#66 - Playbook: Discovery Teardown

Foreign. Everybody. And welcome to this episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Farouk. I'm here with my co host Nick Zagowski. And we have one of the most requested playbooks ever. It's how to run a discovery call. This is probably guys the hardest part selling. So if you get through these 30 and you're feeling pretty good.

Awesome.

If you feel it a little bit tough, listen to it again. But if you master this, you're going to be a killer teller seller. Nick, why should people listen?

Well, Armand and I normally are able to do our playbooks in one take, maybe two if we're lucky. We spent like six or seven hours on this thing, man. I mean, this is a really complex topic, but I think we've made a decent episode.

And it's a three, a two, a one a take two. Today's show is brought to you by Text Us, which helps you move your deals forward faster. When timing matters, the fastest way to move a deal forward is to avoid getting stuck in the inbox. And so my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting and that opens the text channel for you to call back on it later. Folks, we put an entire guide on how to revive ghosted deals. Nudge next steps and use texting to keep deals moving forward with Text Us, check it out. It's free in the show notes.

So, okay, let's start with the discovery philosophies. Before you even get into the blocking and tackling of how to run a good discovery call or discovery process, you have to understand the mindset behind it. Armand. That's one of of our favorite topics. So the first thing that I always think about on a discovery call is it's gotta be a conversation. The last thing that you wanna do is take any specific individual tactic and like pull it out of your pocket on a call because it just is awkward. Your goal is to have a conversation.

Number two, way too many people get stuck in the clicks and the spreadsheets and the process. And if you keep hearing things like it takes a lot of time or we're on spreadsheets, or we do it this way or we do it, that means you're stuck in process problems and technical problems. And so number two is you need to get the technical problems. You need to understand the situation quickly and then get off of that and get them talking about business problems and impact.

All right, so the Last philosophy is we always talk about being disarmingly blunt. But here's the deal. On a discovery call, there's no reason to hide stuff like price or where you're not so strong. We believe you should be sharing weaknesses that you have. If the customer says, hey, we're struggling with X and you can't help with X, you probably want to tell them because if they're not a good fit, it's going to come out in the wash eventually. You better off just be transparent, share it and then move on. So if the call's not going well, also I like to call that stuff out. So if Armand's giving me a bunch of one word answers, I might say, Armand feel a little awkward saying this, but I feel like this call's not really going so hard. Am I totally off base with that?

And this brings us to the most awkward part of most discovery calls. The first five minutes, bonding and rapport. Here's the deal. Nick should really be taking this section because I hate building rapport. I'm naturally introverted, he's naturally extroverted. However, you have to be able to flex into it a little bit. Not every person is going to be okay with you just kicking off the sales call right away.

Do a little bit of flow with them.

But here's the thing. You need to do it quickly and you need to do it in a way that is not talking about the weather. You need to do it in a way that shows that you did your research. So within those first two minutes, take what you know about them, about their company, and bring that up in the first 120 seconds of the call. And that will set the tone for the rest of the call. Because now they'll be like, oh, this person looked on my LinkedIn. For example, if I'm jumping on a call with Nick in the first two minutes, I might say like, hey, how'd you get started at USC wrestling? And he knows I've looked him up on LinkedIn now and that will set the tone that he respects me because I have respected him. But then you need to quickly get off it and then go to step two, which is actually setting the agenda, Right?

So now you roll into the meeting logistics and what some people call the upfront contract. There's a couple of things that you got to nail right in the beginning of the meeting. When you roll into the business side of things, you got to make sure that you're good on time. You've got to get permission to ask some questions. You can't just roll right into your interrogation doctor's checkup, and then you've got to talk a little bit about logistics related next steps. In the beginning of the call, for me, it sounds something like Armand, I had us down for 30 minutes here. I think that puts us at a hard stop at 4:00'.

Clock.

That cool with you or you got to stop sooner? Armand says, great. All right, cool. I have a bunch of questions that I put together after I was doing some research on your company. I hope it's okay if I ask you a couple of them today. Armand says, yes, you can ask me questions. And then I say something like, armand, look. Typically these introductory calls end up going one or two ways. We're probably going to have a conversation here and you might decide at the end of today's call that we're not going to be able to help you. And if that's the case, totally fine. Won't hurt my feelings. We'll just go our separate ways. No harm, no foul. The other outcome might be you think, all right, this sounds kind of interesting and Nick's company might be able to help me, but I need to do some more due diligence and see a demo of this thing to see for myself if that's the case. We happy to set a demo with you, I guess, given that we have a hard stop in half an hour. Are you cool stopping about five minutes early so we can talk about whether or not we move to that next step? Armond says yes, and boom. Now I've got commitment from Armand to talk about next steps at the end of the call. So you never end in deal purgatory where you've got no next step on the books.

So we've set the expectation that we're going to start with discovery before we get into demo. And the first question you got to ask is not tell me about your priorities or this or that, but our favorite first question is just understanding, why the heck did you take the call? Because if you go shoot Dunkin deep to like super detailed discovery questions right off the bat, oftentimes people are going to feel like, hey, like, don't you at least want to know why I'm here in the first place? And so start with why they took the call, oftentimes they'll bring you right to the problem. But here's the thing. If they don't, if they say, oh, my boss told me to take the call, do not take this at face value. If they don't give you a real reason why they took the Call, you need to ask again and say something along the lines of, well, I'm sure your boss has something in mind. Or I'm sure you don't take every call that comes your way. Like, what prompted you to jump on this call? Like, what do you want to get, Armand?

The other reason that you do that is you want the other person to feel like you actually care about them and their agenda. Because they might just say, well, the reason I'm here is I'm looking for a solution for better task management. And if you can't help with like, the thing that they're coming in blazing hot with, like, tell them you can't help and then go save yourself 27 minutes and make some cold calls or something. So let them know you actually care about them. Let them lay their agenda out first. Cause they might say things that you were going to ask about anyway and you get them from them right up front. That's how you get them talking.

Exactly right. And if you find that the type of person that's jumped on the call is one who knows zero about your business or is completely in the dark as to what problem they're trying to solve, oftentimes you can ask them, hey, would it be helpful if I gave you like a 30 second overview of what we do here at 30 MPC? They'll say, yes. Give them your quick elevator pitch just so they have enough, so they understand where the future questions are going to come from. And if they already know what you do, you can jump right into this thing. And that brings us to phase number two, where we're actually in the discovery model.

Right? So the idea here is you're trying to quickly grasp the situation at hand. Why are they here? What's the problem that they're looking to solve? Your goal is to understand the logistics. You know, we talked about earlier. You don't want to get stuck in the roles and permissions and the clicks and the spreadsheets, but you do need to understand those things very quickly because that's how you're going to show them how you help. But you don't want to spend the entire discovery call talking about every little nuance of their workflow. Your goal is to quickly understand that problem and then move to understanding the implications of that problem. So if they're telling you that they're struggling today and they need a more efficient solution to edit the podcast, okay, you need to spend a little bit of time understanding how they're editing the podcast, what that process looks like, but quickly, then move to, well, why is that even important? What are you trying to do with that time that you're wasting editing a podcast right now?

Exactly. And if you're going into demo checklist questions or doctors checklist questions in discovery, that means you are not doing a good discovery. And so I need a minimum viable amount of information to do proper discovery. If I'm selling a podcast editing service, it's probably something along the lines of, how are you editing your podcast today? Are you doing it yourself? Are you doing it with somebody else? And what are the problems with the way you're doing it today? And then I can jump off the situation. I don't care what type of mic they're using. I don't care if they're using Zoom or whatever other crazy squad cast situation they got going on. I just care about how they're doing this stuff today. And then you want to get onto why that matters immediately. And this is where level one sellers tend to get stuck is they can usually grasp the situation and they can usually get to surface level problems. Surface level problems sound like I'm spending a lot of time editing or it takes us a while to ship our episodes, or it's a little bit annoying to deal with our current editors today. But those don't tell me about the true impact on 30 MPC as a business. And so, Nick, what would impact on 30 MPC as a Business sound if you were selling me podcast editing software?

So what I'm trying to do here is get the prospective customer to share big issues that came as a result of them not having an efficient enough solution. If somebody tells you we need something that's more user friendly and more efficient, that's not it. But when I get Armand to share with me that they lost a sponsor on the show because they couldn't ship an episode in time and it screwed up the publishing schedule, that's bad. That's lost revenue for Armon, and he's worried about that. My goal is to understand, wow, Armon lost a sponsor because he doesn't have a good enough editing solution. And if I can tie my solution to keeping that sponsor, I'm in the money and I set myself apart from all the other competitors out there. Now, there's a couple really clever questions or types of questions, Armand, that you and I thought about, that can raise those big issues and understand the impacts.

Exactly right. But here's the thing is, before we jump into how to ask these questions, there are many ways to not ask these questions. And so some ways to not ask these, quote unquote, impact questions, which I hate calling them that, but they are impact questions, are, if I ask you one, very directly offensive questions. And so, Nick, if I just ask you, well, have you lost any sponsors because you haven't shipped any episodes? That is a very direct, leading, antagonistic type of question. Do not ask those. The other ones are the obnoxious ones that are extremely leading and cringy. And what they sound like would be, Nick, what would you do with all that time back in your calendar if you didn't have to edit those podcast episodes?

Could you tell me a little bit about that?

Every single person, all 30,000 listeners this month, all unanimously cringed when I asked that question. And Sellers asked these questions. And every single day, well, what if.

We do a little bit of role play and we pretend it's Harry Potter? And I say, well, Armand, if I had a magic wand and I could wave it around and flick it at you, what magic solution would you like to spawn? Like, please stop asking crap like that. It's so cheesy. Instead, do something like a humbling disclaimer question where you might say, like, armand, I feel a little bit awkward asking you this, but I've heard this from other podcast hosts before where they've struggled with their editing, and it's caused them to not be able to get episodes out in time. And they've had issues with sponsors being upset with them. I can't imagine that's something that's happened with your team, though. You want to break down what I did there.

What you're doing is. This is from Charles Moldauer, one of the best Discovery episodes we had all time, where I'm just calling out the fact that I'm going to ask you about something that's a little bit uncomfortable. And it's sort of like when you go to your mom and you're like, mom, I really screwed this one up today. Mom's, like, expecting the worst. And then when the question or the statement actually lands, it's not that bad. And that's what Nick is doing, is he's taking all that brain trash, that awkwardness that everyone else is afraid to call out, and they just live in it. And what he's doing is he's calling it out, putting it on the table and asking the question. And then the customers are like, no, that's not an unreasonable question to be asking. And that's how you do a humbling disclaimer.

The other thing that I've seen you do really, really well, Armand, is you get the customer to tell a story about their issue. And you do that by asking, when was the time that you realized this was a problem? I love that question because what it does is it forces them to tell about a specific moment in time. And I've always heard stories sell. Like stories are attached to emotion. And it's actually great when you can get the customer to share a story of their issue with you.

Exactly. Any time you hear something where someone's requesting podcast editing services, for example, you can get to the surface level problem of like, hey, it's taken a lot of time, but once you get stuck there, you should be asking them questions like, hey, like, my guess is like, there was a point where it was like, okay, now we need to actually consider a podcast editor. What was that point in time? And they're not going to say July 27th at 7:47pm they're going to describe the moment where when was the last straw that broke the camel's back? And that's what you're looking for. So keep in mind, the surface level problems can oftentimes be described very pragmatically. It takes us a lot of time to edit podcasts, but the emotional business impact problems are almost always attached to a story where it's I spent 3 hours at 3am editing this stupid podcast and all the ums and ahs were still in there, and it was a nightmare. And. And then one of our amazing sponsors, Acme Inc. Ended up dropping us because we missed the episode. That's a story and that's attached to business outcome.

Now when you get a customer to start sharing that stuff with you, the worst thing you can possibly do is turn this whole thing into an interrogation. What you want to do is get them talking artfully. And one of the best ways you can do that is with what is called a label. Now, Armaan just shared this horrible story of being up at 3am editing the show. What novice sellers are gonna do is move on to the next question and start asking about mike integrations, because that's what they need to show the demo. What the best sellers are gonna do is they're gonna say, geez, Armand, that sounds like it was a really brutal process. All I'm doing is I'm labeling my reaction to the story that Armand just told me. I wasn't asking another question. I was saying, here's what I heard from you. That's called empathy. But what that also does is that prompts Armand to continue talking. Remember, your job on the Discovery call is to discover and you don't discover anything when you're the one talking. You discover when the other person is talking. So you can do a label. You can do also what's called a playback, where Armon's just given me this whole brain dump. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to summarize in a couple sentences what Armand just told me. Well, okay, Armand, I just want to make sure that I got this right. It sounds to me like you're using XYZ service right now and you're running your podcast through a transcription service. But part of what's frustrating you is you've got to manually remove the ums and the odds. And it sounds like that's one of the bigger issues that you have going on. Did I get all of that right or did I miss anything? Awesome opportunity to get Armon to continue talking.

And the last piece here is that the biggest point of feedback that I have to people when I do mock disco interviews is not that they're not asking me enough questions, is that they're asking me so many questions that I feel interrogated. And by the end of it, I have no clue what you do or I feel like you haven't listened to me at all. And that's when you tend to hear questions like, am I going to get into a demo or not? And that's because you're usually interrogating your buyers. And so it's important where typically, most solutions have two or three buckets of problems you can help with when you do discovery deep in one bucket. For example, it might be podcast editing is one bucket. Podcast subtitling is another bucket. When you're done with the podcast editing bucket, give them a taste of how you help other customers before you move on to the next bucket. So that might be 10, 15 minutes in and don't give them everything, but you can say things like, yeah, we see this all the time with other customers like X, Y, and Z. They were facing a, B and C type of problem, just like you guys. Directionally, I'm going to mark this down so we cover it in the demo, but we're going to help you by doing E, F and G. Right. Boom. Moving on. Tell them a quick story or tell them a quick anecdote that social proofs that you've solved this problem before. But then don't get super deep into the weeds. Save that stuff for the demo later on.

Yeah, One of the ways that you can do that, Armand, by demonstrating that social proof, is if somebody shares A problem. And you know that that is probably leading to another problem is by asking a really intelligent question where it's like, oh, well, it's really interesting that you're dealing with that. Typically when I talk to folks who are dealing with X, they're also dealing with. I think we can help you with both. Is why something you guys are dealing with today or not really at all? What I'm doing there is I'm showing I actually know what the heck's going on in this space. I love what you did in that example you shared where you said, I'm going to jot this down for when we get to the demo. Because what you've demonstrated is, hey, I'm listening. We're going to get to this. But we're not getting to this right now. We're doing discovery. We're not jumping right into the demo. The other thing to think about is sometimes I try to ask for permission before I share how I can help somebody. So if somebody's monologued at me a lot and I've gotten them to talk and talk and talk, I might say, well, you've just shared a lot with me. I have some ideas about how we might be able to help you. Is it cool if I share those with you? Right now, I'm asking permission before I jump into a pitch because they might have more they want to share with me. So I think we've done an okay job here and we're wrapping towards the end of the discovery call. Now it's time to do what we call driving towards next steps. So I want to think back to the beginning of this upfront contract where we said, hey, typically these calls go one of two ways. You might hate some of the social proof that I share. You might hate what I tell you. You might realize we can't help you at all. If that's the case, totally fine. Remember, this is one of our philosophies. If you can't help them, that's all right. There's a million other people that you should be cold calling or reaching out to or helping out. If you can't help, no worries. But if you can, time to book a demo or move to the next step. And so what you do is you call out, hey, we've got six minutes left here. I know in the beginning we talked about these calls end up going one or two ways, I guess I'm curious how you're feeling. Would you like to move and schedule a demo? I sometimes even say, well, you've shared a lot with me. And I'm a little bit biased because I work for 30 minutes to President's Club, but I think we can help you out. Would you like to see how we can? That's how I propose moving to a demo.

Exactly. And now once you've gotten, and only once you've gotten the affirmative that they like what you're putting down, that's when you can start to spend the last couple minutes digging into the buying process. And this is going to largely vary for your sales cycle. But some oftentimes things that we're going to be hitting on are things like who needs to be involved, what is the deal process, what are other checklist items like procurement, infosec and legal? And then most importantly, when is their target go live? And what you need to do is based on your specific deal cycle, you need to walk it back to what that means they need to do today. And so, for example, we're recording this podcast episode in July. If I know there's a comp cycle for Pave that's going on in November, people think they need to sign on in October, but that is not true. They actually need to sign on next month in July. They need three months of Runway. And the reason for that is because we have really sensitive data, they're going to have to go through procurement, we're going to have to go through infosec review. It takes two weeks for legal, plus implementation takes six weeks for the first product, four weeks for the next product. And I now need to educate my buyer on all of the sales cycle steps that need to happen before that so that they meet that deadline. And so from call number one, you need to understand when they need to be live, what is the business driver for them to be live. And then you need to find all of the things, including the sales cycle that need to happen between now and then and back out the timeline for them.

I think that's it. I think we just led a pretty dang good discovery Call. Armand, do you have any other one off tips that you want to share with our lovely 30 minutes? Minutes to President's Club fans.

The last one. You always have to have a meeting on the books. If you're doing a pipeline review with me, I'm going to be a stickler on this 70% rule. 70% of your ops should have a meeting on the books. And don't just skim your next steps column in Salesforce. Almost every single one of those should have a date next to it, which means that is when the next meeting is you should always put that on the books in the last five meetings minutes of your meeting. Even if there are other people you have to multi thread with, put a placeholder on your champions calendar and say, hey, my guess is it's not going to work. If it does, add the other people onto the call. If it doesn't, we can move it. But always have something that forces next steps on the book. Never leave a meeting without another meeting on the calendar because the one time you think it's okay, that's the next time you're going to get ghosted.

Well, the great thing about that is that calendar invite serves as a reminder for everybody to when you get to next Friday and it's like, oh, they haven't gotten back to me. Everybody sees that invite and it's a great excuse to re reach out to the other person. So, Armando, this has been a really fun episode. Now we're going to move to the final question and you got to ask me the final question once. So I'm going to ask the final question to you today and it's our usual one, but it's going to be forcing you to be discovery centric. So my question for you is, what is one bad habit related to discovery that every sales rep needs to discover its way to the trash can? Ditch, burn, throw away. Because it hurts them more than it helps.

If a discovery call is going poorly, you can call it out and have fun with it. A lot of people rake their prospects over calls and they rate themselves over calls for 30 minutes getting one word answers. And there have been times where I've been on super uncomfortable discovery calls where clearly the person's not engaged even though they requested a demo. And I've said things like, hey, you're really ruining my gong talk to listen ratio right now. Could you help me out or am I totally putting down the wrong thing here? Do not be afraid to call it out. Do not be afraid to show your personality. In other words, think it, say it. The more you can focus on having discovery as a conversation and having fun with it and taking risks and stop thinking about Discovery framework, the better you'll actually get at selling. So that's what you got to stop doing. Stop being a boring square and start doing some disco the fun way. All right? That's how we do it here.

Oh, this episode was the fun way. Thanks everybody for listening. Stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon.

All right, so your playbook takeaways are number one. The first area that we talked about was the 3:30 MPC discovery philosophies. So number one was make it a conversation. Number two was figure out the technical problems quickly and then get off of them to business impact. And then number three is be disarmingly blunt.

If you got to give price, give some price.

If you got to describe your weaknesses, describe your weaknesses. Do not be afraid to call out the obvious things we talk through the agenda. Next, build rapport quickly based on their business or based on them and then get off of it. Don't talk about the weather for 10 hours and then jump right into your upfront contract. Keep it simple. There's a time check, setting the expectation that you're going to ask them questions and then anchoring to next steps. And then the last question we always ask before we jump right into Cisco is why they took the call. If they don't get you right to the problem with why they took the call that kicks off discovery. You should start by trying to understand the situation very quickly. But then again, get off of the situation and get into why this matters from a problem standpoint. And then if you get stuck at surface level problems, get them to tell a story. Use a humbling disclaimer. You need to get them to tell stories that evict emotional pain, not just surface level pain. And don't make it an interrogation when you actually find some problems. Play it back. Play back what you heard, label it, say it sounds like you really care about X, Y and Z and then give them a taste of what you can do. People should not leave a 30 minute disco call having no clue where you can help them. They should feel like someone listened to me and I'm super excited to see the rest of what they got because I think they can help me. And then lastly, you're driving towards next steps in the last five minutes. One, get the affirmative and call out the fact that you propose next steps at the beginning. Two, get commitment on next steps for the buying process based on whatever it is. And then three, make sure you always have a meeting on the books. That's your disco playbook. Nick. Have some people help us out here.

Folks, I never complain but it is 7:59 on a Tuesday evening. I started work this morning at 6:30am I mean I did take a yoga class around 5:30 but that was the only break I took today. We are working really hard on this show and it would really mean a lot to me if you shared this episode with somebody who might get some value out of it. We work hard on the show we really love everyone who messages us on LinkedIn and listens. And we appreciate you all. We do this for love. We'll see you next week on 30 minutes to President's Club.

Sam.