A sales-training YouTube video (May 2024) that argues leaders and reps should avoid diagnosing skills at broad levels (e.g., "prospecting" or "discovery") and instead decompose them into specific sub-skills. The creator recounts an anecdote about an AE who set many meetings via strong cold-calling but targeted the wrong personas, so meetings failed to convert; reframing the problem toward persona identification and targeted messaging unlocked the rep's success. The video then outlines subcomponents of prospecting (right person, right account, right messaging, channels, follow-up) and discovery (pre-discovery research, personal/company motivations, current state, metrics, outcome measurement), and closes with CTAs to like, comment, and subscribe.
I used to manage an AE that most considered to be an excellent pipeline generator because they set tons of meetings. The problem was they were closing literally no deals. And as I dug in with them, I found that very few of the meetings they had set even turned into real opportunities. Their previous leader diagnosed them as being high skill in prospecting but low skill in discovery, which at the service level made a lot of sense. They were sent in a lot of meetings, which must mean they're good at prospecting. No quality opportunities coming from those meetings. That must mean that they were having bad discovery. That was logical, but it was completely wrong. When I dug deeper, I found that this rep was really good at cold calling, but they were cold calling the wrong people so they could convince just about anybody to schedule a 30 minute meeting. But the meetings they set weren't converting, not because they were doing bad discovery, but because they were calling the wrong Persona. So we went a deeper, we went a deeper level in our diagnosis of their prospecting skills. We realized that their cold call messaging was high skill. They were really good at cold calls. However, they were really low skill at identifying the right Personas. So once we had this more specific diagnosis, we stopped focusing on discovery because even the best discovery in the world was not going to go convert the wrong people into opportunities for the solution that we sold. Instead, we focused on finding the right people to improve their Personas skill. Then really good things happened. We were able to combine their strong cold calling ability with the right people and they became one of the most successful reps that I've ever managed in my career. Now the point of this story is it's really dangerous to label yourself and as high skill or low skill in broad categories. A lot of sales is broken down into broad categories. Prospecting, discovery, demos, negotiation. And a lot of leaders fall into the trap of diagnosing at the master skill level. This rep is great at prospecting, this rep is great at discovery, but it's way more nuanced than that. Prospecting breaks down to finding the right person within the right account using the right messaging. Then even deeper tonality, brevity channels follow up the tools we use to keep organized.
Right?
We can go distill the overall scope of prospecting into a ton of subcategories. Discovery is similar. There is pre discovery research is understanding personal motivation, company motivation, understanding current state understanding metrics, understanding how we're going to measure the outcomes. There's so many elements to effective discovery that we can go deeper into. And so if you're caught up looking at yourself as low skill at prospecting or low skill at discovery, it's going to be really, really difficult to figure out what you should actually go focus on to improve. So my recommendation is when you're finding yourself lagging in a certain area, don't look at the overarching skill like a prospecting, demo, negotiation, whatever the larger skill is. Instead, break the broader skill down into smaller segments that you can evaluate and improve over time. You'll master the broad skill when you understand and improve the underlying competencies.
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Master the broad skill when you understand and improve the underlying competencies.
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.
