time to ask the killer question: “Who else do you think is impacted by this challenge?” Get the answer, get the intro and go again!

The more people you involve and the bigger the pain the bigger the problem.

Remember:

Big solutions for little problems = Big discounts

Solving big problems = Little discount.

Happy selling!