Sales discovery for NPOs

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i think it completely goes about saying that discovery is one of the most important parts of any sales process if not the most important part now so many salespeople use the discovery as a means to an end which is oh i've got to ask these five or six questions to get them out of the way so i can show some value or or demonstrate my product and often those five or six questions are the same to every single prospect i want to talk about something called a gap analysis which is really going to help us rationalize and understand what we need to do when running an effective discovery our objective with a gap analysis is really simple we want to try and learn as much as we can about the prospect's current state and the objective of this is to then try and understand what the future state is that they're trying to achieve so where the prospect is and where the prospect needs to be this part in the middle is the gap analysis this is where we discover the value and this is why so much of buying takes place in the questioning itself so this is where a lot of sales people go wrong they're very good at finding the facts and the example here is a car so they drive a honda record it's 160 000 miles it's 11 years old et cetera et cetera these are the facts then what they do is they diagnose the problem so they uncover that it breaks down and it has monthly maintenance it's very little cargo space and they can't take the family camping what they don't do is talk about the impact of these problems so here we have the wife complains a lot about the company which causes flights consistently late for work left with one car and then sales people very very rarely only the very best ones start examining the root cause so what's causing these problems it's made from cheap metal it isn't rust proof it's a foreign castle parts are very expensive and the previous owner didn't take care of it so these are the root causes to the problems now the great sales people also do this and this is where we start turning these into emotions and understanding the emotions that are affecting these problems so how did it make them feel frustrated angry left out trapped and now we start examining the future state where do they want to be they want money so they can go on vacation they want to take the family and camping trips they want less contention with the wife and they don't have to take the bus anymore and then lastly they bring the solution in now what a lot of sales people do is they're very good at examining the facts they're very good at uncovering some of the problems they don't talk enough about the impact or the root causes and we very very rarely get into the emotions that the individual is suffering from when they have these problems and these root causes what we often do is we start with facts and then we jump straight to solution and as you can see we're missing five really really important steps out in that process one of the most common questions i get asked is well how do you do all that on one call well the answer is you don't and you don't have to there's an obsession in modern selling particularly with sas that everything needs to be achieved on one call now it's very important that we stop looking at our sales process as different calls and demos it's about the key information that we need to gather to understand the robustness of the opportunity and that takes different times for different customers so stop fixating about the call or the email it's about making sure that during that process we gather all of the information