Why is Discovery important in sales?

While sales is all about big meetings, presentations, closing deals, it can’t be achieved without having a proper process defined. This is applicable in every business function, including sales. Every organisation that is into B2B sales, does implement a process to ensure that there is a methodical way of approaching prospective clients to convert them into clients.

In my experience of handling sales for over 20 years, I have realized that one of the fundamental elements that ensures a success in sales, is to know your client. I am not talking about KYC, but more in terms of understanding your prospective client in detail before you start engaging with them.

In enterprise sales, this has been defined as Discovery. ?Let us understand a bit more about discovery in sales cycle.

What is Discovery?

Discovery is a critical step in the sales lifecycle. For a sales representative to have a clear direction on every account that they are pursuing, it is important to address this step with maximum diligence.

As the name suggests, in this step, a sales rep gets an opportunity to get a better understanding of the account and also what are they looking for in the product or service that they want to buy. Discovery is also a stage where the sales rep gets the first opportunity to establish a good rapport with the audience and the key stakeholders who are participating from the prospect end.

How to effectively conduct a Discovery?

To successfully execute this stage, it is important to go prepared for the discovery meeting. Preparation from the sales rep should comprise of the following:

• Study through secondary data about the prospect
• Go through your own presentation and highlight your value proposition
• Prepare a set of questions that you want to get answers on

Important Note: Don’t ask questions as if you are interviewing someone. Strike a conversation and during the interaction, slip in these questions either directly or through used cases. Here is an example

Sales Rep: one of the key challenges that an existing client faced was centrally accessing data and documents. Is that something you also want to address?

This will allow the audience to open up about their business challenges as they can relate to the example the sales rep conveyed in his presentation.

Benefits of a good discovery

A good discovery call can result in many benefits for a sales representative. Here are three key benefits of a good discovery call:

• Better and improved sales qualification that gives a better clarity to the sales representative on how much effort to put to close that account
• Helps sales rep build a good rapport with the client. Very much needed for the overall engagement between the two entities
• Allows the service/solution provider to provide the right solution as per the requirement described by the prospect