Streamline Your Sales Discovery Process with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

welcome to the discovery call master class the first of four courses in our sales success masterclass video series if you're looking to absolutely master the craft of having deal closing discovery conversations with your buyers then this is the video for you let's get started if you're curious about Who I am feel free to pause the video here to read those bullet points on my background otherwise let's get right into the material so sales success is a chain link system so in a chain link system the performance of the whole is limited by the weakest link when there is a weak link the system does not perform better if you improve the other links a military camp convoy is a great example of a chain link system like this it travels at the speed of its slowest vehicle there's no point in improving the speed of the other vehicles if there's a slow one holding everything up the slow one is the quote unquote limiting factor now sales success works the same way it doesn't come down to a single thing it comes down to a combination of sales skills and personal attributes that work together when you do get the right combination of sales skills working together as a system you get a compound effect on your results okay it's a compound effect so if you're ten percent better across six key sales skills those compound on each other that doesn't make you ten percent better overall it makes you 77 percent better it's a compound effect discovery skills are the first ingredient of a powerful set of sales skills mastering discover is what you're going to do mastering discovery is what you're going to do today so here's what you're going to learn first you're going to learn the number one and most common discovery mistake that good even good salespeople make next you're going to learn discovery strategy ok before you get into tactics it's critical that you understand strategy and the right discovery approach to take in certain selling scenarios third you're going to get into specific discovery tactics questions to ask and what to actually say and do during your discovery calls and then fourth and final we're going to cover a few final points for you to take away now discovery here's why it's important it dictates the trajectory of your deal both at the beginning of the deal in your intro call and in making continual adjustments throughout the sales process you always want to continue discovery because priorities change and needs are in flux and here's the number one mistake when it comes to discovery that good salespeople make okay it's trading discovery as a linear process where you do it at the beginning and you stop returning to it throughout the rest of the sales process in a front of my name Justin Welch has some of the best thoughts on this that I've ever heard and he says stop treating discovery like a static static stage of the call or even the sales process inflexible always at the beginning and rehearsed the best discovery I hear doesn't sound like discovery it sounds like for an asking me questions throughout a conversation to help me make the best choice okay it's natural so that's the first part of this training is to understand that discovery is not a check the Box event it's not a stage in your sales process it is a process it is not an event it's not something you do once and get done with it it is something you return to you and revalidate threw out a call and throughout the sales process so that brings us to point number two or agenda item number 2 which is strategy ok before you can get into discovery call tactics what to do and what to say during your discovery calls you first have to understand discovery strategy which will help you understand what sort of discovery methodology or approach do you take in different selling scenarios now here's the key skill in discovery the key skill and discovery isn't in knowing the various discovery strategies the real skill lies in knowing which strategies apply to which situations ok what is the essence of discovery strategy what's successful in one scenario could be counterproductive in another scenario so an inbound deal versus an outbound deal would be a great example of that and speaking of inbound versus outbound deals the buyers journey which is what you're looking at here dictates your discovery approach your discovery strategy and even the questions you ask which we'll get into in a little bit here so the be the key to becoming a master at the discovery process is first and a little bit paradoxically mastering the buyers journey okay just mastery over discovery starts with mastery over knowing your buyers journey identifying where they are what they're thinking and feeling and each of these stages and how to align your technique to the specific stage therein so you're going to learn the strategy behind two primary discovery scenarios inbound discovery where the buyer comes to you with active pain that they're looking to solve and are quite possibly looking at solutions that are either competing with yours or could substitute for yours and outbound discovery where you came to the buyer and now your job is to diagnose their pain their latent pain turn it into active pain all without creating friction or frankly kind of pissing them off by asking them a bunch of interrogative questions so let's start with inbound inbound discovery the key with inbound to discovery is to align yourself to where your buyer is in their buyers journey and that's to start with their buying vision okay they're coming to you they've already gotten active pain and they probably have a vision for what they're trying to achieve all already so it's important that you start your discovery efforts with that by buying vision so what you're looking at here is actually the solution selling discovery matrix and we're not going to get into all of these steps that's not the point of this training but I would recommend you go read solution selling if you have the time for it and what solution selling recommends so first I'll explain the columns here is you start by diagnosing pain then you go to the second column which is exploring the impact of that pain and then finally you go to the third column is once you've developed that pain into an active pain which the first two columns achieves hopefully now you go on to developing a buying vision well that model gets flipped on its head just a little bit when a buyer comes inbound okay when they've already gone through pain when they've already diagnosed their own pain and now they're looking at your solution and potential compute ntral competing solutions if you ask the discovery question that aligns with this first column here about pain and diagnosing the reasons for that pain like let's say you said help me understand the biggest challenges and priorities you're currently facing in your business that is misaligned with your buyers journey there past that point and about half of the time possibly more it's going to generate a friction friction full if that's a word conversation with your buyer that's not what they're expecting to talk about the better approach in this situation is to align with what they do want to talk about they've already got a vision for what they're looking to do and so your first question is going to be something like help me understand what you're trying to achieve by looking into XYZ solution now you've aligned your discovery approach with where they are and after a few minutes of talking about that you can actually return to the first stages here where you tie back to pain so they've told you about their buying vision and now you go back to okay well let's talk about the problem behind that what's driving you to do that what's what's the biggest challenge you're dealing with in your business that has you looking to achieve X result so that is the essence of inbound discovery when you identify somebody as inbound and has an active pain point and an act of buying vision your goal is to meet them where they stand and start talking about that buying vision before you make the mistake that everybody else is going to make by starting with talking about pain because that's not what they are primed to do in that moment so that leads us to outbound discovery strategy so outbound discovery strategy is when you're meeting with a buyer that does not have an active pain point they might even not know who you are and they definitely do not have a buying vision that supports your value prop you're starting from scratch you have to develop pain and there are two keys to getting outbound discovery right so the first one is to earn the right to ask questions because you can come across as very interrogative and kind of annoying if you just start pummeling somebody who's not really even that interested in talking with you about questions about they're top priorities and then once you've earned the right to ask your questions then the goal is to start with pain which is the opposite of what we just talked about on inbound discovery strategy so like we said your job here is going to be to start with the first part of the solution selling model help me understand the biggest challenges in your business when it comes to X area that you help them solve now before you even get into that your job is to earn the right to ask those questions to begin with because if you just started a discovery meeting with what I just covered especially if it's a senior executive they're probably going to become a little bit irritated with a question like that they are not sold on the idea of answering your agenda of questions so there are a few ways that we're going to cover throughout this entire training to earn the right to ask questions so that you can have that rich back-and-forth with the buyer and the first technique is to earn the right with what we call a discovery prompter so what's a discovery prompter it is a short educational narrative or even slide deck about the problem or opportunity your product solves for designed to get your buyer talking okay so if your sales motion is to start an intro meeting you've got an intro meeting let's say it's 30 minutes long here's where that would fit in you would spend the first three to five minutes just on small talk and greetings and that kind of stuff you would perhaps set an upfront contract and agenda and that kind of thing and then you would earn the right to ask questions by delivering your discovery prompter and once you've done that if you've done it right it will trigger a rich discovery conversation for the remaining twenty or so minutes that you have that is how you execute an outbound discovery sales motion so I'm going to walk you through the discovery prompter we use here at Goong so you have an idea of what this looks like it's not about product nothing like that it's about an opportunity you can help your buyer exploit or it's about the problem you solve that's hopefully important to your buyer so let's get into this I'll walk you through our example so every business has a set of million dollar questions that if you could answer you would have an unfair share of your market example what really separates your star reps from the rest of the pack why does half of your pipeline end up in no decision or go dark and how do you make your offering a no-brainer what's the right go to market message and positioning to go to market with to a position you're offering as a no-brainer if you had the real answers to these questions instead of just opinions you'd win the unfair share of your market okay unfair share but you don't have the answers to those questions all you're left with is opinions and those can be your worst enemy indeed because they're nothing but assumptions so the truth or the answers to all these questions is buried in conversations and that's actually what Gong does is it gives you visibility into all of your customer facing conversations and when you have visibility into all customer facing conversations it delivers value to you as an executive across three different dimensions of your business we call these the three pillars of revenue success the first one is people success so when you have visibility into sales conversations you can up level your team the second one is deal success again that visibility helps you make sure your frontline managers can keep deals on the right track to close and close more of them and then finally when you have visibility into frontline conversations it fuels your strategy you can hear the voice of the market and hear critical market intelligence that helps you make informed go-to-market decisions now these are typically some symptoms and problems that fall underneath each one of those three pillars that getting visibility into customer conversations helps you make good on so after you've walked or in this case me after I've walked a buyer through this five minute discovery call prompter now I pass the torch over to them and I might keep the slide keep the deck on this slide but I'll ask something like enough about Kong help me understand your challenges and priorities now if you have a well-crafted narrative it's going to resonate with them and now they've you having a discovery conversation with you in their best best interest they are going to open up the floodgates they're going to talk richly about problems that you can help them solve now compare that if I did not walk the buyer through any sort of problem or opportunity based narrative imagine if I had just started the meeting by saying help me understand your top challenges and priorities well they probably would have no interest in answering that question because they don't perceive it in their best interest but when you whet their appetite appetite so to speak with a discovery call prompter it changes the entire dynamic of your discovery call now those that covers strategy we've covered the two scenarios the two strategic scenarios of discovery and sales you're now going to learn the specific tips tactics and insights the things to say and do during your discovery conversations to become more persuasive to move buyers to the next step to find pain and to ultimately close more deals now here's tactic number one start your meeting with an upfront contract now this is a term that Sandler sales training coined and it's immensely immensely useful and it's particularly useful in starting things off on the right foot and again earning the right to ask questions so what is an upfront contract it's an agreement between you as a salesperson and your buyer about what will take place during your conversation and what you'll agree to do by the end of the conversation so this is an example of a script of what a generic upfront contract might sound like you've gone through the initial meet-and-greet at the beginning of your intro call and you say okay so by the end of this call I'd like you to be in a position where you're either interested and we plan the next step or you're not interested and you tell me that and we avoid wasting time is that fair of course they're gonna say yes now to achieve that I have 30 minutes set aside do you have any hard stops coming up that I should know about you're getting quick alignment on time and then finally you get agreement on the important part which is agenda and objective so great I plan on covering a B and C which could be exploring your business than showing you a product demo is there anything you want to add or remove from that agenda yes no whatever sounds good let's get started now I want to share with you at the specific upfront contract that our sales team uses on their qualification calls so just to give you context behind this this is an SDR conducting this conversation it's a sales development rep these are inbound leads coming in scheduling 15 to 20-minute initial conversations to vet whether or not there's a good set so yours will probably look different than this because you have a different business than I do but this is what our STRs say toward the beginning of those conversations they say I'd love to get your take on what I had in mind for this call is that alright with you our goal is simply to determine whether Gong would be a strong fit for you so that if you go further into this process with us you know it's gonna be time well spent if I find that this wouldn't be a great fit I'll be upfront with you and you'll save some time is that fair yes great so to achieve that here's what I suggest first let's briefly talk about your sales efforts to understand if and we're gong might be able to help once we do that I'll tell you a little bit about Gong how I think it can help and we'll schedule the next step if it makes sense - is there anything you would want to add or remove from that agenda great let's get started so that's the upfront contract tactic number two for discovery is tell a customer story that triggers their hot button now I'm going to tell you right now I'm putting this link here you may want to take a screenshot of this or even go to that page in book market because I'm not going to teach you how to tell compelling customer stories in this training we have another training for that which can be found at that link and if you're watching this discovery call course as a result of signing signing up for our sales success masterclass series you'll actually receive the customer stories that sell course sell course in about a week or so now I'm going to I'm not going to teach you how to tell a customer story but I'm going to teach you where a good one would fit in with your discovery call process and where it fits in is a substitute for your discovery call prompter so instead of going through like a strategic narrative like I showed you earlier where you know every business has these million dollar questions you can instead tell a three to five minute customer story that you know is going to resonate with your buyer because they're experiencing the same problem that the customer and your story experienced and from there once you tell that story your play is exactly the same as ending the discovery call prompter which is enough about Goong and the customers we serve helped me understand that you and your biz biggest challenges that is really how you get somebody to open up to you and talk a lot about their problems but there's a key to getting this right and I would recommend you screenshot this or write it down on a sticky note and return to it every three months or so throughout your career and this goes beyond customer stories this is messaging advice in general if your story or if your message describes their problem better than they can describe it themselves they will automatically assume you have the best solution okay it's automatic I think number three get long responses from your buyers when you ask them discovery questions we found through our analysis of over five million as of this recording five million recorded sales murse agents that there is a direct correlation between close rates and getting long responses from discovery questions getting customers to talk for long periods of time after asking a single question so this is what you want your conversation to look like you want to have a lot of back and forth so the purple is you that's the sellers interaction and the pinkish color the reddish color is the customers you want to ask a highly engaging discovery question at some point that gets them talking for a long period of time now the key to getting that right is to ask them about something that resonates but there's a tactical tip that I can give you right now that'll help you get longer more rich responses to your discovery questions and that is to phrase your questions in a way that signals to your buyer you want them to go in depth and you can take any of your who what when where why questions and phrase them with one of these ways to signal to them that you want them to go in depth and talk at length so instead of saying what's your biggest challenge you would say can you help me understand your biggest challenge or can you walk me through your biggest challenges when it comes to your sales efforts okay when you phrase your questions like this it tends to generate longer responses which again correlate pretty strongly with success rates and close rates tactic number four softened the quote unquote feel of the conversation with labeling and mirroring techniques okay labeling and mirroring techniques OD this is a chart that shows the question velocity of top performers and average performers and you can see that top performers spread questions throughout their discovery questions or calls evenly okay they're having a natural back-and-forth conversation you can see there's no point throughout the call duration that really has more questions than other points if you look at the question velocity of average reps though you can see that they front-load all of their questions toward the beginning of a call and then stop asking or ask fewer questions throughout it's almost as if they're making their way through a discovery called checklist and then they launch into a pitch of some sort now the takeaway there is that feels very interrogative okay it feels like you're interrogating your buyer so the key is to not front-load all of your questions to the beginning but it's to have a natural conversation just like Justin Welch taught you at the beginning of this course make it feel like a natural conversation like you'd be having with a friend and the two techniques to really make that work are labeling and mirroring and both of these techniques come from Chris Voss who wrote an amazing book on negotiation called never split the difference and I would recommend everybody listening to this video read that book now mirroring which is the first technique is simply repeating the important words of what a buyer just said usually one two three words maybe a few more with an upward inflection so if they just shared with you that their sales ramp time is too slow you just respond with ramp time is slow and now you shut up and so instead of asking a full new question which could feel a bit like a pickaxe you're simply pinging back piggybacking off of what they just said you're doing it in a very innocent manner and you get people to talk more and more about a topic that you want to get more information from now the second technique which is even more powerful is called labeling and labeling is not a question at all it's actually a statement which makes your dissever discovery conversations feel more conversational however you're getting information out of them by using this statement so it's a win-win and labeling is when you label an emotion that you observed your buyer express by completing one of these three sentences so it could be they just answered one of your questions and spent two minutes doing it you could say it seems like you're really frustrated with this or it seems like you're really overwhelmed when it comes to onboarding new reps or it seems like you looks like you or sounds like you fill in the blank with what are whatever emotion you observe them Express now if you are accurate in labeling their emotion correctly which requires you to listen to begin with and then you just shut up after you've labeled now they're going to open the floodgates again they'll probably felt more under or feel more understood than they have in a really long time they're going to emotionally exhale and they're going to give you more and more valuable information and the beauty is you didn't have to ask another equity burning question to get that information you just made a statement and you looked them in the eye all right tactic number five ask strategically spontaneous questions that is a fancy way of saying ask questions based on what the buyer just said and Charles Mull Bauer says it best he says the number one issue I find reps have is not basing their discovery questions on what the prospect just told them as a result the questions come across as more of a line of questioning than they do in natural conversation so you can end up having a list of the best questions in the world but it won't be nearly as effective if it's not natural so the moral of the story with this tactic is stop opening up new threads and new rabbit holes to go down with every question you ask ask a question let your buyer respond and then ask a follow-up question - whatever it is just they just said that is as much information as I can give you on this technique this is going to be mastered through practice you're going to learn how to do this as you implement it in live conversations and I would encourage you to put some intention behind that and on your next call consciously think about that as a skill you want to try and develop on that call okay tactic number six ask questions only an expert would think to ask and a lot of this just comes down to phrasing you can sub communicate to your buyer that you're an expert and competent or income but in green just by the way you phrase your questions so the best question you can ask is that one that only an expert would ask their questions that make your buyer think rather than just recite information now here's one example here's a question here's an example of a question that exudes competence versus one that does not if I ask the VP of Sales what's your sales process I come across as trite and experienced and a little bit crass that's kind of an irritating thing but if I say something like can you walk me through your sales process from first contact to close deal it's the exact same question but it's communicated at a higher level of competence so think about the questions you are asking today and take a pen and paper and come up with a few variations of asking those questions and wording them in a way that sounds like you know what the hell you're talking about okay it can be as simple as that tactic number seven validate the buyer and sell the next step okay this is what you do at the end of the discovery call assuming a demo is not part of the same call which often it is so at the end of the discovery call you want to make sure they're excited about taking the next step whatever that is and here's one that we use here at gotten we say based on what you've told me I think you're going to love God okay that's the validation part it's going to help you and here's where you insert your value prop ramp new hires faster and achieve your annual revenue targets by getting your new enterprise Account Executives up to quarter-over-quarter attainment much faster as a next step I suggest we schedule a product demo so you can judge this for yourself do you have your calendar handy okay there are a few parts to unpacking this so the first is the first sentence based on what you've told me I think you're going to love gone that is the phrasing of that statement matters deeply you are validating to your buyer that they're in the right place because at the beginning of the sales process they're probably not sure and they want that certainty and conviction and confidence from you the second part in yellow is when you relay their pain and your value prop back to them to sell them and whet their appetite on taking the next step and then finally the third one is actually closing on that next step in a way that melts pressure and buyer resistance and the key to this is so you can judge this for yourself so uttering that phrase and makes your buyer feel like they're being in there in control and they're not being pressured now if you're a sales leader I have an important message for you feature dumping I dramatically reduces your close rates okay this is what your sales reps will do if they aren't trained up on discovery calls and on the discovery call process we found through our research that there is a direct negative correlation between win rates and feature dumping so what I would recommend you do next make sure your reps are not feature dumping and that they're having the types of discovery calls you'd be proud of and what you can do next to actually prevent them from feature dumping and making sure that they're having amazing discovery calls is to sign up to see Gong in action it helps your reps sell value so go take a look at it go over to WWII of demo take a look judge for yourself and thanks for joining this training today