This YouTube tutorial (by Adam Kay) teaches five practical tactics to run higher-quality discovery calls for SaaS sales. The five tips are: (1) treat discovery as an ongoing process, not a one-time stage; (2) align questions to the buyer's stage in the buyer’s journey; (3) constantly revalidate previously uncovered information; (4) phrase questions to elicit long, detailed answers (use prompts like “help me understand” / “walk me through”); and (5) ask follow-up questions driven by what the buyer just said. The video emphasizes listening, situational tailoring, and repeating validation at follow-ups to reduce deal risk.
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Hey everybody. In this video, I'm going to teach you five discovery call tips that are going to set your discovery calls on fire. This is kind of a sister episode between one of the recent videos I did, which was six discovery call mistakes. That's we talked about the things not to do a few videos ago. Today you're going to learn five simple tips, tactics, strategies and insights to discovery calls on on fire. Now, before you move forward and watch the rest, make sure you like this video. If you got value, share it out with your next network. And here are the five tips. Tip number one. Realize that discovery is a process, not a static event. Okay? Most salespeople treat discovery as a static stage in their sales process, right? They try to get through everything at the very beginning and then they're done with discovery or moving on to demo and presentation and negotiating and closing. But the best salespeople realize that discovery is a process that unfolds. You don't have to cram it all in. And even if you did, you need to continually learn and relearn what's changing within the account you're selling to, right? One of the best things you can do is start every follow up meeting with what's changed since last we talked. Okay? So treat discovery as a process, not a static event or stage. Tip number two, align your questions to the buyer's journey. Okay, if you think about a typical buyer's journey, it's kind of like a funnel where you have people at the top of the funnel up here, they haven't really defined their problem. And then you have people at the bottom of the funnel who have defined their problem and they're actively looking for solutions. You should be asking different types of questions to each of those different types of buyers. So for example, if somebody's at the bottom of the funnel, if somebody is exploring solutions actively, maybe they came inbound on your website, requested a demo, then your question needs to respect where they are in their buyer's journey. And it should sound something like, talk to me about what you're looking for. What are you looking to accomplish with a solution like this? Right? Because that's what they want to talk about. Now, on the other hand, if you ask a question like that to somebody who's at the top of the funnel and are not exploring solutions, and you're like, what do you want to accomplish with a solution like ours? They're going to be like, you asked me to join this meeting, I'm not even looking at solutions like this. So instead you tailor your questions to where they are in their buyer's journey, which is the very top of the journey. And you say something like, I'll tell you about some of the challenges we solve in just a second, but I don't want to poison the. Well, talk to me about some of the biggest challenges you have on your plate that you would regret not solving a few quarters from now. Maybe let's start there. Okay. So recognize those are different approaches. One respects buyers that are at the bottom of the funnel and one respects buyers that are at the top. And you should be able to toggle your approach based on where your buyer is in that buyer's journey. Tip number three, revalidate what you uncover constantly. This is actually similar to number one. And the idea behind this is things are always shifting in deals. Change is constant. Especially if you sell sales cycles that are longer than 60 days. You are at risk of of priorities and people shifting underneath your feet in deals in a way that derails the deal. And so to combat this, you should start every follow up sales meeting confirming what you already know. Are these priorities still what we're attacking? Great. Are these people still involved? You don't have to overdo it, but just validate the things you've already uncovered and make sure they're still true. Because if you don't and if you go a long time without validating it, more than likely something has changed in a way that's going to make it harder for you to get the deal done. Especially if you're just finding out now. And you could have found it out a week ago, two weeks ago, a month ago, whatever. Tip number four, phrase your questions to get long answers from your buyers. Gong has a lot of data that shows there's a strong correlation between win rates and how long you can get your buyers going after you ask a question. If they have several studies they've done. And one of the things that you can do to generate those long responses from your buyers is just in the way you phrase your questions. And here's how to do it. Take your typical who, what, when, where, why questions and add one of these phrases in front of it. Help me understand. Talk to me about. Walk me through. Okay, so that could be like, help me understand your sales process from beginning to end or walk me through the biggest challenges you're having when it comes to sales effectiveness. Right in this situation, I'm maybe selling a sale sales technology. When you add help me understand, walk me through, talk to me about phrases like that, it signals to your buyer that you want them to go in depth and it generates long, rich monologues from your buyer as a result of your phrasing. So give that a try. Tip number five and the last tip for the day. Ask your next question based on what your buyer just said. Okay, so your follow up discovery questions, they shouldn't all be pre planned. It's okay if some of them are, but if that's all you do, it tells me you're not listening to your buyer and you're not being spontaneous in the questions that you ask. Okay, the best salespeople, they'll plan the first few questions, but then based on whatever their buyer is saying, they'll ask questions that relate directly back to whatever their buyer just said. And it's really hard to preplan those questions. But the good news is you don't have to. You just have to be a very intent listener and you have to know your space well. And if you do those two things, then you are going to be empowered to ask very powerful follow up questions that do not feel like you're just checking the box and trying to get through a discovery call. Okay, that's all I have for you today. Those are five tips that, if you implement them well, will absolutely light your discovery calls on fire. Give them a try. If you liked this, write your favorite of the five tips in the comments below. Just write a number right? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Like the video? Share it with your network, all the YouTube things and I'll see you in the next video.
