Why Customer Discovery is the heart of Product and Sales

Understanding customer needs is the heart of both product development and selling. But eliciting what pains and needs customers have is both an art and science — it requires practice and understanding your target customer’s persona well enough to know what questions will resonate. Fortunately, this is an area where sales reps and product managers can partner together.

The key to great discovery is getting customers to talk. Getting customers to talk means asking open-ended questions — and tailoring those questions enough to make it relevant to their industry or job. For example, an open-ended question like “tell me more about your biggest problems” is sometimes way too broad; while a question to an IT Operations leader like “tell me more about the challenges you face when responding to customer audits” could be a bit more specific and help you get closer to the problems.

We leverage Chorus.io extensively — an automated transcription service for sales calls. When the sales rep or product manager is doing 50%+ more of the talking, this is the biggest indicator that we’re not asking enough open-ended questions. We want that talk/listen ratio inverted — ask a few open ended questions that gets the customer to share more about the job they are trying to get done.

Here’s a few good questions to ask to get you started:

• So, tell me more about what prompted you to take a call with us today?
• Was there a recent event that made you decide to look for alternatives?
• Help me understand the goals you have for your job or team?

Once you’ve started making progress, try to understand the pains:

• Explain how you’re solving this problem today. What’s working well, what isn’t?
• If you could wave a magic wand, what would you like to solve?
• Describe for me what success looks like in 6 months?

And measure the negative consequences:

• When you aren’t able to solve <problem>, tell me about what could happen?
• Explain to me the process your team has to go through to fix <problem>? How much time does that take?
• When was the last time you experienced this <problem>? Describe the process for addressing it?

For each of these questions, product managers can help sales reps make the questions more contextual — as it relates to the job, product, or category you’re selling into. More context = more credibility = great customer, sales, and product success!