I ran a poll last week about the usage of slide decks in sales discovery meetings.
The results were 50-50 for a long time before ending up 60-40 in the favor of “no”.
I voted no as well. Here’s a quick overview of one approach towards discovery meetings that I’ve seen work well.
1. Understand what they’re looking to get out of this meeting. They made the time for you so it’s in their interest for you to know what would constitute time well spent for them. Just ask the straightforward question.
Whiteboard – physical or digital – get one.
And then have a conversation (as opposed to an interrogation).
2. Get them to share their top challenges that they’re trying to solve & list them down on the whiteboard.
3. Dive deep – find out the root cause of their issues. If you sell tech and the problem is purely people or process, then you should know this sooner in the sales process.
4. Politely push back (if needed) on certain prospect assumptions based on what you know from your experience. You’re an expert based on the number of similar situations that you come across on a daily basis so don’t be afraid to voice your fact-based opinions.
and then
5. Get them to rank those challenges in order of importance (negative impact on business or magnitude of risk).
Sometime, we add opportunities in the CRM because we only hear the challenges that we know we can solve.
Are the challenges that we can solve really important to the prospect?
But having an opportunity of that size would look nice in the CRM – be a good story to tell – will give comfort regarding pipeline coverage in those pesky review meetings. So an opportunity at Qualified 10% is added in the CRM to stay there for weeks if not months without any activity on it.
A list of prioritized challenges is just one but a key requirement for you to assess whether you can help them.
It also gives you guidance on how to structure your demo later on so rather than doing a “training session”, you show them how you can solve their challenges better than anyone else.
I’ll cover other key questions in a future post.
If you find yourself talking more than the prospect in a discovery meeting, it’s probably time to rethink your approach.