Discovery Calls will make or break your deal

So, why do we build these demo and pitch decks that only follow ONE format? Yes, our prospects will share similar problems, challenges and issues but, they will interpret them differently within their own organisations.

Over the course of my 13 years in sales, I noticed pretty early on that people are at very different stages of the buying process. In fact, let’s go back even further. People are at different stages of even figuring out whether change is needed. It’s a salesperson’s dream to cold call or reach out to a prospect who is at the VERY beginning of identifying something that is not quite right within their business. It’s even more fun when you drop a gem of wisdom about the shape of the market and how your new shiny solution is built to propel a prospects business.

The Discovery call exists to help you and your prospect figure out if it makes sense to work together. The underlying structure of a discovery call is establishing where they are now, or where they think they are and, where they want to get to, or where they think they want to get to. I emphasise think because some prospects honestly do not know, and that is why I pulled together this video that was supposed to be 5 minutes but, as you can see I just had to get the extra information in.

The key takeaway from this video is the golden question that you ask either right at the beginning of a call/meeting OR at the end of your previous initial call/email that you had before setting up the discovery call.

“Customer, on a scale of 1–10 where are you in the process of resolving your issue, challenge, opportunity? 1 being very early research where you are yet to really uncover the impact of the issue. 10 being, you are reviewing proposals from vendors, maybe even shortlisting…”

This single question will help you to weed out so much from your prospect and also help you to plan the most targeted discovery call. A prospect who is between 1–5 will benefit from a discovery meeting that focuses on you teaching and informing them. Those who fit on the scale between 6–10, really want to understand your knowledge, experience and capabilities in addressing the issue they have. They want confidence that you are the right partner to engage.

Try it.

Enjoy.