#446 - How to Teach Discovery Without Confusing the Hell Out of Your Sales Team | 30MPC Playbook (Lead)

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Everybody. And welcome to this leadership playbook of 30 minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Farooq and I'm here with my co host Nick Sigelski. And folks, today we are going to try to literally teach the hardest skill in sales to teach your sales team, and that is discovery. Why is discovery the hardest skill in sales to teach? Well, if you think about like a cold call script, it's like you've got your opener, your problem prop, and those usually stay the same every time you open a cold call, they have a little bit of customization and then most objections can be bucketed into a couple of steps that you can use and then you get off the call pretty quickly. Or if you look at a sales process, you know that you need to take these series of steps to get to power, to get budget approval, to get a contract signed, get through vendor review, et cetera. But discovery requires, frankly, just teaching a lot of EQ to your reps. Because you can't just teach your reps discovery questions out of context. You need to teach them what to listen for, how to properly deliver a question that doesn't sound cringy with tone, when to lay off the questions because the prospect is getting a little bit sheepish and they're leaning back in their chair and they're getting tired of discovery. So a lot of discovery involves you teaching the balance between here's a rigid discovery script that makes your prospect feel like you're not listening at all versus here's like a loose set of problems you need to go find and your reps are totally wandering all over the place in the discovery call. So we're going to teach you how to teach discovery to your team step by step. As a caveat, we are going to be using the 30 MPC discovery methodology and we will be giving high level definitions of what the frameworks are in our methodology. But we're not going to literally teach the entire framework from scratch. We did that in an episode earlier this week on the sales show where we actually walked through our entire discovery framework a couple of days ago. So go catch that episode. Either scroll down in the feed or go in the show notes. If you want to go deep on how to actually do discovery, we are more going to focus on how to roll out those frameworks in this episode.

And so we've split this episode into three different chapters. Chapter one we're going to talk about how you can build your minim viable discovery 101 framework as a sales leader. Chapter 2 of this playbook gets into how you actually teach your team to navigate through that framework once you've built it. And then chapter three is about style and skilling up. How do you get your team from good to great to killers? And so you should expect to learn in this episode. One, the biggest mistake that sales leaders make when they are teaching discovery. And then two, a step by step breakdown of the different ways, places and strategies that you can use to actually teach your team those skills. So let's get into this thing. Let's roll the tape.

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All right, so the first section is you need to build your own internal discovery framework. So what I usually found really helpful when I was the VP of sales over at Pave is there are a million ways a discovery call can go. But try to break the discovery call into the sum of its parts. So the three major sections of the discovery call are the agenda, the meat of the call, where you're trying to find a problem and give them faith that you can solve it. And then you have the next steps, which are the last 5 minutes of the call. For each of those 3 parts, we had 3 basic steps that you needed to take in each of those parts. So it was like a three by three framework. So in the agenda we used a framework called purpose, plan, Outcome. In the meat of the call, we were like, here are the problems you need to get a.k.a. our problem trees. Here are the questions you can use to uncover those trees. And then here's the give and take you can do to make sure that it doesn't feel like an interrogation. So you're like giving as you're going. And then the final piece when you're setting next steps, we use what we were calling the five minute drill. And there were three questions you would ask in the five minute drill. Do you want to buy, when do you want to buy, and how do you buy? And so when you give reps, like a high level three by three framework, they have a series of simple steps that are not a full script. It's not like a 17 page checklist that they'll get lost in. But like high level, they know that they need to do three things at any point in the call and they will mentally be oriented at all points of the discovery call. So they're never getting lost.

I think this was one of the biggest things, Armand, that when I started leading sales teams and coaching reps that like, I didn't realize when I went from being a top rep to leading folks, because there's so many little things that you do when you're a really, really great rep, it can be really tempting to be like, wait, here's the 57 point checklist of all the things that you need to do in a discovery call. And the reality is that actually overwhelms a lot of reps. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. If you can break things into threes and make it simpler, folks will find their way and attach to the best pract. And then you can layer in the fourth point, the fifth point, the 57th point. So do not let perfect be the enemy of good when you're breaking the call into the sum of its parts. Once you have broken the call into the sum of its parts, the next piece is honestly the most challenging part to teach, which is that middle piece of the call. Navigating the actual conversation that your rep has with the prospect. And the biggest mistake that I see sales leaders make when they're teaching reps how to run a discovery call is, is they think the key to training the team is to train them on the questions that they should be asking. The reality is there are so many different combinations and permutations of the prospect's situation that they're in the tech they're using today. They have this problem, but they don't have that problem. They want this impact, but they don't want this impact oh, and they need this integration over here. It can be really overwhelming if you are just teaching your reps and here's the questions to ask because they'll get on a call and if it goes off the rails, they don't know how to get things back on track. Instead of teaching your reps the questions to ask, you actually need to teach them the information that they need to get. Because if they know what they need to get the prospect to say, they can figure out what they need to ask. And even if they ask it in sort of a weird way, one, like that's better than them asking eloquently the wrong thing. And two, most prospects will give your reps a second chance. If they ask a weird, weird question, they'll be like, wait, what did you mean by that? And your rep will have another at that. So it's more important that you teach them where they need to go with the call. And what that requires you to do as a leader is to build out for your team the four different layers of the information that you need to get on a discovery call and then help teach your team how those different layers lead to each other. And that is what is called building out a problem tree. And so if you're listening to this, we actually have a free toolkit. There's a link in the show notes that teaches you how to build your own problem trees. I recommend taking a look at that. But for those of you who want to just keep listening here, there are four different layers to the tree. Layer one is simply the prospect situation. How are they getting things done today? Layer 2 is the problems, the operational problems that your prospect might have. Those are problems that you can solve and those typically sound like things that, that a champion would complain about. Ah, this is a really manual process or it takes me too long to run this report or something of that nature. We then once we've gotten that layer, we're not going to be able to sell a deal off of a four or five figure problem. But typically those operational problems lead to the next layer which are executive level problems, which are typically related to making money, saving money or mitigating risk. And so an executive level problem sounds like bad news that a VP would have to deliver to a CEO. The fourth layer, the business impact layer, is literally a board level priority, a C level metric or existential risk to the business. And if you can teach your team how to turn situations into problems and turn those operational problems into executive level problems and quantify those executive level problems by bringing them down to the business impact layer. Now your team knows how to discover.

So let's talk about how you actually build out these trees yourself. So to recap, the four levels are situation, how they do it today, operational problem, what a champion complains about. Executive problem, Bad news a VP delivers to a CEO Business impact C level metric, Board level, priority or Existential Risk. The way you actually build these trees out is you start with the operational problem. You don't start at the situation because there are a million situations your prospect could possibly be in, but there are only a handful of problems your product can solve. And so ask yourself, what is the most common thing that your champions will complain about? That's step one. That will usually, for example, at Pave give you something like, my champions always complain about how much time they're spending planning compensation and spreadsheets. If they don't complain about stuff very often, which would be surprising, you can also try inverting the feature benefit. And so go on your website and look for a phrase that sounds like spend less time planning compensation and spreadsheets. And the problem is wasting time planning compensation and spreadsheets. So just invert the feature benefit. So once you have the operational problem, then you go up to the situations and you just ask yourself, under what situations is that operational problem going to exist? So, for example, in order for people to be spending tons of time planning comp and spreadsheets, they have to be planning comp in spreadsheets. So that's the situation. But if they're using a competitive comp planning tool, that actually means that that problem doesn't apply and I need to have a separate tree for rip and replace deals. So you've got the situation and the operational problem. And now what you're going to do is you're just going to so what down you're going to ask so what? To get to the executive problem and the business impact. So what that sounds like is if someone's saying, I'm spending way too much time planning confidence spreadsheets the next so what behind that is? Well, that usually means that you're making compensation mistakes. I was like, well that's not good. That's an executive problem. Because compensation mistakes cause massive risk for the company. Well, so what? So what if you're making compensation mistakes? Well, that gets us to the business impact, which is, well, you either have key employees leaving the company in a broader retention issue related to compensation, or you have massive PR risk because people are literally going to threaten to sue your company for screwing up their pay. And so what you want to do is at each layer of the tree, ask yourself, so what a couple of times to get all the way down, but then like work your way back up and be like, are there any other executive problems that could happen because of this operational problem? And like flesh out all the branches of the tree until you run out of things that your prospect complains about. And that will give your reps a framework where it's like, okay, wherever the prospect takes us, whatever a prospect complains about, we have a way to turn that problem into a bigger problem, into a business impact. So once you stop finding things that your prospect complains about, that means your trees are actually complete. So you usually want to build like two to three different trees for different situations, whether that's by product or whether that's for rip and replace deals versus other common situations. A prospect might be doing things, whether it's like an in house provider or something like that.

One thing that you taught me, Armand, is like, these actually don't need to be perfect at first, like you were going to iterate on these over time. So don't worry about getting it perfect. It's about having a map to start in the beginning. So once we've actually built out these problem trees and we have our discovery 101 framework, let's talk about how we get our reps to adopt this and actually show up in the right way on the calls.

So section two, let's talk about rolling the training out to your team. So first of all, when does this happen? Usually this will happen during onboarding and I like to break discovery into two to three sessions. You'll notice the three by three rule again. So one way you can do this is you can cover the intro to the discovery call and the bookends on the first training. And then in the second training you can walk them just through the problem trees so they really start to get acquainted with the problems. And then the third training, you can walk them through the questions they can ask and the ways they can tell stories and balance them, give and take, as they work their way down the trees. You can also do this in two trainings where again, you do an overview, the discovery call and you cover the bookends. But I really, really recommend you focus on the middle part of the call in its entire training on its own because it's so, so, so complex. So let's talk through training that middle portion of the call, because again, the purpose, plan, outcome agenda and the five minute drill. Do you want to buy when do you want to buy? How do you buy? Are three pretty standard questions that you always ask. But again, there's a lot of listening and nuanced skills when it comes to the middle part of the call when you're asking questions to uncover problems. So the same way that we walked through the discovery trees, you sort of want to walk your reps through that logic first. So you pull up your discovery trees and you walk them through the situation, the operational problem, the executive problem, and the business impact on your second or third discovery trees. I like to quiz my reps and be like, okay, here's the situation and here's the operational problem. All right, what's an executive problem that happens because of this? What's a business impact that happens because of this? And that really starts to code it in your team's brain. And notice that we are literally not talking about any discovery questions yet. From there, once you feel like the concept of the problem trees are clear, I like to start with one example question per layer in the tree to keep it simple. So to get to a situation, I usually just have reps ask, why'd you take the call? And a prospect will usually say something like, oh, we're planning compensation on spreadsheets. That's a situation. It's not really an operational problem. So to get to an operational problem, I would usually teach reps multiple choice questions. And that just sounds like, hey, typically when you're planning compensation on spreadsheets, it's either you're spending like so much time in spreadsheets, or it's really hard to oversee manager compensation decisions in spreadsheets. Which one is it for you? And that's how you get to an operational problem. When you want to get to an executive problem, I usually teach a magic moment question, which is if someone says like, oh, I don't have visibility in a manager's planning comp, I'm going to say, hey, my guess is you didn't wake up yesterday and be like, man, I have no idea what they're doing. I guess, like, when did you realize that that was a problem? Was it you? You've stumbled upon an incorrect comp decision with someone making a bias decision. Are you just crazy checking these in the middle of the night? Like, what was it? And you almost always get a painful story of when that operational problem turned into a real life executive problem that was like hair on fire. And then the final question that I'll teach to get to business impact is a push pull question. So if someone says like, oh my God, we had one manager who was like giving someone a comp increase of 10% even though they got a performance rating of a 2. You can be like, oh, shoot, like obviously I understand, yada, yada, yada. And then you ask a push pull question that sounds like, hey, like, I want to make sure that we're actually solving the right problem here. You mentioned that solving for compensation and equities and all that stuff is like top, top, top priority for your team. Like, how much of that is this impacting? Or is this something that's like, not actually that important to solve and we should focus on solving another problem? And so that's a push pull question that you can use to uncover business impact. Once they have one question at each layer in the tree, you want to make sure that they're not just interrogating their reps. So I teach them two really basic triggers that you can use to balance give and take. Number one, whenever a prospect says more than two things, recap it and drill into one, whichever one sounds like the bigger problem. And then number two, whenever you get to the bottom of a problem, always tell a story of how you've helped another customer solve that problem before you move on to the next problem. And that is how you balance give as you take. And there are a million other tactics that we walked through both in the course and also in the episode earlier this week, but those are like the basic ones. One question at each level of the tree and then two basic listening triggers that allow you to do give and take.

A lot of reps want to ask these like triple axle, shit, spin humbling disclaimer, negative business impact questions. And the goal is to keep it simple to get to the right things. So keep it simple and then layer on the complexity later on. So now it comes time to actually make this real and layer on this framework on top of real prospect interactions. And the best way to teach your reps this stuff safely in a real way is via tape reviews. Now what you're going to do is you're going to show how these trees and framework work in action against call reviews. Before you even get into the call review, before you even hit play on the tape, you should be asking your reps for their point of view on the call and you're going to ask them a couple different things. One, you should hear their point of view on who is the company type that we're talking to and what sort of Persona are we meeting with? Because that's often going to dictate where you take the Call. When I was selling to law firms, the way I would navigate a call with a CFO of an insurance defense law firm would be really, really different than how I would navigate a call with a managing partner of a personal injury law firm. So your rep needs to know, where are they even oriented company type Persona. From there, you're going to ask them, all right, based on that, what's the PPO agenda that we would set for this meeting? Based on that, again, our point of view, what trees do we think are going to be relevant? What problems do you think we should explore? What should we not based on what we know before we even listen to a word the prospect said? And then the last piece is, you want to ask them, okay, in the last five minutes of the call, when we're running through our five minute drill to set and drive next steps, what are we going to ask for? For a next step, an ideal next step in our world and who are we going to ask to get in front of? Because you want to train the team on, it's not just about great discovery, it's also about driving the deal at the end. And this trains the skill of every single call. They need to be prepared for what they will ask for at the end.

From there, you actually begin the tape. And the major places you want to stop in the tape are as follows. Number one, whenever a prospect says something, you just want to ask your reps, let's recap and ask ourselves, where did that prospect drop us in the tree? And this is going to train your reps for proper listening skills. Because they're going to be listening for the moment that a prospect said something that drops them into the discovery tree. From there, pull up the tree and ask your reps, where do we need to go next? And that will usually be like, oh, they gave us the time in spreadsheets. Operational problem, we need to get to the executive problem of comp mistakes. It's like, okay, the final thing you do is you just ask your reps, what question can we ask to uncover that problem? From there, you brainstorm some questions and then you click play. And then you see what the rep actually did. And sometimes the rep might not have given the exact answer that the room gave, but it was still good. Other times it was totally off. And what you want to do is you want to give that rep the chance to give themselves feedback first when you pause again. So let the rep give themselves feedback first and then let the room chime in. So you basically just like keep running this over and over and over again. You stop after the major prospect riffs. You recap what they said, plot yourself on the tree, ask yourself what problem is next. Ask what question comes next. Click play, give the rep recap. Repeat. Give the rep feedback. Repeat over and over and over again.

You don't want to make these tape reviews take all day, and you want to focus the bulk of the time on these tape reviews, on that discovery skill. And so when you're doing these tape reviews, I recommend skipping around a ton. Put the speed of the call review on 1.25 or even 1.5, and then skip the pieces that are not related to discovery. So skip the upfront rapport building, skip the prospect monologues that are unrelated to problems, and just summarize that stuff. Instead of using the transcript, skip when your rep is showing the demo that everyone has already seen or the rep story that everybody already knows. You want to focus on the major prospect rifts that are related to your trees. And then train on, what did we hear? Where are we in the tree? Where do we need to go? What question do we ask to bridge us to where we need to go?

A lot of times when people are going through these tape reviews, they'll freak out because they're like, prospect gave us a problem that wasn't in the tree. That is a feature, not a bug. So you want to have your first two or three basic trees mapped out going into these tape reviews. But the way that you actually perfect these discovery trees is you run tape reviews and you beat up the trees. And then over time, it's sort of like this seasoned cast iron that you've been cooking in for 20 years, where like has all the bacon fat and the marbling of the steak and the duck breast you cooked at all ingrained in there. Like, you got to season your trees over these years and over an entire year running tape reviews. Ultimately, your trees will be able to cover your reps wherever they go. The final piece before we get into the ongoing training and coaching of this thing is you can't expect your reps to ask perfect questions on day one. It's going to be a little bit cringy at the beginning. And I usually like to walk reps through, like a progression of three levels of selling. So level one, when you're just starting out in discovery, especially like SMB sellers, I'm like, did you set an agenda that set the expectation for discovery? Did you find one problem and did you ask the three questions in the five minute drill? Okay, did you at least do the right steps. It might not have been pretty, but did you do them? Level two is once you've got those steps down, did you get it stylistically correct? So did you balance give and take? When the prospects started to lean back a little bit and get defensive, were you able to ask questions in a way that sounded smooth and conversational instead of asking a couple of questions out of context? So that's number two. Number three is once you get smooth, this is really when you get into like enterprise selling is. This is when you can start to challenge customers who either have given themselves an incorrect diagnosis, for example, they're like, I don't need a compensation planning tool and they're digging their heels in. Or you're able to expand a prospect's problem horizons. So for example, if someone thinks they only have a four or five figure problem, if someone only thinks they have stomach acid, you can turn that into a six or seven figure problem by educating them on how that's actually going to lead to stomach ulcers, for instance, if they don't take care of themselves.

So let's move now to section three. Armand that talks about the past two sections were on how to build your framework and how to get reps up to level 101 where they can actually execute on that framework. But you've taught me discovery is not a one time onboarding. Great, you're good to go. Let's talk about how we iterate on this stuff and get people up to mastery.

My general approach to training is a lot of people take the 80, 20 approach, which is they spend 80% of their time training their team, 20% of their time coaching and reinforcing the concepts. And the problem is when you spend 80% of your time training your team once upfront, they forget 90% of the training. And so what you want to do is you want to give them the minimum viable skills again, those three by three frameworks and spend 20% of your time training your team upfront and then spend 80% of your time coaching them every single week to level 201, 301 and 401. You use training to get to 101. You use coaching to get to 201. 301, 401. Okay, so there are three major places or coaching rhythms where I like to reinforce discovery. Number one is in live or async tape reviews with the team. Number two is in role plays and one on one settings. And then number three is during pipeline reviews, believe it or not. So let's Start with the most common place. Every single Friday, I would run a team wide tape review and once the team got bigger, we would run it in a segment or in a pod and that would be Friday at noon. So it's always fun to like do this stuff over lunch. It's like a fun end of week development thing when people like aren't on the grind of a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.

Okay.

And we already gave the framework for how to run that tape. But ideally what you want to do is you want to pick your reps who you've either pre screened these tapes, the managers have nominated them, or you know, it's a rep who's pretty good and you don't want someone bombing on this thing. And every single week you're going to use a good tape to show a good example of some places where a rep has navigated the tree. And not only is this going to reinforce the discovery framework, it's also going to help with some recognition for some of your top performers. That's number one as part of these Friday tape reviews. The other reason they should be good, other than the fact that it's really awkward to have one rep have their tape scrutinized when it is not good, is this allows you to build discovery tape libraries. So for example, you can say for the next three weeks I want to do competitive takedown tapes only. So I only want to see, rip and replace tapes. And what you can do is you can basically use your tape reviews and as a function for your reps to bring the best tapes to the top. And now anytime someone onboards, they can go and watch three competitive tape reviews from the top reps on your team.

Another great way to start to iterate and train to get to 201 and 301, is with role plays or practice. And this can be something you can do in lieu of a tape review. You might actually do this with the whole team, but you can also do it in a one on one setting. The good part about practice, intentional practice in lieu of a tape review is you can get really, really high repetition on one specific thing. Thing where you can drill it again and again and again. The con is it usually is a little bit less realistic because it is a salesperson working with you, another salesperson. And so this can be really helpful. However, if you're trying to really improve on one specific piece of the call. Some keys to having really, really good practice are as follows. Number one, let the rep know the specific situation that is going on. Don't Be like, all right, cool, we're going to practice discovery calls. Go give them some of that firmographic of like, all right, here's what type of company I am, here's what Persona I'm going to be. What problems do you think we should explore? And then get into it. So set up the situation. Right? Two, you don't want this to be softball bs. You actually need to press them a little bit and act like a real prospect where you might be a little bit cagey or you might be a little bit opaque. That's good. You want to make this stuff realistic. And then three, this is actually something Armand, that I learned from Katie Kevin Dorsey, where he talked about practicing as a way to prepare for a future call. So if your rep has a big discovery call on the books for next Friday, make the situation that you're doing that practice drill on the situation that that prospect is in. So they actually get reps that help them prepare for a call that's going to happen in the future.

And then the last place is every manager's favorite exercise, which is pipeline reviews. The major place where you want to reinforce discovery in your pipeline reviews is whenever you're getting to problem agreement, and that's usually stage one. For example, when you're running a pipeline review, you always have your rep recap what problem the prospect agreed to in stage one before you go into stage two, which is for some people, demo. For other people, it's solution agreement, for example. And if your rep is saying things like, oh, the problem that they agreed that they had was they're they're spending too much time planning common spreadsheets, well, you can now say, well, that's an operational problem. Did you get an executive problem or a business impact? And if not, you can be like, okay, there's some risk in this deal. And there's also some more stuff for us to do on our next discovery call or our next meeting with this prospect. So, folks, that gives you three different places that you can now reinforce this stuff. Do it in the one on ones and get specific with the rep. Do it in the Friday team tape reviews and then do it in the pipeline reviews. And that allows you to cover all of your deals deeply. So to recap, we covered how to build your Discovery 101 framework. That includes breaking the call into the sum of its parts, the agenda, the meat of the call, the next steps, defining the four levels of problems, building your own trees. From there, you want to roll this out to your team. You usually want to train them on the bookends and the overview of the call structure first, and then spend a solid two sessions on the meat of the call. If possible, you walk them through the trees first and then you keep it simple. You want to teach them one question per layer of the tree and two basic listening triggers for give and take. And then from there you're going to actually show them what this looks like in a real Discovery tape review. And that brings us to the final piece which is training to coaching, coaching, coaching, coaching. You always want to coach your way to 201, 301 and 401. So Friday tape reviews, role plays in one on ones, and pipeline reviews were the three places you can reinforce Discovery every single week.

And so you might be sitting here thinking, gosh, training my team on the hardest skill in sales feels like a lot of work. I wish 30 MPC could help. Well, let me tell you, 30 MPC has got you covered because we recently rolled out the 30 MPC course on discovery which you can actually use to help empower your reps with pretty much everything that we talked about in this episode, with the one exception of it is not specific to your specific product and industry. But if you want to teach your reps how to set extremely clear expectations with prospects upfront. If you want to teach your reps how to demonstrate credibility instead of crummy generic rapport, if you want to teach them how to uncover massive business problems as opposed to vague operational problems while also giving your prospects the trust and credibility that you can make those problems go away, you may enjoy the 30 MVC course on discovery. We have a link in the show notes to go check it out. I promise you it will get your reps 90% of the way there and then you can plug that 10% of product and industry specific stuff that we couldn't possibly create unless we were going deep with your team specifically. So go check it out. There's a link in the show notes. You can get a preview of it before buying. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week on 30 MPC.