Deals are Won Through Problem-Based Discovery with Kevin "KD" Dorsey

Foreign. Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management, and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff. All right, what up everybody? How we living? How we doing? Hope everyone is doing well. Really excited to record this training today on problem based discovery. Because discovery to me is the essence of everything. It starts it all. In fact, more often than not, when a rep is struggling, I start at the beginning, not at the end. So I wanted to dive into what I mean by problem based discovery. Get into the tactics, the tips, the tricks, how to go through this the right way. So hopefully you can be doing better discovery moving forward. So let's rock it. So I want to start with where discovery's gone wrong. All right? Because most reps do discovery completely, completely the wrong way. They're going down a checklist of questions that they were taught or even worse, they're trying to qualify, not discover. And I'm going to talk about the differences in a little bit here. But if you aren't asking the right questions, you aren't using what you discovered, you quite literally aren't needed. And I want to be as bold as to state that real quick because if you think about what the entire point of having a human involved in the sales process is, this is it. It's being able to ask the right questions and more importantly, use them. If you're not going to, a salesperson isn't needed. That is how important discovery is, right? Because more often than not, and I get to. The reason why I get to be hard on y', all, by the way, as salespeople, is one, I am a salesperson. Two, I lead sales teams. But three, I also get sold too, which not a lot of sales reps actually get, is to be sold to. I get to experience this from the other side. And I can tell when someone's just asking questions down a checklist because they're not even paying attention. Right? If you do discovery wrong, it hurts every other part of the sales process. And that's why I wanna start with this here, right? Qualification and discovery are two totally different things. Okay? Qualifying questions should be done either before discovery or. Or throughout the presentation. Here's why. If you open up the call asking me the size of my team and my decision making criteria and how much budget I have set aside, you've completely ruined your opportunity to actually build rapport and actually set up a proper sales process. Right? Also too, if there are little things like I can't, it just drives me nuts. How many people will ask me how big my team is? How long have I been patient? Like, no, these are things you can Google, right? It starts you up on the wrong foot, right? Qualification is about can they use your product. This is what qualification means to me. I don't sign up for bands or medic or anim or any of this. Qualification to me is can they, Is there anything that prevents them? So a good qualification, right? So say I have a tool that only works if you have salesforce.com a qualification is so GS use salesforce. If the answer is no, they are unqualified because they can't use my product. Discovery is all about should they, should they use my product? That's what discovery is all about. So if you have qualification questions you have to ask, those need to be done before the disco call or spread throughout, right? That is really, really important. And I know some of y' all listening might go against what your companies do or how you have it set up, but I'm telling you, when you waste the first four to five questions around these types of questions, that's not discovery done, right? Discovery is about should they. It's about figuring things out. Because I believe things are won and lost here. If you don't do problem based discovery, the end of the call will never go the way that it was. No problem, no next steps, no deal, right? You'll be referencing the problems you discovered in discovery throughout the demo. This is so key, right? Because I have a rule on questions I tell my reps all the time. One, don't ask a question you're not going to use to close. And you'll be shocked at how many people will go through discovery, even get some good answers. Then never use it. They never use what they learned in discovery, right? This sets up everything. Your proposals will be better, your demo will be better, your contracts will be better, your next steps will be better. Everything gets better if you do this right? If you don't, you're stuck. And you're wondering why deals don't move forward, right? So to me, deals are won and lost in discovery. Because if you do this right, everything else gets better. If you don't do this right, everything else becomes harder. And this is where I come to find out what's going wrong. Very rarely do I have a rep who's doing discovery really, really well, who's struggling. Very rarely is that the case. Right, so let's talk about the goal of discovery. What is the actual goal? First bullet point to agree to a problem. If you forget everything I say right now, except for this, you could stop the presentation right now and go listen to all of your discovery calls and go, how often am I getting them to agree they have a problem? This is the first goal of discovery, agreeing to a problem. Then it's getting them to share the impact, getting them to agree to learn, agree that a change is needed. Right. Remember these four things again, if you forget everything, if you think I'm totally full of it, but you remember these four things and go back and sit before every discovery call going, how am I going to get them to agree there's a problem. How am I going to get them to share the impact of it? How can I get them to agree to learn and change your discovery and your demos will get better? This is the goal of discovery.