Brian LaManna, an AE at Gong, argues that better discovery starts with doing your homework first. Research the account, form a specific hypothesis about their priorities, then present it confidently but stay open to being wrong. He says this beats generic questions and gets more engaged responses.
I've honestly gotten a lot of really great advice. Some from posts, some from coffee chats. You know, one on one with different folks on LinkedIn. I think the one that's had like the biggest outsized impact on me was I used to always run Discovery a certain way and I saw a lot of success at Gong doing it where I would just kind of open up and ask something like, hey Jeff, what are your top two to three strategic priorities for the year? I learned from a seller on on LinkedIn who's a RVP at MongoDB, Kyle AC mentioned that that's really not a strong way of going about things. You know, buyers and VPs of sales are kind of sick of the questions around what are your pain points? What keeps you up at night? What are your top priorities? So to get a much stronger answer, something he recommended was coming with a certain point of view when you kick off Discovery and having it be like really strong and formulated around your research with that account, but holding onto it really, really loosely. So as an example, instead of just saying, hey Jeff, what are your top two to three strategic priorities? I might say, hey Jeff, I saw you just took over as Chief Revenue Officer three months ago. Typically brand new CROs are focused on X, Y and Z. And I saw at Able, you just launched this new product. Is this the number one most important thing in your world? It then gets a really good response of either yes, and you can start to go down that conversation or Jeff will be like, wow, that's super impress that he put in all that research all that time and share a different take of like, hey, that's super important. But actually Brian, XYZ is the number one thing I'm focused on. So it's really just impact. I think Discovery is one of the most important parts in our sales process and that advice of bringing a really strong point of view but holding onto it loosely has really shaped the last year of me selling, especially as I've moved more up market and had more strategic conversations.
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