Skipping Discovery Will Kill Your Deals
It’s no secret by now that your sales process needs to be a defined set of steps that bring a prospect from infancy to a mature and productive client.
Where it gets nuanced is knowing how to guide the prospect through your sales process toward an economic outcome.
The best sales professionals do this instinctively
In this post, I’ll discuss how to position discovery questions to make prospects feel the pain in their current business and run toward your solution faster.
It all starts with discovery…
If you fail to understand a prospect’s needs, you will fail to sell
Discovery is the act of asking targeted questions to understand your prospect better, while also surfacing pain points in their current business.
The idea is to have them see the bigger picture through their lens and become open to exploring solutions.
Let’s try it out…
If you were selling an automatic can opener to a restaurant you may lead a dialogue like this:
You: “How many canned ingredients do you and your team handle on a daily basis?”
Prospect: “A lot, they are a part of our lunch and dinner menus.”
You: “What is your current process for prepping your canned ingredients for each shift?”
Prospect: “We task one of our chefs solely with opening cans while the rest of our staff preps everything else, we are stretched pretty thin right now.”
You: “If you had a more efficient process for prepping your canned ingredients, do you think that would make a meaningful impact on your team’s efficiency each shift?”
What do you think the prospect would say?
Here are the two main things we learned through discovery:
- The restaurant uses a lot of canned ingredients
- They have an inefficient process for opening their canned ingredients
By asking the right questions we can lead prospects down the right train of thought and leverage the pain points that they bring up.
Armed with these two valuable pieces of information we can begin to build a case on why they need an automatic can opener for their restaurant.
Alternatively…
What might have happened if we started the conversation by talking about how fast the can opener is, and how many different settings it has?
They may have just said: “we already have a process in place for this and don’t have a need for your solution.”
Asking discovery questions is how you build the business case for your solution
Once the prospect accepts that your solution can solve their pain points you can start to discuss all of the great features and functions it has.
If you skip discovery, it is guaranteed to kill your deals before they are even alive
Think about your approach to sales presentations, are you asking enough targeted questions to your prospects?
Would you benefit from learning more about sales strategies to grow your business?
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BR
