Speaker presents three core B2B sales lessons from an in-person training: (1) if you still go wide in a second discovery call you likely lost the deal — discovery must surface the buyer’s single biggest priority and why it hasn’t been solved; (2) negative consequences must explain why a problem matters (digging “so what?” until executives see business-threatening impact); (3) when customers define required capabilities, vendors who merely meet those basic specs compete on price, so sellers must influence requirements or offer the lowest-cost option. The video closes with a CTA to like, comment, and subscribe.
We flew our entire sales work to Miami. For two days of in person training, I was responsible to deliver eight hours of content. But across those full eight hours, there were only three main points I wanted everyone to take away. One, if you are still going wide in your second discovery call, you've lost. Two, negative consequences are not just a definition of the current state. And then three, when required capabilities are only defined by the customer, lowest cost wins. These points are so important, I wanted to make this video to go deeper into each one of those so you can avoid mistakes that most other sellers are making. The first point, if you're still going wide in your second discovery call, you've lost. Let's think for a second about the buyer psychology going into a discovery call. No buyer is excited to get on a discovery call. They're worried that you're going to waste their time, they're worried that you don't understand their business, and they're worried that you're not going to listen to them. What happens is a lot of sellers go into these first calls and they validate that bias by immediately asking what I call level one questions that are super superficial. These are questions that the seller should have known before they got under the call through research. It's questions like, how does your company make money? Or tell me about your role, or what's keeping you up at night? What do you care about all these things that if you know your Personas, you know your accounts, you come into the call with that point of view, not are these annoying questions for your buyer to answer. They're also a massive time waste. Keep in mind, your buyer wants to know as soon as possible, can this vendor help me? Should I keep listening to them? Should I use more of my time with them? If you're spending 20 minutes of a 30 minute call on superficial questions and conversation, you've wasted all that time where you could have been going deeper into things that your buyer cares about. Great initial discovery uncovers the biggest, biggest problems your buyer needs to solve and why they haven't yet been solved. If you're not finishing your first discovery, knowing what the biggest priority problem is, if they're trying to solve it today, and if they're not, by the way, it's not that priority and where they're falling short in solving it, then your discovery has likely failed. Because if you get to the second discovery and you're still searching for pain, you're not going to get a third call. The second point, let's go a little bit deeper into pain, negative Consequences are not just a description of what's going wrong. They are a definition of why what's going wrong matters. When I see negative consequences defined by a seller, I often see things like we're spending too much money or employees are wasting their time, or we have data silos. And my response is always, so what? Every company has areas where they spend too much money. Every company has employees wasting time and every company has data silos. And a lot of the silos actually are intentional. The reality is every company has tons of fires burning. Even the best, most well run companies in the world have massive amounts of issues that are frustrating, annoying and slowing down teams across the entire organization. However, every company also has finite resources when it comes to money and time and employee bandwidth. And so no company is going to go solve all of the problems. The problems that are really important to me as a VP of Mongo aren't even on the radar of our CRO. They're problems I'm expected to go figure out. If you think again about the idea of we're spending too much money, like imagine an Amazon or an Apple wasting millions of dollars a month on a bad initiative or unoptimized tech stack or whatever it might be. That's nothing. Even though it's millions of dollars, when it's compared to the opportunity cost of other problems to solve, it is probably nowhere near the priority list. And so when you're uncovering negative consequences in a conversation, employees are wasting their time. We're not efficient, we're losing money. You need to keep digging in to so what? So what? So what? Until everyone agrees the problem that you've defined is big enough to solve. Now, because most problems are tolerated, most problems are ignored, and even pret big problems are procrastinated because executives only care about the problems that threaten to burn the business down immediately. And that's where resources are going to be pushed. And the third point is all about how buyers evaluate solutions for whether or not you can solve the problem they care about, specifically around required capabilities. When required capabilities are only defined by the customer, the lowest cost solution will win. Let's think about this. Your customers are generally experts in the problems they have. They are not experts in the possible solutions to solve. There are all sorts of vendors voting out different ways to approach the problem they care about. And there's no way that your buyer understands all the things that you might do differently and better than the competition. And so when a buyer imagines a solution to the problem, they're not thinking about all the advanced ways to handle it. All these new technologies, they're thinking about the most simple, straightforward way to solve the problem. That's why a lot of RFPs are full of basic requirements. The problem with this is anything that the buyer defines that is basic is going to be met by all the competition. And so as an early seller, I remember getting RFPS or being on discovery calls and the buyer would list off all the things they need and I would get super excited and they go, well, we can do all those things. What I didn't understand at that point is if I could easily meet all the requirements the buyer had, so could all of my competition. And so I kept losing to lower cost competitors because they could also check all the boxes, but they could do it at a much lower cost. And so you need to either influence the required capabilities in your favor or make sure you're the cheapest proposal, otherwise you're going to lose and it's a lot more fun as a seller and you're going to make a lot more money if you learn to compete by influencing required capabilities rather than discounting or putting forth the lowest proposal to try to buy the business. I hope this has been helpful. Those are the three main takeaways from my training in Miami. If you're going wide in your second discovery call, you've lost. Negative consequences can't just be a description of what's going wrong. They have to also define why what's going wrong matters. And then make sure that you're influencing your craft capabilities, not just checking off the box of your shopping customer's shopping list. If you found this video helpful, let me know I'm going the right direction by leaving a like on this video. Then, if there are any questions or topics you want to make sure I cover in a future video, leave me a comment. I read all comments and I love recommendations that will help me help you sell more. Finally, don't forget to subscribe. That way you won't miss any of my upcoming content that I'm creating to help you improve the way that you sell.
