Chapter 5 -- Discovery Questions --- From Sales Playbooks: The Builder's Toolkit

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Goal: Develop good discovery questions that create velocity in the sales process. Standardizing discovery questions allows a sales organization to communicate consistently and to iterate quickly on the messages that have the highest impact in converting good prospects to customers and disqualifying the bad.

How It’s Used:

• Account Executives (AEs) and Sales Development Reps (SDRs): Identify new business opportunities.
• Sales Management: Ensure that salespeople are asking pain-based discovery questions instead of talking about product features.
• Customer Success Managers (CSMs): Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Difficulty: Medium

People + Resources Required:

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????SDR Management

Pro Tip: Identifying Features in the Winning Zone

The best salespeople ask pain-based discovery questions about topics that are relevant to their prospect persona and fit into the salesperson’s winning zone. The winning zone (fig. 5.1) is the specific area where your company wins against the competition.

Figure 5.1: The winning zone

If the salesperson is able to uncover buyer pain in the winning zone, he or she is in a good position to win the deal. If not, there’s still an opportunity to find pain in the battlefield or in the future winning zone, which will exist after the expansion of the current product or service offering. The last two options will result in a longer and more challenging sales process, but sales management might feel that these conversations are still worthwhile.

Salespeople who have conversations in the losing zone, where the competition has a clear advantage, are simply wasting their time.

Defining where each discovery question fits into figure 5.1 is a key component of the playbook.

Step One: Features and Benefits of Your Product or Service

Use figure 5.2 to make an exhaustive list of all your products’ or services’ key features. For each feature, list three to five benefits. If the list of features is extensive, focus only on those that clearly fall into your winning zone.

A feature is defined as a specific attribute of a product or service, while a benefit describes the positive outcome or result of using that feature.

For example, a feature of this book is clear tables for data, and a benefit of tables is that you can focus on collecting the data and not worry about frameworks for organizing them.

Figure 5.2: Define the features and benefits for your product or service

Step Two: What Problem Would A Prospect Need to Have In Order to Care?

Is each problem significant enough to inspire action? It will be tempting to add things like “cost” and “inefficiency” as problems, but avoid these responses. They are symptoms of something deeper, which is where the real problem lies.

Complete column C of figure 5.3 by answering the question “What problem would a prospect need to have today in order to care about this specific benefit?” These should be statements.

Figure 5.3: Aligning benefits to prospect problems

We like to refer to the “feature > benefit > problem statement” framework as the Pain Finder.

Step Three: Developing Discovery Questions

Once you are satisfied that the problem statements are well defined, it’s time to develop discovery questions.

Step Four: Discovery Questions for Inbound Prospects

Inbound sales development teams work with prospects that have signaled interest in their company. The “interest” shown might be as simple as filling out a form on the company’s website, or prospects might have used the product or service in a prior company. To ensure that a salesperson is able to maintain control of the conversation, we incorporate these inquiries into the discovery questions.

By adding column A in figure 5.4, it’s easy to align the discovery with the inquiry instead of pitching.

Figure 5.4: Developing problem statements based on inbound inquiries

Populate column A with all of the phrases that prospects use when describing why they reached out to your company.

Pro Tip: Ongoing Discovery Question Development

Discovery question development should be a part of every new product release. The ability to create pain-oriented discovery questions using the framework outlined in this chapter adds a critical component to the product release cycle that will have a substantial impact on the sales team’s ability to position conversations in the winning zone and realize revenue based upon product evolution.

In addition to your typical product or service release agenda, these meetings must:

1. Demonstrate new features
2. Explain the benefits of each feature
3. Explain competitive advantages now realized
4. Develop discovery questions based upon the new feature set

Step Five: Adding Discovery Questions to the Playbook

Depending upon your business, there are three different ways to present discovery questions to users.

The first method is outlined in figure 5.5, where we segment discovery questions by persona.

Figure 5.5: Segmenting discovery questions by pers

na

Use this view if persona is the main driver of discovery.

Another option is shown in figure 5.6, where the questions are segmented by use case.

Figure 5.6: Segmenting discovery questions by use case

Use this method if the use case is relevant to many personas, and discovery questions will not change from persona to persona.

The third approach is shown in figure 5.7, where discovery questions relate to both a persona and a use case.

Figure 5.7: Segmenting discovery questions by persona and use case

Use this method if different personas are going to care about different use cases for different reasons.

In most situations, asking one discovery question will lead to logical follow-ups (fig. 5.8).

Figure 5.8: Logical follow-up questions

Do not become overly controlling and develop full conversation scripts here. They won’t be useful. But, if there are specific follow-up questions that should be asked, note them here to assist the salesperson.

For many discovery questions, the Priority Path is the logical follow-up, but depending upon your business, other specific questions might make sense as an intermediate step.

Step Six: Questions to Uncover Resources

A critical part of discovery is the ability of the salesperson to uncover the Resources that a prospect is willing and able to sacrifice to resolve their pain or realize an opportunity (fig. 5.9).

Figure 5.9: Questions to uncover Resources

Determine the types of Resources you want your salespeople to uncover, and develop questions help them do so. Completed tables can be found at TriangleSellingPlaybook.com.

Step Seven: Questions to Disarm Resistance

It’s essential to shed light on Resistance in discovery (fig. 5.10). Unspoken Resistance will leave a salesperson expending energy on the wrong deals.

Figure 5.10: Questions to disarm Resistance

Your sales methodology may advocate objection handling as part of the selling process. If so use the framework in figure 5.11.

Figure 5.11: General objection handling framework

Take Action

????Complete a Pain Finder (feature > benefit > problem statement) table for each key feature of your company’s product or service. There should be at least two to three benefits and problem statements for each feature.

????Create a bank of pain-focused discovery questions, using a combination of problem statements, social proof, and CAUSE.

????Develop questions to uncover Resources and Resistance.

Traps to Avoid

1. Asking questions that do not fit into your winning zone will lead to long sales cycles or lost deals.
2. While most organizations will find their sales team having conversations specific to five to seven discovery questions, it’s important to be exhaustive in this exercise so that salespeople are able to maximize all opportunities in the winning zone—not just those that are common.

Keep It Fresh

●?????For each new product feature that is released, complete the Pain Finder to develop new discovery questions.

●?????As sales managers listen to and coach calls, they should update this list with new discovery questions that are effective and remove those that are obsolete.

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Previous chapters that have been released include:

1. Introduction
2. Gathering Information
3. Interviews
4. Blueprint Creation (Outline Your Playbook)

Want to check out the rest of the book? You can wait for next week's chapter, or?get it now on Amazon.

We are also offering a free 30-minute review of existing sales playbooks. If you want us to take a look at what you have and give some advice, book time at?TalkPlaybooks