These Are Not Your Daddy’s Discovery Questions

The following is adapted from Beat the Bots.

The process of discovery—asking questions to learn and understand more about your customer—is crucial if you want to be a high-performing sales professional. It’s vital that you collect as much information as possible throughout the sales cycle. You can’t articulate a meaningful value proposition for your customer if you don’t know what they need and value. 

Discovery begins before you meet your customer, through research. Do as much research as you can. Go through the company’s website to understand its mission, vision, and history, of course, but also Google the company. Look for news, financial information, reviews, and whatever else looks interesting. Don’t forget to look at LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social media platform where the company has a presence. If someone in your LinkedIn network is a connection of the person you are meeting or anyone else at the prospect, ask that contact if they have information they can share. Your contact might introduce you to their connection, who may have all kinds of inside intel for you. 

Research whatever you can while staying on the right side of creepy. That research ensures you ask relevant questions whose answers are not easily found on the website.

By the way, customers are likely doing the same thing with you. They’ve researched your company. They’ve been on your LinkedIn profile. Customers value their time and they want to ensure you aren’t wasting theirs. The internet has created a B2B sales landscape where buyers have a lot more knowledge and power than they ever have before. 

What Kind of a Question Is That?

Our goal as sales professionals is to develop a value proposition that makes what we are selling a no-brainer for the customer to purchase. To do this, you have to dig deep to learn what matters most to that customer. If you don’t ask, you won’t know how to position your offering in a manner that can differentiate it from the others.

You’ve been told to use open-ended questions for discovery. That’s good advice, but I want you to call the kinds of questions you need to ask “high impact questions,” or HI-Qs. Think of these as open-ended questions on steroids. HI-Qs are designed to give you the most bang for your buck during discovery. I call them “high-impact questions” because they have high-impact answers that help you sharpen your message. They aren’t your everyday open-ended questions. Take a look:

Average open-ended question: Who are your direct reports?

High-impact question: Can you help me understand your organizational structure? 

Average open-ended question: How well does IT partner with the business? 

High-impact question: How would you describe IT’s role within your business? 

Average open-ended question: What are some of your IT initiatives? 

High-impact question: Can you explain how your planned IT initiatives support the company’s business objectives? 

Average open-ended question: What roles have you held at this company? 

High-impact question: Tell me about your career here at X Corp.

Understanding Your Customer

Your questions should begin with something like, “help me understand,” “how do you feel?” or “what do you think?” Average open-ended questions may get you better than a “yes” or “no” answer, but they aren’t going to get you the most important information. Also, when you ask questions using these openers, you are showing the customer you care and that you aren’t just interrogating them; you want to understand them, their perspective, and how they feel about it. There’s a reason a gazillion shrinks ask questions this way.

This is not as simple as it sounds. In my career, I’ve seen high-level sales leaders neither understand this nor do it effectively. Top performing sales reps consistently ask high impact questions. For them, it’s typically intuitive. Of course, not everyone walks around asking questions a shrink would be jealous of. But you can learn how, practice and go into discovery meetings with a mental list of HI-Qs to ask. 

Many successful transactional salespeople are taught to ask basic yes or no questions so they can quickly move through a conversation and get to the sale. That approach works in simple, straightforward sales, so these salespeople continue to use it. Before they go into the meeting, they have an idea of what product they want to sell that customer. They ask closed-ended questions to get the answers they need to get the order so they can move on to the next sale.

When it comes to more complex sales, you must ask more detailed HI-Qs that tie to the business and help you understand the person you’re talking to. You need this information because it is harder to differentiate in complex sales. What’s more, you have to continue asking those HI-Q questions throughout your engagement with the customer. These questions will help you uncover how you can differentiate. 

If you want to learn more about Hi-Qs and see some great examples, download my free e-book "High Impact Discovery Questions."

For more advice on future-proofing your B2B sales career, you can find Beat the Bots on Amazon.

Anita Nielsen is a sales performance consultant with over twenty years of experience in B2B sales and support. As an advocate for salespeople, she is dedicated to coaching and equipping these professionals for success. For her efforts, she was named one of the Top Sales Enablement Consultants of 2018 by Selling Power magazine. With a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in business administration from the New York Institute of Technology, Anita is uniquely positioned to help salespeople adapt and thrive. Anita lives in Chicagoland with her husband and two teenaged children. Currently, she is trying to survive her children’s adolescent years without going completely grey or succumbing to overwhelming tiger mom urges.