The Ultimate Discovery Guide for B2B Sales

Hey, Kyle lacey, currently a VP at MongoDB and also the founder of Sales Introverts, Helping as many sellers as possible improve their sales acumen so they can make more money. Discovery is a balance of better understanding true customer problems while educating them enough that they are confident that you can solve them to encourage them to continue the conversation. The ideal checklist of a discovery, assuming a fairly complex software as a service or B2B solution being sold, is one, you can you understand the value driver for the customer. What that means is you understand something that is in their words, that they define that they own that is most important to their business. Every business has lots of problems, they solve very few of those. So a successful discovery means you leave that call knowing what are the one or two problems are important enough for them to actually solve. The second piece of successful discovery is understanding what they're currently doing to solve those problems. If it's nothing, you haven't found a big problem, and if they're succeeding, you probably don't have a great opportunity. And then the final piece of that checklist, once we know we have a big problem, we understand how they're currently trying and ideally failing to solve that problem, the buyer leaves the conversation understanding generally how you might be a better solution to solve that problem. Therefore earning buy in to go continue the conversation. Discovery, when done well, is a good balance of qualification to understand if you should spend more time there without making the buyer feel like you're peppering them with the budget. Do you have authority? Do you have decision making? All these, all these aspects. The reality is there are a couple ways you can have a successful discovery, okay? And sometimes you can have a successful discovery with a non qualified buyer. What that can look like is a discovery conversation where you leave the conversation with no next steps, but you better understand the account, you better understand what problems they might be facing and how they might be trying to solve those, but the person you're talking to is not qualified. That's not a bad outcome. However, it can become a bad outcome if you go into that same call only dead set on qualifying the buyer, finding out they're not qualified and then leaving the call with no further intel on the account. So you didn't progress the account and you didn't progress the deal. The best way to avoid a lot of the mistakes that we're going to lay out in this video today is preparing effectively for your discovery. And so we want to go in with a point of view on the account. Now when I say a point of view that doesn't mean you need to know everything about them. It doesn't mean that you need to understand deeply the account or the person. But I'd rather you have a point of view, an opinion loosely held, than no opinion at all. So what I want to understand as much as possible is first, who am I talking to? To based on their Persona, based on their role, based on their title, what are they likely worried about? If it's a sales leader, you know, it's all about quota attainment, recruiting, performance management. If it's an engineering lead, it's all about platform stability, speed of innovation, speed of development. You should have a pretty good understanding of who you sell to, generally what they care about and generally how they're trying to solve it. For a lot of accounts, you can even begin to get a good idea of what their current state is. You can get an idea of their tech stack by looking at job descriptions, job postings, LinkedIn profiles, the skills they list on their profile. But I want to go into the call, have a pretty decent point of view, an opinion of what problems they're probably facing and a little bit about how they're trying to solve it so I can share with them what I think I understand, have them validate it, and then begin to get them to prioritize those problems, allowing me to go a lot deeper into the first conversation than if I just show up and ask all those questions at a surface level that I could have gotten through that pre discovery preparation. When you get on a call with the customer for discovery, remember they don't want to be there and they're worried that you're going to waste their time. And so the first thing I want to do is make sure they understand what they are going to get out of the conversation. And it's not all about me. What they don't want to do is go answer questions for 30 minutes. Then at the end I'm like, great, I have all that I need. Let's talk again and I'll tell you a little bit how I might be able to help you. That's just a waste of their time. They want to leave the call knowing, is there a good chance you can help them? Otherwise you're going to hear the hey, can you just send me a case study and I'll get back to you. So what I do is I shift away from an agenda and I shift to an objective. An agenda describes what we're going to do. An objective is what we're going to accomplish. Put yourself in the buyer's shoes. What they want to accomplish is leave the call knowing if they should spend more time with you or not. So my objective is always by the end of the call today, you're going to understand if and how our solution could help you improve. Then I'm going to add the metrics that I know they care about, because I know my Personas, I know my buyers. Then I set the, I guess I said to the agenda point in order to get to that point where I can give you what you want to have, I need to better understand your role as it relates to. And. And then I describe the aspects of the role that I know they're doing, but I want to better understand the depth of it. That way. They kick off the call with not the same old, oh, we're going to talk about you, your business, and then maybe a little bit how we can help. But we're getting exactly right to the point of, hey, before, I'm not going to waste your time. The last thing I want is for us to continue the conversation if there's not really good likelihood of value here. So let's agree up front that we're going to get there by the end of the call. So there are two things that sellers hear about discovery. One, they say, don't interrogate your buyer, and two, they say, don't pitch. And so, like, how do you find that balance? Right? How do you ask a bunch of questions without pitching, without interrogating, and how do you not interrogate without pushing at all? And so the way I love to find this balance is by asking questions with context. And it's the closest thing to a magic phrase that I have, but is adding, the reason I ask is to the questions that I ask. And then when I share, when I, when I say the reason I ask is, I then give a case study. So an example of another company doing something a certain way that works really well or maybe sharing this industry insights on what other organizations are doing in their space. Not even related to my solution solution, but adding that context to the conversation simultaneously can show value, that I know who they are, I know generally what they care about, and I work with similar people. And it can also be a chance to talk a little bit about the outcomes you drive through those case studies. So when you're preparing for discovery, when you look at the questions you know you want to ask, think about, what can I share? What can I teach? What can I add to this question to give the buyer context so they understand why I'm asking the question. And also to give them more confidence that I know a little bit about what I'm talking about. And you're going to find your discovery is much more natural and conversational and much less like an interrogation. So when I'm looking at discovery questions, I often bucket them into level one, level two, level three, level one questions are a dangerous one. Level one questions are questions that you should know from research about the account. Just things like, how does your company make money? Tell me about your role. These are questions to tell your buyer, I don't know anything about you. Which makes them wonder, if you don't know anything about me, then how could you possibly have a solution for me? Most sellers spend a lot of time in discovery on level one. Not only is it irritating to the buyer, it's also a waste of time. You spend half the call, two thirds of the call, talking about things that don't move the needle. You want to get as quickly as possible to level two, which is how what they care about and the gaps, what they care about are impacting them individually. Then level three is how those problems are impacting the business and why it matters. So level one, you come in that ask about things that you should already know. Waste of time, buyer irritation. Level 2, what are they personally doing to improve those areas? How are they personally measured? You're not going to get as much of that through LinkedIn or through generic research. So discover is a great place for those. And then level three, how is the business measuring the impact of that? And what are the gaps in the business throwing you down? You want to get as quickly as possible to level 2, level 3 questions. To have good discovery. For a level 2 type question, it could be something like, if you successfully implemented this solution, what would this enable you to accomplish that you can't today? Or if we want to reframe more to just a negative consequences piece, what is the consequence if you don't solve this six months from now? And a great way to figure out quickly, is this even a problem worth solving? And then when we get to level three, which is more around the impact the organization, how is your team currently supporting? Then you talk about the company goal that you'd previously uncovered. Or if I love this question from Nate Nasrallah, if you were to write a headline to announce the outcome of this project, what might it say? Right. So we're trying to help them see this potentially visionary state while better understanding the consequences of if they aren't going to make a change. Because if you don't leave Discover with both of those, it's really, really difficult to go in. Right. You need to have a bad enough negative consequence where they agree whatever we do, we can't stay the same. An exciting enough positive business outcome and future state that they want to join with you on the journey to see if your solution can actually get them there. How do you know you are done with discovery? Is best answered with never. You're never fully done with discovery. I think a big mistake reps make is treating discovery as a stage in the sales process and not an ongoing conversation. Every time I look at a deal, even the best run deals on my org, even the best run deals that I used to run when I, back when I was selling, every one of those deals, including the ones that were winning, have gaps. And so I would argue that when never done with discovery, before every call we should be looking at our notes, understanding the outcomes the customer is driving for, understanding how they're currently failing to get there, understanding how we plan to get them there, and then covering what else do we need to know? Most common the gap is understanding the so what and so we know that they're spending too much money on something, but we don't know the so what. Why is that important? We know that their data is siloed, that's a description of what's happening, but we don't know who is that hurting, how bad does it hurt, how is it trying to solve it? And so I would encourage every seller, when you're preparing for your calls, look at your notes, look at your deal breakdown and find out where the areas were, another so what or another two more so what's my added value? And then plan to ask those questions. Even in demos, even in proposal reviews, there's always an opportunity to better understand where your buyer is headed, where they need to be and how you can best get them there. And so when you do discovery well, you're going to uncover a big pain that's important enough for them to solve. You're going to understand who it's hurting, you're going to understand how urgent it is to fix and you're going to understand at least a little bit about how they're currently trying to solve that problem. And with our falling short now In a typical 30 minute discovery, you're not going to be able to go much farther than that. So it's critical to go get next steps to go deeper. To do this, we don't need to go fully explain our solution, we don't even need to convince them that we can definitely solve the problem. We just need to give them enough confidence that we might be the right solution that they continue the conversation. And the best way to do that is through a proof point. If you come to the conversation ready with organizations that you work with with that face similar problems that you think the customer might be facing, then you validate those. You should have a few disprove points ready to go. So I'm going to wrap up the call by restating to the customer what I heard from them. So here are the problems you're looking to solve. Here's why it's painful. Here's how you're going to try to solve it, here's why you're falling short. And then I'm going to give an example of another organization where we help them in a similar way. It doesn't need to be highly specific. It doesn't need to be perfect. All you're trying to do is help the customer feel all right. This company has talked to somebody a little bit like me before that had a similar problem and they helped them fix it. That enough of a confidence boost for the buyer is going to be enough to justify next steps. Now, those next steps are going to depend very much on where your discovery went on the first call and the kind of deal that is working the next steps. If you're more transactional, it might be a demo where you show them how you might solve it. For more complex deals, it's going to be discovery, going deeper into how they're currently trying to solve the problem, where it's going wrong, and possibly looping in more individuals. But regardless of what the next step is, you need to sell the next step. And in my experience, the best way to sell that next step is giving them confidence that you've done this before, you've helped somebody else similar to them solve a similar problem. And that is where customer stories become your best friend. Thank you so much, Salesmead. This was so fun to collaborate on this. For those of you watching, if you want more tactics on sales, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. Still new at this, but having a lot of fun. And you can always check out my website, salesintroverts.com.