How To Ask Discovery Questions To Uncover Business Problems (Sell Playbook)

Foreign.

Everybody.

And welcome to this two part Discovery Playbook episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Farouk and I'm here with my co host, Nick Szigelski. And folks, there is no way we could cover all of Discovery in its true fullest form without breaking this into two different steps. So today is part one. You can think of today as the ignition in your car. And that is how to ask discovery questions in a way that uncovers pain. But step two will be making sure your car is going in the right direction. And so next week we will cover the agenda in the next steps of your call. In other words, those are the steering wheels in your car that make sure that once you find a problem, that car is going in the right direction and you ultimately get access to power and all of these other things. So, Nick, why should people listen?

So your inability to structure and manage the 22 minutes of a 30 minute discovery call that come after the pleasantries and agenda that you set in the beginning but before the next steps that you said at the end will have an outsized impact on your success as a salesperson. And so for you to be successful in sales, you have to know that how to manage and run these interactions effectively. We're going to teach you how to do it so that you do not have a rough ride as a salesperson.

It's 22 minutes to President's club today as we drive through Discovery land. And there will be four sections of this playbook episode. Number one will be the keys to discovery or the philosophies behind a good discovery call. Then number two, we'll cover the situation, problem and impact framework that you can use to uncover problem problems through questions. From there, number three, we'll give you some ways to make sure that discovery doesn't feel like an interrogation. And there's proper give and take throughout the call. And then lastly, number four, once you get all the problems, you tell a couple stories. We'll talk about how to wrap it all up into one big recap, turnaround, pitch, and ultimately lead toward next steps. Alrighty, Nick. So let's start with the keys to a good discovery call.

Great. So we were talking about what are the things that need to be true? And in order for us to say that was a good discovery call thing number one, you have got to find problems that are worth solving. And what that means is you need to uncover business problems, not process problems. When I was selling billing software to law firms, a process problem would be it takes our biller a lot of work and a ton of different clicks. They actually have to go between two different applications in order to get our bills sent out. Okay, that's a process problem. A business problem related to this would be when we send our bills out, they actually are not compliant with what our insurers need them to be. And we end up having a lot of back and forth that results in our bills actually getting written down or written off where we don't actually collect the money that we were billing them. That is something that hits the business's bottom not line and not it takes a long time for bills to get done. And so you've got to find pain and problems that impact the organization that you are selling to. So that's the first one. Find problems worth solving.

Number two, discovery should feel like a conversation, not an interrogation. There are two parts of this. Number one is the way you ask questions. Every question you ask should be build on the next. What most sellers do is they ask a million situational questions. They say, how do you do this? How do you do that? At Pave, what this sounded like is people would say, how do you run a merit cycle? How do you communicate equity? How many employees do you have? When's your next merit cycle? And none of these questions build on each other. In other words, it doesn't feel like you're listening to your prospect. It feels like you're going through a checklist, of course questions. Instead, what we'll talk about today is what's called vertical questioning, where if you ask someone, how are you running a merit cycle today? They'll say, we're running it on spreadsheets. And then you ask them a deeper question about what it means to be running a compensation cycle on spreadsheets. That is bringing your discovery deeper, not wider. And then number two, the other thing that makes discovery and interrogation is people will literally pepper their prospects with 3,000 questions in a row. And at the end of the call, they'll do a five minute monologue pitch on all the ways they can help. And up until that point, that prospect will literally have no idea what you do. And so there should be give and take dose throughout the entire discovery call as you ask your vertical questions. And that is how you make discovery not feel like an interrogation.

So that brings us to our last philosophy, which is your prospect needs to see you as an advisor, not an enemy. And what that means is there's a lot of sales interactions that you have with buyers where there's this weird like adversarial tension going on. And we actually don't want that. We want our buyer to trust us, because when they trust us, we're actually going to get a lot more information out of them, and it will help us progress our sale and not waste time on bad opportunities as well. And so some of the ways that you can get your buyer to see you as an advisor, including, number one, let them come to their own answers or their own conclusions. We talked about getting to problems and getting to pain earlier, and when we get to that, we actually want our buyer to be the one to vocalize the problems that they have or the challenges that they are dealing with, rather than us putting words in their mouth. Because when they are the one to vocalize these things, they then take ownership over what's going on, rather than feeling like you have prescribed something upon them. Number two, in order to be seen as an advisor, not an enemy, is we want to avoid asking your typical salesy cringy questions, oh, Armand, what would you do with all of that time back? You want to come across as someone who is professional and competent and someone who is actually trying to help them, not someone who is asking questions or acting in a way to trap them in a corner where now they have a problem that only your software can solve. We're here to help them figure out, is their problem worth solving, can we solve it, and how do we actually go about determining can we do that or not?

And this includes breaking many of the common sales stereotypes or traditional forms of advice that create an adversarial relationship between you and your prospects. So, for example, you've probably heard the saying, do not show price until you demonstrate value, or don't show demo until you pepper them with 300 discovery questions. And don't get me wrong, there's some truth to those things you should not quote in the first five minutes of meeting someone. You shouldn't show a demo in the first five minutes of a discovery call. But the way that you actually position these things to your prospect should be in their best interest, not in your best interest. So if someone asks, hey, am I going to see a demo? The way you position that back to them is not. No, I need to ask you questions that I need the answers to first. Instead, you say, sure, totally happy to go through a demo toward the back half of this call. Do you mind if I ask you a couple questions to get a sense of how you're doing this stuff today so I don't waste your time showing you every single thing we have to offer? Because it Might not all be relevant. Is that okay with you? And then from there, you can continue the rest of the call. So those are your three core philosophies to sell in a way that doesn't feel like selling. Find problems worth solving, make it a conversation, not an interrogation, and position yourself as an advisor on the same side of the table, not as an enemy.

Those are the philosophies. In our next Playbook episode, we are going to cover how you kick off a sales call. Everything from small talk to how you set an agenda. Today, let's assume that you've already set an agenda and now you are into that 22 minute chunk of the discovery call. We're going to be talking about a framework that you can use to guide the altitude of the conversation that you are having with a prospect. And the framework is called Situation. Problem Impact. At the highest level, this is what it means. Situation. We need to understand what's going on in our prospect's world relative to the areas that we help with. Problem. We need to understand what ain't going well. Where are there issues? Where are their challenges? Impact. Why do those problems matter? And so our responsibility is to understand what's going on in their world. What isn't going well, why does that matter? And that is what helps us drive a deal and run an effective discovery call. Let's make this real. Give me an example for Pave Armand.

So to give you a sense of what this would look like in a past sales cycle of mine is Pave was selling compensation software. And so an example situation that we'd find prospects in is they were running compensation reviews in spreadsheets. But there are no problems associated with that. The problem associated with that is the fact that when you have compensation reviews being run in 300 different spreadsheets, it's actually really hard to figure out all the decisions that each individual manager is making in one of the 300 spreadsheets. But that doesn't really impact the business. Like, I could see how it's a problem, but like, why does that actually matter? That brings us to impact. When you can't oversee all of the compensation decisions of every single manager, you tend to have managers making really biased compensation decisions and that leads to compensation inequities. And that is how you get written up in Business Insider. And you definitely do not want that. And so when your champion is going and communicating to the business, you want them communicating in business Impact. You don't want them to say, I want to buy Pave because we're running compensation Reviews and spreadsheets. That's how you get shut down. You want them saying, I want to buy pave because we have massive compensation and equities. And the reason for that is because of the situation we're in, because we're planning compensation and spreadsheets.

So I'll give you an example, Armand, and this is my new method for issuing an RFP, which is sharing 30 MPC initiatives. Situations, problems, impacts on the show. Here is a real situation, problem, impact that we are dealing with. We have a mailing list at 30 minutes to President's Club of 50,000 people and we want it to grow to 100,000 people. There's a situation. Here's a problem. It's not growing fast enough and it's not at 100,000 people, which is where we want it to be. Here's the impact. We have a book that is releasing in August and we are not going to hit our book sale goal if we don't get it to that hundred thousand mailing list number. Because the mailing list is one of the biggest drivers of book sales. If I were somebody selling something that could help us grow our mailing list, those would be the situations, problems and impacts that I'd be looking to uncover on a discovery call with yours truly. So let's now talk about some of the ways that we can uncover things layer by layer. And we're intentionally going layer by layer. You can't start a sales call at the impact level. You have to understand some basic information about their situation in order to understand context for the problems and the impact. So we always start at the top and go down layer by layer by layer. And so there's a couple different ways that we can understand the situation that we are dealing with.

The easiest way to understand the situation that your prospect is in is right after you set your agenda. Simply ask why they took the call in the first place. They will give you one of two types of answers. They'll give you a situation answer where they'll say, yeah, the reason I took the call is because we're managing compensation and spreadsheets. Or they'll actually bring you right to the problem. They'll say, look, the reason that we reached out is we're managing comp and spreadsheets and it's taking so much freaking time. They'll bring you to the problem level. Now if they don't, what you can do is sometimes people will say, ah, well, the reason that I reached out is one of our investors told us, value if you don't get the situation from the first why? Just ask why Again, you might say, I'm sure something caught your eye. I'm curious. My guess is you don't take every single call with every investor that tells you to look at something. I'm curious what prompted you to take the call with us specifically? Or was there anything that seemed particularly interesting to you? And that again, will usually drop you into a situation where a problem that's number one.

Another way that we might do this, if we're not really getting as much on the why'd you take the call? Is we might try to ask about their current state, their current situation, and where they want their situation to go. If I'm doing this newsletter example and I'm selling to me, one thing that I might say is, I understand you've got this newsletter that you, you and Arman have been running for a couple years. Give me a sense of where it is today and where you're hoping to take it. I'm not saying what do you what is the number you're looking to grow to? I'm asking a wider question because maybe my focus is, hey, we want to improve the content for us before we grow. But what I'm trying to understand is where are they today? Where are they looking to go? And that helps me understand some details that will help me flesh out their situation. And so the last type of question that we can use to understand the prospect's situation is what is called a what how question. And these are questions that typically I don't recommend you use. In general. You're going to want to lean on the why'd you take the call? Or the current state to future state questions. The reason for that is questions like those sometimes smart prospects will say, let me tell you about the situation, but they'll also take you down to where their problems are with that situation. And so you actually get more juice for your squeeze with one question with those than you would with a what how question. The reason that you might use a what how question is if you are talking to a buyer that is not good enough to automatically bring you down to problems, which is why they should be on a sales call in the first place. And you need to understand a bit about how they're just doing things today in order for you to then understand what some problems they might have are. So an example for Pave that we talked about would be how are you currently managing your compensation process? And you're going to get a lot of technical process information and then it's on you as the salesperson to bring them down to problems.

So to recap, there are three ways you can map out their existing situation. You can ask why they took the call. You can ask about their current state and future state. And then you can ask a what or how situational question. But you should spend as little time as humanly possible at the situation level. Again, none of these things are actually problems. You want to get the situation as quickly as humanly possible and then turn it into a problem, and that begins vertical questioning. So there are three ways that we'll talk about to turn those situations into problem. The first way is you might not actually have to do it. And the reason for that is if you ask a sophisticated prospect why they took the call and why again, they'll oftentimes say, the reason that I took the call is because we're planning comp and spreadsheets and it's massively unscalable. And sometimes they'll bring you all the way to the impact level. Usually not, but they might even say, and we have big compensation inequities. Why? Questions tend to get you problems more commonly than what or how questions. The other way that you might not have to ask for a problem is a good executive will say, these are my business priorities, my current state, my future state, et cetera. And the reason I chose these priorities is because these are some of the problems we're hoping to solve. So you might not need to even ask for problems. They will be presented to you at which point you start to turn those problems into stories and get business impact. But then if they don't proactively suggest any problems, that means you're still stuck at the situational level. In other words, you might still be stuck at or managing compound spreadsheets. And so now you need to ask for a problem if they don't proactively give you a problem. The easiest way that I've found it to ask for a problem is you can do what's called turning wants into whys. So if someone says, we are currently managing our compensation on spreadsheets and we want a better way to manage it more scalably, all you have to do is turn that want into a why you want. You might say, well, that's great. My guess is you didn't wake up yesterday and think, I want a more scalable way to manage it. I'm curious what's driving your desire to have a more scalable way to plan compensation. That's number one. The other way is you can invert the desire, invert the want. So if they say we're looking for a more scalable way to do compensation planning, I might invert that want by saying, gotcha. So that must mean that the way you're doing it today is taking a ton of time or things are breaking or my guess is it's really hard for you to do this with 10 managers, 20 managers, 30 managers, what have you. In other words, I take that desire to have a more scalable process and I infer the problem based on that.

So sometimes they're going to take you to the problem when you ask, why'd you take the call? Sometimes they're going to understand their motivations and their wants, and you just need to turn that into a problem. Other times, they're not even going to know what the problem is or be able to proactively bring it up. And so then the responsibility is on you as the salesperson to raise the problem, to bring up the issue that you believe based upon your knowledge of their situation and their space that they might be dealing with. And the best way to do that is using what we call typically like language, where you think about what problem might they be dealing with or other people like them deal with. And you say, typically, when I'm talking to people like you, this is often a problem or this is often an issue. So if I'm selling to law firms, typically what I'm talking to, insurance, defense law firms, one of the big focuses is their attorneys waste a ton of time going back and forth with clients on making sure that their bills are compliant. And I'm curious if that's something you all have been focused on also. And what I'm doing here is now I have presented and laid on a silver platter. Here's a problem that I think you might be dealing with to see if they bite. This is the least preferential one because again, going back to our philosophies, we want them to come to their own conclusions and have them be the one that present the problem, not us be the one that presented. But if we're really stuck, this is our last resort, which is to raise the problem ourself.

So to recap, you have three ways you can turn a situation into a problem. Way number one is you might not have to if you just ask them why again, or if you ask them about their priorities. Way number two is you can ask for the problem by turning once into the whys or inverting the problem, or you can suggest problems using typically, language. And now what we need to do is we need to turn this into impact. Now, it's worth noting that very rarely does this mean you ask one situational question, one problem question, and one impact question. Especially at that problem level. You're going to linger there a little bit longer than you will at the situational level because you want to more deeply understand the problem before just jumping right to the impact. So you might combine multiple of those questions together. But once you are certain that the prospect has validated and said, yes, I agree that this is a problem, that is your jumping off point to start moving toward impact once you get problem agreement. So the first way that you can get impact is through what's called an impact story. You can get them to tell an emotional, painful story that adds color to the problem. The easiest way to get this is the moment they agree to the problem. Ask them a magic moment question. And what that means is I might say, hey, Nick, totally understand. It sounds like you feel like there might be some bias in the manager decision making. My guess is you didn't wake up yesterday and think, my managers totally don't know how to make comp decisions. When was the moment that you realized that that was a problem? And when you ask when the moment they realized that thing was a problem, you will almost always get a story in return because there's a specific moment when a manager made a bad decision and the employee complained to HR and then you found all these other issues. That's number one.

Number two comes on the back of what Arman just talked about, which is once you get one of those stories, you need to determine was this a one off bad experience or is this a trend that they are focused on solving. And so one of the ways you might ask that is they've just shared this story of this nightmare employee complain, they had to call in some HR folks and mitigate the situation. And what you might ask here is, gosh, you know, I really don't mean to minimize how brutal that must have been, but I'm curious, is that something that you've seen happen on a, on an ongoing basis or was it more of a one off? And what I want to identify here is is this something that is happening more than once that they need to solve or was this a one time frustrating experience which is going to be less of a focus for the business to solve A one time nightmare versus a recurrence recurring bad dream?

One thing that can oftentimes soften these impact questions when you're asking about trends, goals, priorities, being missed it can be really inflammatory. You can use what's called a humbling disclaimer, which is a tactic that was developed by Charles Muhlbauer and has been covered multiple times on his episodes on this show. And what that involves is all you're doing is you're taking all of the uncomfortable concerns you have about the question and putting those on the table. So before you ask a question, all you have to do is say something like, well, I recognize that this is probably a really awkward question. Or, look, Nick, I was. I was totally raised not to assume this, but. Or I recognize that this question might be totally out of bounds. And just by calling out the fact that it's an awkward question shows that you have eq and naturally they start to brace and they're like, okay, this isn't actually that bad of a question versus if you just asked dead on, hey, are you going to miss your hiring goal? It can come off as a little bit inflammatory and make a prospect defensive.

Yeah. And that actually applies to the last way that we might get to impact also, which is getting to impact metrics. If you just flat out ask your buyer what metric is suffering the most as a result of that, they're going to be like, whoa, you're trying to paint me into a corner. I can tell you're trying to sell me. And so this is where we can have some softening language where you might say something like, I appreciate you sharing that. That's got to be really frustrating. You know, one of the things that I found when I'm talking to folks as they start to socialize things like this internally is it can be helpful to tie what we just talked about to a KPI that this is impacting so that folks actually care about the problem, not that they shouldn't. On its own, I guess I'm curious, as you think about this, is there a metric or KPI in particular that you feel like is suffering the most because of this comp problem that you guys are dealing with? And that can be a way to ask the direct what metric is suffering? Question without smacking them in the face and feeling like you are leading them on with just the intent to sell them.

Bingo. So we covered three ways to get impact as well. You have impact stories through the magic moment question, and then we use humbling disclaimers to get impact trends, slash goals, slash priorities, or impact metrics. Now, folks, we've talked only about the questions you're going to ask from situation to problem to impact. But number one, like we mentioned earlier, There will be multiple iterative questions at each layer. And number two, if you ask all 20 questions in a row, and that is the definition of an interrogation. And so it's time to talk about how you make sure that you give and take. In other words, give. In other words, actually say things as you do discovery. So the first type of way or the first thing you can do to give a little bit in your discovery is doing what's called a playback. So playback shows that you're listening. My rule of thumb of when I do a playback or a recap of what they say is whenever a prospect gives me two or more problems, I'm going to play back and recap both of them. So it's not like every single thing a prospect says, I'm parroting it back to them. But if they do a long monologue over a minute and they just throw two or three things at me, I'm going to lay all three of them on the table. And I might say, okay, Nick, it sounds like you're really focused on communicating equity to employees. You're really focused on making your compensation reviews more scalable. And you're also really focused on working, rolling out this new equity compensation plan. Let's focus on number two. You accomplish two things with a playback. Number one, you demonstrate that. And then number two, you allow yourself to isolate the problem that is most important to you without them feeling like you've missed the other two. But the problem with the playback is it only shows that you're listening. So you can't just ask questions and, and recap. Ask questions and recap. You actually have to take it a step further. And that brings us to the pylon.

When someone has shared a bit about the problem. Again, we are trying to position ourselves as an advisor who understands the full scope of what they might be dealing with. Because when they're talking with someone who gets them or gets their world, they're more likely to share with someone who doesn't need to be totally re educated. And so one of the best ways to get someone to share more while also feeling like you're on the same side of the table with them is to do what's called the pile on, which is simply if they've shared A and B about a problem, you can play back. Yeah, that's really frustrating. And also, a lot of the folks I talk to are dealing with C and D. So when I would sell billing software to law firms and they would complain about the deductions that would happen on their bills, when they didn't have the perfect for format for their insurance companies, which is a really weird problem. I would say, yeah, that's super frustrating. And then it actually also ends up affecting your attorneys where they have to go and re litigate their bills simply to get them paid. And they have to spend hours just like changing words on their bills to make sure they're compliant. I imagine your attorneys have voice frustration also. And now I can get them talking about the attorney frustration, not just the billing department's frustration. And so when you pile on and it get gets them feeling like, ah, this person gets me, but also allows you to uncover even more pain and frustration in an authentic way.

Another example of the pylon, because I think it's so important, is when at Pave, an HR leader would explain or complain about the fact that employees don't really understand how much they spend on benefits. I would always explain to them, when I left my previous job to come to Pave, I got a COBRA letter. And the COBRA letter was 800 hundred dollars a month to pay for my own health care. And I was like, holy cow, that's a lot of money that my past job was paying for my health care. And they will always look at me and be like, I know. And that is the reaction that you want when you do a playback is they think, oh my God, this person finally freaking gets it. For once someone understands my complaints. And that is when you can finally go from just agreeing with the problem, piling onto the problem, recapping the problem to showing how you can help is once you get that I know, problem agreement moment. And the way that you quote unquote, pitch is it's one thing to talk about your product, but the best way to pitch is actually to explain how you helped someone else in the exact same situation solve the same problem. This is called a parallel story. So if I was selling to Uber and Uber was having all kinds of issues around compensation inequities, what I'm going to do is I'm going to find another company that went public, ideally someone in their space. And I might tell them the story about how, oh, when DoorDash went public, they were seeing the same type of thing. By the way, those weren't customers that PAVE at the time, they're just hypothetical examples. But I would tell them an example of how I helped DoorDash solve that same type of problem. And the solution will be implicit in the social proof. And so what this allows you to do is it allows you to dose your pitch throughout the entire sales call without dumping an entire pitch on them, and frankly, without really talking about your product while still giving them a sense of how you can help them.

So at this point in the call, we've learned a lot about what they're dealing with, why what's not going well and why that matters. And we've shared tidbits of why we might be able to solve that and some similar customer stories to make them feel pretty good. But in order for us to have the right to ask for the next step, and honestly to improve our chances of getting to that next step, we need to give them a bit to make them say, wow, there's something here. And so the way before we get to the last five minutes, we're going to talk about the last five minutes of a sales call in our next playbook and we're going to talk about the five minute drill there. But before that, we need to give them what we might call the grand hooray pitch, where we give them a reason to want to keep moving through the sales process. What we're going to do, step one, we are going to recap the biggest three problems or milestones that we uncovered in this call. We got to show them, hey, I was listening and I heard you. And we've got to reorient their head around, man, this is really frustrating. So recap the big three problems you've heard from there, you're going to share the three bullets of how you can help solve those big three problems. And again, this might be where you would lean on a customer story, but really you want to share, hey, I heard your problems. We can solve those problems. And here's a tiny bit of detail to make it believable.

And for bonus points, we're going to break the cardinal sin of software sales, which is everyone thinks that you're not allowed to demo on the first call. And the reality is, if things are going really, really, really freaking well, I actually think that showing software on the first call, a five minute quote unquote Harbor Tour demo, can accelerate your sales cycle. And here's why. What you can do in that Harbor Tour demo is you can show them that you solved the three problems. Problems you can show the dashboard really quickly. You can show them the compensation planner and their ability to toggle between all the different managers. You can show them the ability to communicate equity. And so you answer the first question, which is, can you solve a problem? And you do that all on the first call, but then you use the next call as the carrot for them to figure out how you solve the problem. So that demo can oftentimes get them really excited because they're like, oh my God, this thing is real. I have all these questions around, does your thing actually fit for my business? But when you make it real for them, as opposed to just hearing it in abstract words, it oftentimes increases the chances that they're going to take a next step with you. And that leads us into, no pun intended, the next step. But the next step is going to happen in next week's episode. To recap, folks, we talked through four sections. Section one were the key philosophies behind running a good discovery call that included finding problems worth solving, making sure that it feels like a conversation, not an interrogation, and then positioning yourself as an advisor, not an adversary. From there, we walk through the situation problem impact framework. We walk through three ways to map out the situation. Whether you're asking what, why they took the call, the current state, future state, or asking what, how situational questions. From there, we talked about how to turn the situation into a problem. In other words, if you ask why, you might not have to, but if they don't give you one proactively, you might have to ask for a problem. And if you can't get a problem from there, you might have to suggest a problem to them. And then lastly, we talked about the ways to get impact through getting impact stories by asking magic moment questions and then using humbling disclaimers to get impact trends or impact metrics. Finally, we talked about give and take playbacks to recap and show your listening pylons to show that you understand the problem, and then parallel stories to show how you can help. And then we just talked about the quote unquote grand turnaround pitch where you recap all the problems, explain how you solve the problems, and maybe even show a harbor tour demo. And that's a wrap. Nick, my question to you is how can people help us out here?

Well, folks, one of the best ways to get better at discovery calls, believe it or not, is having real discovery calls with your prospects. And in order for you to book real discovery calls with your prospects, that means you probably need to do a bit of prospecting. And that might mean that you need to pick up the magic device called the phone and make a couple cold calls. And believe it or not, 30 minutes to President's Club is also here to help you with that. If you didn't know In August the 30 minutes to President's Club book on cold calling is coming out. And so if you want to learn how to be able to pick up the phone, call one of your dream prospects and actually book a meeting with them, this might help. There will be a link in the show notes or description of this video for you to pre order the book or if it's already been released, get access to it. Check it out. I promise it will help you build more pipeline. They have more great content.