A discovery is a fact-finding session with your client to understand their needs, their business problems, and concerns. It is your time to really get a solid understanding of the impact of those problems and to determine if your solutions would be a good fit for the customer. During a discovery meeting, your job as a top-notch salesperson is to LISTEN and to ASK QUESTIONS. The customer should be talking at least 80% of the time. Let them talk and elaborate about their needs. Your job is to ask questions relevant to their needs and to truly peel back the onion several layers, gaining a deep understanding of their business issues and how you can solve them with your products.
Discovery is not a time to be blabbing about your products and how wonderful your company is. You want to keep asking more questions, deeper questions about the customer and how bad they are in pain (so to speak). I have a whole article on discovery questions, but the purpose of this post is to reiterate the point that professional salespeople do not sell or push their products during discovery. You can’t afford to. You need this time to understand the severity of their business issues before recommending solutions.
If you rush the discovery, you may miss or gloss over key pain points such as the costs associated with the client’s problems. For instance, your customer might say, “We are experiencing a lot of customer service issues by having two software programs to manage our inbound customer service calls. When a customer calls in, our support person may not see that the caller has placed three service calls already this week because our people are using the other software program that doesn’t show customer history.” As a top-notch seller, your job right here is to peel back the onion on this issue. You want to ask more questions around this, such as, “Wow, that sounds problematic. What kind of financial impact comes along with not seeing the customer’s history when they call in? Customer’s response: “Yes, we just lost a $1M account because the customer was so fed up with our service as they had to repeat their issue as if they were just calling in for the first time!” BINGO!!! Can you see how by asking more questions (by further qualifying) you just uncovered a huge nugget of information? You now know the cost associated with this business issue and if you keep asking more questions and keep listening, they will reveal more to you!
Do you see how the above is so much more effective and time well-spent compared to just blabbing about your products, making statements, or just scratching the surface, only asking a few questions? The other point I want to make is that when it comes to the end of the sales cycle, you are going to provide this customer with a sales proposal for $X. It will be a lot easier to justify the purchase when you know you have a solid ROI based on all the valuable information that you learned from your discovery!
Discovery is all about listening and asking questions! No selling, that will come later. One last point- in some strange way you are actually selling when you do this, you are selling yourself by being an exceptional listener. Customers like this!
-Happy Selling!