Opportunities are won and lost on discovery. The ability to ask great questions in your sales conversations is one of the most common traits for elite salespeople. The greater your depth of awareness of the prospect's problem, the better equipped you are to sell a high-value solution to match.
Still, many salespeople struggle with getting prospects to truly reveal negative consequences and challenges with significant business impact. We've pulled together some of our best practices for executing a great discovery process:
A shift in attitude or focus during discovery can produce major benefits to your sales conversations. Emphasize rapport and trust-building during this initial phase. Doing so helps you guard against a natural inclination to transition into selling too quickly.
Multiple decision-makers and long sales processes are the norm in many B2B industries. You need to have a compelling reason to move to action, which means you don't want to rush discovery. In fact, many buyers will expect you to push your solution right away. Remember, there's as much differentiation in how you sell as there is in what you sell. When you have a buyer-focused conversation, asking questions to understand high-level buyer needs and demonstrate empathy, you motivate a prospect to want to meet again to learn how your company and solutions align to their needs. Consistently uncovering this information from your prospects requires discipline. To keep your conversations relevant and meaningful to your buyer, here are five sales drivers to focus on in every opportunity.
Good salespeople ask investigative, open-ended questions to uncover pain points and buyer needs with true business impact (and large funding requirements). They also understand the basic value of listening to a prospect's responses. However, many reps accept simple answers to questions and launch right into features and functions without digging deeper. A truly effective discovery process means digging deeper in discovery until you find big business pains and their impacts on the buying organization, and the buyer.
You don't want to offer up a remedy or solution without getting a full scan of the prospect's pain. Keep asking questions until you get there. Otherwise, you'll find yourself in the later stages of the deal without a compelling reason for them to buy your services or, you'll be forced to negotiate on price. We write a lot about executing an effective discovery process. It’s one of our most popular blog topics because it’s one of the most important components to executing a value-based sales conversation and closing premium deals. Here’s some of our most valuable content on executing effective discovery that you can use to advance your skillset.
How you prepare your question flows can separate you from other salespeople, putting you in a better position to influence the deal in your favor.
For example, ask your buyer, "When you've tried to implement solutions like this in the past, what limitations have you found in other programs that have impeded results?" This type of question could get the prospect to share key requirements for the next purchase. Those requirements may be the things you offer and the things your competitors don't. Even if your competitors offer some of those capabilities, you can still influence your buyer decision criteria in your favor.
Differentiate the value of your solution from competitor offerings by building your differentiation into the customer's requirements. Trap-setting questions can be used in your discovery process as a way to bolster your own differentiators, and show the weaknesses of your competitors. Trap-setting questions are nothing but discovery questions meant to demonstrate weaknesses in your competition. The power of them lies in a buyer’s answers. Understand how you can ask the right questions in your conversation and use both trap-setting and discovery questions to instill value in your deals.
Effective discovery sets the stage for a productive sales cycle that ends with a closed-won opportunity. Don't leave it to chance. Force Management Director of Facilitation and seasoned sales leader, Brian Walsh shares personal experiences and tips on the art of great discovery in this episode of the Audible-Ready Sales Podcast. It’s one of our most-streamed episodes. Tune in for actionable tips you can apply to your pipeline opportunities.