How to Structure The Perfect Discovery Call (Sell Playbook)

Foreign. Everybody. And welcome to this Part 2 Discovery Playbook episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Farouk and I'm here with my co host Nick Sagalski. And folks, in the last episode of Discovery Dragon Ball Z, we talked all about the ignition in your sales cycle. In other words, how you press the gas in a discovery call by asking really good questions that uncover pain. And now we're talking about the steering wheels in your Discovery call, the bookends on your discovery call. In other words, how do you set an agenda and drive next steps at the beginning and the end of a call? So Nick, why should people listen?

Well, if you're pointed in the wrong direction, Armand, if your steering wheel has been turned and you are facing the guardrail, you are going to crash instead of cruising to the finish line a la Mario Kart when I beat you every time we play. So let's focus on being pointed in the right direction by nailing the beginning of a sales call and actually nailing the last five minutes also so that the next call in the sales process is set up for success. So let's get into it. You get on a zoom meeting with your prospect. You typically do not immediately jump in to setting an agenda. Most sales calls start with a little bit of small talk. Our recommendations as it relates to small talk. One, do not overstay your welcome on small talk. You should be transitioning to business in the first two, maybe three minutes. You don't want to burn more than 10% of your 30 minute discovery call on small talk. Principle number two is you don't want to get yourself lumped in with the junior salespeople who are also meeting with your prospect who make small talk about stuff like sports or the weather. Or they ask, hey, where are you calling in from? Instead, you want to follow what we call the 90 second rule, which is within the first 90 seconds of your sales call with a new prospect, you, you need to establish yourself as someone who has done some business related research on them or their business. And so what I will do is I will comment on things that I found in my research. I sell sponsorships for 30 MPC and so I'll comment on things related to what my product helps with. I'll say, hey, I saw you just through a big webinar or hey, I saw you had a big product launch. But when I sold law firm billing technology, I I would comment on things like hey, I saw you opened a new office. You all must be growing, you must be hiring attorneys and what you do here is you start to establish yourself as someone who is worthwhile and on their level, not a salesperson who is going to linger in pleasantries.

A few episodes ago, we had Chris Voss on the show and he talked about the fact that every interaction you have with someone conditions them for the next interaction. So if you linger in small talk for 10 more minutes, they're going to expect that, that every single call they have with you in the future is going to include 10 minutes of BS, even if they enjoy it the first time. So do not linger in small talk. Leave it in under five minutes. And that's what brings you to the agenda. So a lot of people set these crazy, freaking, long winded, cringy, overly structured agendas. They sound like, I appreciate you taking the call. Naturally you're going to have a bunch of questions for us. Obviously, I'm going to have a bunch of questions for you. Typically, these calls go in one or two directions. Or are you comfortable telling me if it's not a fit, yes or no. And then my biggest concern is da da da da. And your buyers are just sitting there for two minutes at the end of this monologue being like, dude, I just clicked request a demo. What's going on? And it's just so freaking antagonistic and it's so cringy and it makes you come off as really junior when you're that uptight with your agenda. So I prefer a very simple three part agenda that's called ppo. Purpose, plan, outcome. And Doug Landis originally came up with this on a previous episode of 30 MPC. The three steps are as follows. I want to explain the purpose for the call. Why are we here? From there, I want to explain the plan for the call. How are we going to spend the time, what's coming? And then I want to explain the outcome for the call. What is the explicit decision that you and I are going to make together to determine whether or not it's worth us spending more time together? And so here's what that would actually sound like in practice. I used to sell compensation software for a company called Pave. And so my PPO would sound like this is. I would say, hey, Nick, appreciate you taking the time. Look, the goal of this call is I don't know if there's a big problem we can solve for you. And honestly, the goal of this is to figure out if there's any way for us to be helpful or not. The plan or the way that we'll do that is, is I'd love to spend the first half of this call, frankly, just like, getting to know your business a little bit better, how you're doing compensation today. And then we can spend the back half giving you a sense of where pave might be helpful, maybe even doing like a Harbor Tour demo once I actually have a sense of what you're doing. And then at the end of this call, you, you and I can just have a frank conversation on whether or not it even makes sense to dive deeper. Does that sound like a plan to you, or was there anything else that you wanted to cover? The next step is once we have a purpose for the call, it's time to establish a plan to achieve that purpose. And the biggest thing that you want to set the expectation for is that you're going to do discovery. Before you start showing your software or pitching or anything else like that. You have to remember that oftentimes your prospects have clicked the request a demo button. They show up, and they think they're going to see the software right away. But as you and I both know, oftentimes you need to understand what. What's going on with their business and figure out if there's even a problem worth solving before you start showing your product. But the key is, when you explain the plan for the call. You don't say, I need to run discovery on you so that I can figure out if you have a problem we're solving. You frame it in terms of their best interest. You say, in order for me to even figure out if we can be helpful, I have to have a sense of how you're doing things today. And then once I know that, I can give you a sense of where we can be helpful and. And maybe even cover something like a Harbor Tour demo towards the end of this thing. So what that does is it creates a little bit of ease in the prospect because they're not constantly wondering, is this person going to show me software? Why is this person asking me all these questions? If you've ever had a prospect be like, why are you asking me all these questions? It's either because you asked a bunch of really bad discovery questions, which we covered in the last episode, or you didn't set the expectation that you were going to ask questions.

And.

And that happens in this step.

The last piece here is Outcome, which is where you will foreshadow that you are going to spend some time at the end of this call talking about whether or not you and the prospect are even going to continue the sales conversation after today. I like to Say something along the lines of, typically calls like this end up going a couple ways. You might learn some stuff today that makes you realize, hey, this isn't a good fit and I might learn some stuff also. And I definitely share that with you. You know, if we do feel like this is something that's worth continuing to explore together, usually what folks want to do next is see a deeper dive demo. But maybe we can spend some time at the end talking about whether or not it even makes sense to do that at the end. And when I say something like this, what I'm doing is I'm telling them, hey, we're going to spend some intentional time at the end talking about whether or not we keep going. You have the ability to opt out. And I'm not even sure if that's where we're going to go next. But then, two, I've given them a sense of I'm going to ask for this thing. And so the questions and conversation that we have today should be driving towards help inform whether or not we end up doing that. And then the last piece is if they're like, no, actually I don't think we should do a demo next. I think we should do a security review next. Well, great. Now that's out in the open and you have a sense of where they want to take things if this call goes well, which helps you steer the rest of the sales process.

So there are a couple finishing touches that you can add to your PPO to make sure that it is executed the right way. So the first finishing touch is you want to give them the ability to opt in, opt out, or even edit your agenda. What I mean by that is they might not want to go all the way through discovery, at which point you need to have a hard conversation and explain to them why you need to just do discovery before you go into a demo. They might say, hey, I really want to cover this one part of your product and that allows you to edit the agenda or add things to the agenda. Or they might say, this is totally good, at which point you move into the call. So that's key number one. Key number two is oftentimes, especially for these weird, like 45 minute meetings, you want to do a little bit of a time check. I will usually do that right before the PPO where I'll say, are we good to the top of the hour? Are we good to the top of the half hour? We or sometimes Nick will even explain that as part of the purpose in PPO by saying, hey, for the next 30 or so minutes. Here was how I plan to spend the time. That's number two. Number three, skip the introductions. Unless you've got more than two prospects on the discovery call, you do not need to do the introductions one by one. You should be doing your research ahead of time and if anything, you can just briefly introduce yourself as someone who works on the team at whatever company you're at. But frankly, that should be pretty obvious that you're a salesperson. And then lastly, number four, your PPO talks to the PPO in future meetings. And what I mean by that is, if the outcome of this call is we're going to decide whether or not it makes sense for us to do a deeper dive demo, then your purpose for the next call and your plan for the next call is, hey, we're going to spend our time doing a demo today for the purpose purposes of figuring out if it makes sense to bring in power for the next call. And that's your outcome for the second call. And then guess what, when you get power on the third call, you hit PPO again. And so all of your PPOs, your agendas, talk to each other where your outcome in this first meeting points to the purpose and the plan for the next meeting. And so this is what allows you to drive in a straight line, block by block, using your steering wheels and make sure that each call in your sales cycle is properly connected.

That's right. It allows you to control the sales process in the way that you know is best for you, which is also probably best for your prospect. And speaking of control, we also want to keep control of the call after we set the agenda by asking the opening question. And we covered this in the part one playbook. So I'm not going to go super in depth here, but the question we recommend you ask after setting your agenda is, why did they take the call? We've got to figure out what is their motivation for being here, which will often start to open them up. There's two different ways that I ask it for an inbound meeting. Super easy. What prompted you to reach out for an outbound meeting? I'll ask something like, you know, I have to imagine there's a lot of people that reach out to you, Armand, and I can't imagine you take meetings with every single one of them. What prompted you to take this meeting with me today? And now that gives them the mic and they will start to share what their motivation for being on the call is. There's some nuance here where there are going to be Some prospects, when you ask that, why did you take the call question and attempt to hand them the mic that they don't really know what the heck you do.

So let's go back to this example that I was using at pave. Oftentimes if I was selling compensation software, I would meet with people leader and they would jump on the call. And a people leader might say, I'm really looking for someone who can help me build out all of my compensation levels or help me build my compensation philosophy. And PAVE didn't do that at all at the time. PAVE gave you some data so that you could build your own compensation philosophy, but we're not going to be a compensation consultant for you and go build your whole comp philosophy for you. And so whenever I had someone saying that, I would pull up a three part chart and it literally had three bubbles on it that said the three things we did. And in 60 seconds I would be like, here's how PAVE works is PAVE helps you do three things with compensation. Number one, we give you data to benchmark your compensation. Number two, once you build your comp philosophy on your own, to be clear, we help you plan compensation and run merit cycles. And then once you're done running those merit cycles, at that point we help you communicate the results and the total rewards to your employees. So it's a very simple three part overview. It's not all the details, all the value propositions, but these are literally the three workflows you can do inside of pave. And at that point I'll ask them why again and I'll be like, so based on what you see here, I'm curious to what extent does any of this stuff resonate with you? And at that point, they'll usually pick one of the three things we do and that begins discovery.

We're not going to get in to how you run discovery in this playbook. If you want that, go listen to Playbook Part one that we did on this, which was the previous episode. Let's assume in this scenario, Armand, that we've run a great discovery call and we have made it to the last five minutes of the call and we have uncovered and the prospect has vocalized at least one big business problem that we are able to solve. You to taught me a lot about what needs to happen in the last five minutes of a sales call. Before I started working with you, I thought the last five minutes was great. Set a next step, tell them this is what we're going to do next and make Sure, I never left the call without a next step on the books. You've taught me there is far more nuance in the last five minutes than that.

Many sellers make the huge mistake of thinking that I need to set next steps. And so what they do is they set next steps on every single deal. And that's better than not setting any next steps at all. But it's still a horrible mistake of an average seller. And the reason for that is oftentimes prospects, you will be surprised will waste a lot of their own time to do window shopping. Prospects will agree to a deeper dive demo. They'll agree to a proposal call because they want to see your product, they want to see your pricing. But in order to order for them to earn the right to see your product or earn the right to see pricing, they need to confirm that this is actually moving on the path toward an eventual purpose. So instead of just blindly setting next steps, we're going to run three questions to set next steps using what is called the five minute drill. So the three questions that you ask in the five minute drill are as follows. And this is not exactly how you'll phrase them. We'll go through that in just a second. The first question is do you want to buy? That first question needs to validate their intent to purchase. In other words, you need to get to problem agreement in that first sentence. Once you have problem agreement, your second question is when do you want to buy? In other words, when do you want to solve this problem by when is the latest you would want to solve this problem? That's number two. Then number three, once you know when they want to solve the problem, that informs your next step. In other words, that informs the third question, which is how do you buy? And that is when you start explaining based on when you want to solve this problem. Implementation takes this long. This takes that long. What that means is we need to set our next step for next week because you need to finish your evaluation by the end of this month. So those three questions to recap are do you want to buy? When do you want to buy? And how do you buy?

And you ask them in a very intentional order. It makes zero sense to talk about timing or to try to force something on the calendar with a prospect that doesn't actually have serious intent to buy the thing that you are selling. And so first gate that they need to make it past is do they have purchase intent? This is not, do they want to continue the exploration process? This is not do they want to learn more? This is do they think that this is something that they could buy? The way that you can ask this varies. There's a super simple way, which is where you basically just say, so now that we've talked about this, like, how are we feeling on things? And hand them the mic and let them be the one to voice over. Yeah, I want to continue this. There's another way where you can actually qualify them a bit more and say something along the lines of, well, cool. I know we're coming up on our time here. You know, I feel like there's some potential here, but I'm curious to hear from you, knowing that continuing to evaluate this, it's going to take a decent amount of time and resources from both your team, frankly, also our team. Like, is this something that you actually see worth continuing to explore with us? And what I'm doing here is I am sharing. Hey, this is going to take some work from us both. Should we continue doing this work or might that be a waste of time for all of us? Now, there's a couple different directions we're going to go based on their response. Let's talk about those.

Now, there are a few different ways that this thing can go. Number one is they say, yeah, I agree that there's a problem we're solving. Awesome. Now you move to question two. When do you want to buy? The second situation is they might not validate the problem. They might say, yeah, I'd like to see a deeper dive demo. At which point you actually need to redirect and confirm that they don't just want to see a demo. They actually see this progressing towards a purchase. The way that you do that is you redirect the exit criteria of the. So let's say they're like, yeah, I'd love to see a demo or do a deeper dive. I'll use let's just pretend language that sounds like, Nick, awesome, would love to set up demo with you and the team. Hey, let's just pretend that thing goes well. You know how this thing goes. It's going to be an investment of your time and my time. I'm curious, is this the type of thing that you could actually see the team investing in based on some of the problems that we talked about today and shut up and let them answer that question. And if the answer is no, then it's not worth you setting the next step. The third situation is they don't say, yes, I have a problem. They don't suggest a next step. They actually introduce an objection. In other words, they say, I have a concern with taking a next step. I don't see that there's a problem. They might say, hey, this looks really good, but not now, but six months down the road. And at that point you honestly need to go back to discovery a little bit, you need to understand their concern. And then you need to say, hey, based on what I learned in discovery, here are the problems that you said you wanted to solve. And what it sounds like is it might not be worth solving those today for the next six months and it's okay if those things burn for now. Am I hearing that right? And so position the trade off for them and go back to Discovery and figure out if it's even worth you spending another figure out if it's even worth you setting a next step with them. And at that point you'll either decide this is not worth the next step or you'll get them to agree to a problem at which point you now validate when they want to buy.

So at this point we know that they have some degree of intent to buy our product. The next piece is we need to talk about timelines not for when they want to see the next demo or take the next step, but we need to talk about timelines for when they would want to be live with this thing, AKA when they would have the problem that they shared solve. And so there's three ways that we can get to this way. Number one is we can suggest when they would need to be live based on something we heard on the call. Example, when I sell 30 NPC sponsorships, oftentimes people want to advertise with us when they have a big problem product launch coming up. And if somebody shared their product launches in September, I'm going to tie when they need to be live with us to that September product launch. Now if I didn't uncover something like that, I can ask them about their timeline by saying something like, you know, we didn't really talk about it, but when is the latest you would want to have something like this in place? Actually solving the problem that we talked about today. Great. Now I know their timeline and if I believe that that timeline is too far in the future, I can start to educate them on things that would make them need to move sooner. I might be trying to test typical compelling events year end for example, or they have a merit cycle upcoming is something you would use at Pave Armand or I might share. Hey, this is typically how long implementation and evaluation takes. We actually might need to move faster based on those facts.

And that brings Us to the flow final step which is how do you buy? And fun fact. The third question in the five minute drill is not a question, it's a statement. It's this is how you buy. You never ask what do you think the next step should be? Or who do you think should be involved. You always want to suggest people and process. In other words, here are the next steps that I think we should take and here's explicitly who I think should be involved. The way that you do that is you do a high level walk back from what you learned in when do you want to buy? So let's say that they wanted to go live in four months. I'm going to say awesome. Usually there are three or four things that need to happen before you go live. It takes about a month to implement, it takes about a month to go through vendor review and it honestly probably take you about a month to go through the full evaluation. Get this proved by power and all this yada yada, yada, yada. And so what that means is we should probably get moving on this thing pretty soon. And usually the right next step is we would do a deeper dive demo with you and oftentimes with your chief people officer Jane, just because compensation is one of those things that executives usually want to have their hands on pretty early. How does that sound? And so I'm suggesting the next step which is a deep dive demo and multi threading to Jane in that next step. And I'm not asking do you think that would be a good idea? I'm saying that's what I think we should do. What do you think? From there they might disagree with that next step, but at that point then I can unpack that concern as opposed to having them suggest the next step. Like I think you should do a deep dive demo with my people ops analyst for three hours. Instead I can just go back and explain what why they don't want to take my next step as opposed to disagreeing with their suggested next step. One last kicker you can use on this one is if you're really good, you'll set next next steps. In other words, you'll say this is why we should do that deep dive demo. And then if that goes well, then we'll go into this next meeting or this next proposal or whatever it is. So you create three dots in the line segment so that you keep this thing on its path. And speaking of which folks, that has given you the beginning, middle and end of your discovery call. And that brings us to the end of part two. So to recap, we covered small talk, which meant in the first 90 seconds you need to establish that you've done your research. From there, you move on to the agenda and you set it with purpose, plan and outcome. After that, you ask them why you took the call and if they give you a funky answer, you you give them the 30,000 foot primer. And then the final piece is the three questions in the five minute drill. Do you want to buy? When do you want to buy? And how do you buy? So folks, we gave you a lot here. Discovery is probably the single hardest thing to learn in sales, but I would strongly recommend re listening to both this episode and the last one a couple times as you get into this thing. All righty, Nick. How could people help us out?

So if you got some value out of this episode. Armand, you've been doing quite a bit of writing recently and I know you wrote up a four part discovery best practice series for the 30 minutes to President's Club newsletter. And folks, even if you weren't subscribed when Armand sent it out, you can get access to those editions at the link in the show notes. Go check it out. It should help serve as a visual aid to help with what we talked about on this episode. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week on the show or maybe even the newsletter.