Rachel Mae explains how to shape what prospects care about during discovery by asking diagnostic questions that uncover root causes and the cost of doing nothing. She uses a doctor analogy: gather information, diagnose the problem with data, then guide them toward decision criteria that fit their needs before you pitch anything.
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
So how in discovery do you start to shape decision criteria? Well, you start with what I was saying before. Influence the way they think about the way that they're doing business today and influence the way they think about the problem. And how you do that is by asking great questions. So I— so an example of that might be, If you don't fix this problem with your reps can't write emails and therefore they can't get meetings and they're missing quota and you're only 50% to your revenue target for the quarter and it's, you know, whatever, March 15th. If you don't fix this, what's going to happen? What have you done in the past to try to improve this area? Can you walk me through, if you could create a new future of what this would look like, can you walk me through what that would look like for you? And then what do you think is going to get in the way? So you can see how, like, I'm asking questions that are teaching them to go, oh shit, this problem of shitty emails. is not just annoying. It's not just kind of— writing better emails might not be what I'm thinking of as the biggest problem in my life if I'm a VP of sales at a startup. Trust me, I am one. It's not what I'm thinking about. But when you start to help— when you ask questions in a way that help them to tie the business problem to the root cause and help them to put the pieces together that that's actually what's causing this Shit that they're really thinking about, that's when you turn the light bulbs on for them. And that's where you start to influence the way that they think about the way they do business today and influence the way they think about this email problem. Substitute email problem for whatever process technical problem you solve. So I know that's a lot, but that's where it all starts. You influence the way they think about the problem by asking questions that get them to think about the cost of doing nothing and get them to think differently about what the root cause is of the business problems that are really, really keeping them up at night. Okay, so secondly, you need to influence their desire to change. And remember I said salespeople are change agents. Influencers are there to influence that desire to change. And so after I ask all of these discovery questions, I— everybody misses this, y'all. Everybody misses this. Yeah. Um, you guys ask a ton of questions and then you don't do shit with it. And the, and the client prospect's just sitting there and they're like, why did she just ask me all those questions? Like, what was the point? Right? This is why people think discovery is a waste of time. When your people are like, can't I just do a demo? It's because The discovery, they think it's for you. They don't think it's for them. But if you're doing it right, it's for them. Because if you're doing it right, you're going to get all of that information and you're going to hold back. You're not going to say anything. Okay. I just want you to ask the questions, ask the questions, try to get as much information as you can. Don't say anything about your product. Don't tell them you can fix it. Don't tell them anything. And then once you've gotten all that information, just like a doctor, You're gonna go, okay, Andrew, thank you for sharing that with me. Based on what you shared, I have a few observations that I'd like to share with you. Okay? So you mentioned this, you mentioned this, you mentioned this, and because those 3 things are happening, you're not able to hit plan. Your reps aren't making quota, which is actually probably what's affecting your attrition, right? You're telling me that your reps are leaving, you can't keep your SDRs. It's not because they, you know, suck. It's because, you know, you're not giving them the right tools. They, you're not giving them the right onboarding so that they can be successful. So it's not their fault. It's actually your fault that those SDRs aren't successful because they need the tools. And, and they're spending all this time, hours and hours a day writing emails and A/B testing everything. only to find out their sequence still doesn't work. The clients on the other end, um, are getting crap messaging. So you're ruining your brand. And even if they do take a meeting with you, they don't have any expectation that that meeting is going to be great because already your messaging is garbage. Right. And so that's impacting your close rates. And all of this together is why you're at 50% of plan. And why you're not going to hit revenue this quarter. So what I want you to do is take all of those specifics and I want you to tell them that their baby's ugly, why their baby's ugly, how to fix it without mentioning your product. That should actually be like a game we play without mentioning your product. And so once you do that, the third thing is, so now you've influenced how they think about the problem, you've influenced their desire to change. By giving them a great diagnosis that's really straightforward and ties right back to your root cause that you solve. And then the next thing is you have to manage the process. And that means I need you to take all of that information. You said this, you said this, you said this. And because of that, this happening, this happening, this happened. Here's what you should be basing this decision on based on what you shared. So ask them, what is your decision criteria? And they'll say something stupid like price. And I want you to go, here's what I would offer you. You need a solution that is going to fix this, this, this, this. And if it doesn't fix all of these things, then it's not going to fix that business problem. And then you're going to write that all out in an email with as many metrics as you can get together. Show them what's going to happen if they do nothing, or if they choose a solution that doesn't address all the root causes. of the business problem, and that way they can share it with everyone else in their organization. And that way you've, you've definitely influenced the process going forward. And that's how it's done.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenuetoday.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
