A short instructional podcast episode (Getting to Club) teaching a repeatable technique—called a ‘discovery prompter’—for warming up buyers in B2B tech sales by telling a concise customer story that surfaces relatable pain and prompts deep discovery. The host presents a five-step template, an HR-tech example with concrete metrics, and practical cautions about practicing and tailoring the story to make buyers see themselves in it.
Chapters
All right, welcome to another episode of the Getting to Club podcast where you get to learn to become and stay a President's club winner in B2B tech. And today I'm going to teach you a simple technique that helps you accelerate the process of building trust with your buyers so that you can ask some of the pain oriented questions, the kind of questions that reveal deal closing, business pain that I talk so much about faster. And I want to start by saying this. I personally have an unfair advantage that most salespeople do not have. And that is I have a fairly decent sized personal brand with the group of buyers that I serve. I hate the words personal brand, but it's true. I have that. And as a result, buyers come to me already trusting. And because of that, I can get away with asking almost intrusive questions at the very beginning of a discovery call. I don't have any warming up to do. We just kind of jump in and I can ask something right off the bat because they already trust me coming in. Now, the typical account executive doesn't have that benefit at all. Right. Depending on the market you sell to, you might have to warm up your buyer a little bit before they're ready to open up to you and to start sharing some of their most challenging issues. You can't always just barge in asking a bunch of pain oriented questions right off the bat. So if that's you, right, if you sell to a market that needs some trust building and warming up before you can ask these questions, here's what to do. I want you to start your discovery calls if you get the sense that they need warming up with a short customer story that your buyer can see themselves in, a short customer story that your buyer can see themselves in. And I want you to do it toward the beginning of the discovery call and then after you're done telling the story, pass the torch to your buyer and ask them about their typical challenges. So I want to make a caveat and I'm going to give you an examples and a framework to do this. You're not telling like a typical customer story where you're like, we helped job two networks skyrocket their business and you're just talking about outcomes. You're telling a story of a customer who was in pain before they found you. And the idea here is the pain they were in, if you can get this right, should feel very familiar to the buyer you're talking to. They should be able to see their own pain in the story. So I'm going to tell you how this Works. And I'm going to tell you an example of how you what this sounds like. First I'm just going to walk through a few of the steps, empty steps, the template, and then I'll give you an example with the filled in story so you can hear what good sounds like. So this is the structure of a great, what I call discovery prompter. Okay, that's what I'm talking about here is it is a pain oriented customer story that prompts discovery. Step one is talk about a customer who was dealing with your pain. So that might sound like one of the customers we worked with was dealing with. Insert pain statement here. Step two, you'll then expand on that pain. Okay, so the sentence to fill in more or less is before working with us, they were struggling with. And then you expand on the customer's pain. Step three is you talk about one or two negative ramifications or negative impacts from that pain. So it might sound like this. In fact, it was such a struggle that. And here's where you describe the negative ramifications. So those are the first three steps. The fourth step is giving them just a short story of the results. What was the outcome they achieved? You don't have to go into depth here, but it might sound like the short story is we helped the them achieve desired future state and then finally you pass the torch. And that sounds like. But enough about our customers. Tell me about the key issues that are making their way on your priority slide. Okay, so I'm going to give you an example of what this sounds like because I just kind of gave you an empty framework. And then I'm going to unpack why it works and what to do next. Okay, so here's an example of what this might sound like. If I was selling P Club for business to an HR tech company, it would make sense to understand your priorities. But before we do that, let me give you an idea of the typical issues that we solve and help with so you have context so we can discuss the right priorities. Is that fair? They'll probably say yes. Okay, and here's where the story starts. We recently onboarded a customer in the HR tech space just like you. And due to the economy, their sales team was struggling. Only 30% of their reps exceeded quota in H1, which we find is a typical number right now in B2B tech. And their win rates were down to 17%, which we often find. We also find is a typical number in B2B Tech. Right. Right now the typical tech company we talk to has between 16 and 18 win rates. Now, before they came to us, they tried to dig in and understand the issue a little bit more. And they found that their reps did not have the skills they needed to sell in this tough economic climate. They struggled to build champions, they struggled to find high priority pain, they struggled to write compelling business cases. Access, power, you name it. They didn't have to do any of that. Eighteen months ago when the economy was good, it was like shooting fish in the barrel. And now the economy turns upside down. They don't have any of the skills that they need. So when we first met with the VP of sales, she talked about how their exec team agreed that they needed to solve this because. Because it was influencing their customer acquisition costs negatively and too much right. CAC was going up because their reps weren't closing deals enough. Now, I'm going to cut to the chase a little bit here. The short story is we helped them build the very precise set of skills that they needed to sell through this economy. And while they still have work to do, last quarter they saw a lot of success. They increased the number of reps meeting or exceeding quota to 52%. And remember, it was around 30% before we started working with them. Enough about our customers and some of the issues they're facing. Talk to me about what issues you're facing and what's on your priorities slide. Okay, so ideally you add a little bit of interactivity to that story so you're not talking at them for two minutes straight. But here's the point of this. That story, what I just told. If I'm selling to a B2B tech company who sells to other tech companies, meaning they are affected by the economy, they see themselves in that situation. I know my ideal customer profile enough to know that they're going to be like, damn, that is exactly what we're facing. And let me tell you what's going on. In fact, even though I often get trust from buyers really fast because of my personal brand, I still tell stories like this because it triggers such rich discovery conversations. Now what I want you to do is go use this yourself. Go craft your own story and give it a try. Now, you only have to use this when you feel like your buyer needs to be warmed up. And I'm going to give you a little bit of a warning here. It's going to take you some time to get the story right. If all you do is just fill in the story structure, right, those five steps with words and you expect it to work. It's going to fail, right? The point of this is your buyer needs to see themselves in the story that you're telling for this to be really effective. Or at least they have to be familiar with the pain or resonate with the pain to some extent. And if you do, and you end it with anyway, enough about our customers, talk to me about what's on your priority slide. If you did this right and it felt like you almost read a page from their journal or diary, buyers will automatically trust you because you have articulated the problem they're facing better than they can themselves. They can see themselves in it. They will often respond by being very open about the pain and challenges they have. So give that a try. I want to make I want to emphasize that this is a skill, not just a tactic or a framework. Right? I can give you the framework, but if you fill it out in an empty, half assed way, it's not going to work. You're going to have to practice this. You're going to have to get good at it. But if you do, and it doesn't take long to get good at this one, then you will trigger very rich discovery conversations that lead to more, more closed deals. So give that a I'll overlay the framework in this. If you're watching this on video, you'll see a visual. If you're seeing this in the podcast, we'll put it in the show notes, give it a try and I'll see you in the next episode.
