Zach Selch compares the discovery phase of sales to the Fulda pass, a World War III choke point, because it determines how you allocate time and resources. Get discovery wrong and you waste months on the wrong budget year, wrong budget size, or wrong decision-maker. Building trust and asking the right questions upfront saves everything downstream.
Chapters
When I was a boy, and then when I was a young paratrooper, this is where we all thought World War III was going to be decided. It's Fulda, and the pass here goes through the Vogelberg Mountains. And this is where Russian tanks would have come through into Western Europe in the event of a war. And holding this particular point on the map was considered strategic. strategically the most important point of a future war between Russia and America. And it's really interesting when you can pinpoint a specific location and give it so much importance. And you might remember a few weeks— oh, a while— and you might remember a while back, I talked about how I had had a discussion with a friend of mine who was also a sales nerd, and we were talking about if we could locate the point in our sales process which was actually the most important. We talked about whether or not we could and how we would go about doing it. But I didn't talk about what I decided was my important— most important point. And here's my most important point on the whole sales process. I think the introduction during the discovery is probably the single most important point. Now, why is that? I know it doesn't sound maybe that romantic, and a lot of times people don't consider discovery the most important part. They consider closing the most important point. They consider— After-sales service may be the most important point. They discuss— they consider prospecting. Discovery to me is how you put together your plan for your whole sales process, how you allocate resources, how you allocate time. If you decide, maybe you decide this isn't a real prospect, this isn't somebody you want to pursue, maybe you decide it's, it's a lower priority and you put it off. When you decide your timetable, when you decide what the potential revenue from this could be and how you're going to allocate resources towards it, you're going to decide all these things based on your discovery conversation. And discovery conversations are always a lot more tricky than people think they are. I know I talk to people all the time and they think the discovery is really simple. You ask somebody a question, they give you an answer. You capture that answer hopefully, and there you go. But if the person you're talking to doesn't trust you, or doesn't understand what you're trying to achieve, or doesn't understand the importance of this discussion, you might get false information. Now imagine how important it is if you build your whole plan based on false information. Maybe You get the budget year wrong. Maybe you get the budget numbers wrong. Maybe you get their pain points wrong. I've had situations where I talked to the right person's boss, and that boss totally discounted the idea of them feeling pain. And then when I talked to the right person later, the right person, the actual end user who I should have been talking to from the beginning, Came up and told me about her pain, and it was crystal clear. Okay, so there are a lot of different things that can go wrong during discovery, and it's all reliant on a good introduction, on making sure that that person is willing to talk to you, be forthright with you, trust you enough to talk, and to open up and give you a little bit of time and a little bit of correct information. So I would pinpoint it at right that spot, just like Fulda was that point on the map where the armies would clash in World War III. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
