B2B buyers distrust reps because they doubt you understand them or will listen. Prepare a point of view on their business using research and account conversations, then ask questions that prove you've done the work. This shifts the call from sales pitch to genuine conversation.
I've sat through hundreds of discovery calls in my career and many feel uncomfortable until a key shift occurs. The tension in discovery comes from buyer skepticism that is tied to what many people call seller deficit disorder. Most buyers are worried going into discovery. One, does this rep know anything about me and my business? Two, are they going to listen to me? And three, are they going to try to convince me and push me to buy even even if it's not a fit? In today's video, I'm going to walk through two ways to remove this tension so that your discovery calls can turn into more comfortable conversations. The first goal is to convince the buyer to think that this rep knows me. When they're afraid that you know nothing about them, they're skeptical that you're going to be able to give them good recommendations on the right solution. And so the goal is, as quickly as possible, get them to think, hey, this rep's different, they understand me. You want to come in with a point of view about what you've already learned about them and their company. Now, there's a few layers to this based on the type of account, the type of buyer and the stage you're at in the conversation. The ideal situation is you come to the discovery with information collected from having conversations with others at the account. Especially with executive buyers, there are few things better than showing up for a first call and walking them through all the information you've collected from people on their team and and throughout the organization, verifying the challenges they're having and places where you might be able to fit in. Now, of course, it's not always possible to have a point of view collected from people at the account. Sometimes your first discovery is literally the first discovery at the company. And so you're not going to have all that multi threaded information. So the next best point of view to develop is getting insights from company research. Now, if there's a company where it's very difficult to get get information, maybe it's smaller, it's not publicly traded, you can't go to their 10k. The Last Resort is that you come prepared with industry related challenges. Okay, but the worst case scenario is you go into the first call, the buyer's worried, this rep knows nothing about me. And then you proceed to ask very basic questions that show you did not bring a point of view. And maybe you don't know anything about them because they are just going to tune out the second that they're thinking, wow, this rep knows enough about me to not waste my time. You've actually earned earned their attention, which makes it much easier to go into the conversation. Now, the next thing you can do to show that you understand them is to ask questions that show you understand your buyer. As an example of what not to ask is something like, tell me about your role. Okay, I hate this question because it's basically saying, I came to this call knowing nothing about you. I came to this call not having done research on who you are, what you care about, which means I'm completely grasping at straws for how I might be able to help you. Now. We still want to understand their priorities. We want to hear from them what they care about. So it's important to still ask some questions, but we can get more specific in how we ask this question. So we can shift the tell me about your role question to, hey, many people, many people we're working with, but their title are focused on improving insert a key priority that most Personas in that role care about. How are you approaching this opportunity? That way, we are digging deeper into the role while showing them that we understand at least a little bit about what they care about. Another great approach to tee up this role question is what my friend Kristin Connor refers to as the menu of pain. It's when you come prepared with all the challenges that people in that role in that industry are typically trying to battle, and you simply ask them to validate and prioritize those problems and then give them the opportunity to expand beyond it if there are other problems they're facing that you did not come prepared to discuss. We're not wanting to go into the discovery call and just tell the customer what they care about. We do want to do discovery, but we want to show them by bringing our point of view, that we've earned the right to ask them questions by not putting the full burden of education on the buyer, but by doing a lot of that research up front. Now, the other element we're trying to avoid is the buyer's fear that we're going to try to sell them regardless of if it's a fit or not. Okay. Buyers are conditioned that sellers want to close deals, and buyers are conditioned to think that salespeople will try to force deal.
