My Keys to a Successful Discovery

 Discover Some New Habits for Your Discovery Calls

If all we needed for a successful discovery call was answers to a few basic questions, then a chatbot could do your call for you. Think about it. If all we needed were answers to XYZ and a few generic outputs based on those answers, then AI has it covered, and SDRs or whoever is doing your qualification and discoveries is out of a job. 

But I argue, that’s absolutely not the case, so quit being a robot on discovery calls. It might be the first time your prospects talks to a live human at your company. 

About a month ago, I was amazed to see how many people felt the exact same way I did about a 2-sentence post. 

(Full posts and comments here.)

And it wasn’t just my fellow Sales people. Buyers also commented on their experience of robotic discovery calls and demos that didn’t provide any value, ask the right questions, or they felt the rep wasn’t listening.  

By all means, we do need a process in place to run a successful discovery and demo, but not a verbatim script or list of questions. The process should help us propel the conversation forward. 

This post from a month ago was geared towards wasted discoveries leading to wasted demos and conversations, but I’ve been thinking a bit about what a “wasted discovery” could mean. 

For instance, you could have an awesome discovery call and learn a ton about what a company really needs and know you have the solution. But then this information isn’t properly shared and used to frame the demo. 

Or you could finally get an ideal prospect on the phone and waste the opportunity because you kept your eyes on your qualification questions checklist and didn’t lift your head up to really listen. A successful discovery call means you are listening more than you are talking.

Listening and connecting what a prospect is telling you into how your solution specifically helps them is one of those skills AI and chatbots just can’t mimic. 

But I get it, after running 100s and 100s of discovery calls, sometimes we just need a refresher on the 4 basic steps to a successful and unwasted discovery.

Step 1: Preparation

The number one reason discovery calls go sideways is because we don’t prep for the person you’re talking to. Again, this is something a chatbot can’t do. 

We need to be asking ourselves and finding answers about the person:

Ok, this person has been in this role for 10 years at the same company. How is she going to behave? What are things she cares about? How does she talk about herself digitally and interact online?

How do they make money. Who are they? Who is their competitive set? What do they care about? What are the hot trends in the industry?

Depending on the discovery, you should take 15 minutes (minimum) to an hour to prep for every single meeting. You cannot have a good discovery without thinking about, “Who am I actually going to meet with? Who is this company? What do they care about? Who is the competition?”

And then maybe pre-write a few questions that you have based off of that research that will also show the person on the call that you know your stuff and they are what is important, not your discovery checklist.

Step 2: Role & Fit

Start the discovery by talking through prospect’s role and how they fit in their organization. Too many times I’ve seen discovery calls that try to put people in buckets. Say I’m talking to a VP of Operations. I’m going to say, “Hey, I work with a lot of VPs of Operations,” but then ask, “At [Company Name], what are YOUR top two core areas of focus?” Because one VP’s areas of focus could be completely different from their counterpart at another company. 

Next, I would say, “Ok, tell me a little bit about your team.” As soon as I understand who the person is and how their team is set up, this tells me who needs to be involved in the next meeting. I can now drive to next steps at the end of the meeting versus asking about next steps and say, “Ok, you mentioned Lucy does X and Mark does Y, let’s loop them in on the next call.”

Step 3: Goals & Objectives

The biggest oversight with identifying business goals and objectives is going too narrow too quick. 

Let’s say you sell recruitment advertising. You may ask, “What jobs are you advertising for?” when you should just be talking talent acquisition goals. For instance, “What are your top two priorities for talent acquisition?”

Then they may say, “Well, we need to be able to decrease the time it takes to fill open positions, and we need to be able to decrease our ramp time of our growing sales team.” Now that you’re talking top business goals versus open positions, if there is a way to connect to that, the budgets are much larger because these are much broader initiatives.

Step 4: Now You Get Tactical

Only after discovering role and fit and top business goals and objectives do you get tactical and bring out your handy-dandy checklist. But again, don’t just inundate your prospects with a script, keep it conversational and all and all around 11-14 total questions from the beginning of the call to the end. If you listen and set your questions up right, a prospect may even answer your next question without you having to ask. 

So do your prep, dig into the “who,” don’t go too narrow too fast, and then get to tactical questions for the things left unanswered. “What are you doing today to change this? What’s working and not working?” Etc. 

And if you only take away one piece of advice and somehow made it all the way to the bottom of this article... Stop being a robot. That’s what AI is for.

-Jake Dunlap