Customer discovery is unfortunately still a woefully underestimated part of customer engagement. Too many sales people still run around with the notion that all you need to know about a customer are BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) and some personal information about your contact so you can relate to him on a personal level - create a 'true' connection.
I have also been on the buyer side, buying high value services as a manager. And I have been treated to the full breath of connection creating tactics. I even liked some of the sellers as a person. But I clearly remember many incidents where I chose to work with the seller offering a better solution and having a clearer understanding of my needs over the one I personally liked better. In a study, leading to his book "The Challenger Sale", Matthew Dixon found that only 4% of the B2B sales top performer fall into the category of relationship builder, despite it being the most common profile among B2B sales people.
So please don't think that creating a personal connection should be the core of your discovery.
Why you need good discovery
Your discovery has to focus instead on a number of areas. You need to have a precise understanding of your customer's:
Business environment and competition
Strategic and operational targets
Hurdles that prevent them from achieving them
Impact from helping them overcome some of those hurdles
Internal processes, both in the area your product gets applied as well as internal approval process for purchasing your product
Costs of change
Why are those important?
You need these information in order to:
Identify and evaluate the gap your product closes
Identify and address internal obstacles on your customer side (cost of change - for more background read my blog post on cost of change)
Proactively manage your customer's deal approval process
So basically to run the entire customer acquisition process effectively, from providing your customer with a compelling reason to buy, over ensuring there are no internal obstacles to closing the deal with a signature.
Get specific answers - not vague answers
A key element of an effective discovery is to make sure that the answers you get are precise and specific:
Not "we want more sales" - but "we target a 20% in sales"
Not "we already have a system" - but "we currently use x"
Not "someone in IT has to sign off" - but "x has to approve integration into y"
Therefore your job as a sales person is to ask for more clarification when you receive the first type of answers. Without precise answers you cannot conduct any of the tasks you have to do discovery for.
But make sure it is not an interrogation
The question I hear often is "how do I avoid this to be an interrogation"?
The immediate answer is "never ask a customer - can you be more precise". A discovery is always supposed to be a conversation. But there are tons of ways to ask a contact follow-up questions that increase precision, for example:
"You just said you wanted to increase sales. Do you have a fixed target?"
"Do you know who exactly is responsible?
In our last conversation you said you already have a system. Can I ask which?"
Now the last one indicates that you can postpone clarification to a different conversation. And you can. But be careful.
You have to make sure you have all the crucial information you need in order to offer value in your next conversation!
Therefore the last example I gave you is actually a terrible one. If you are selling a system solution, you don't want to wait until the next conversation to find out what your potential customer is currently using. It is part of your gap analysis. Same as the growth target.
Only ever postpone questions which you don't need in your next micro-sale (check out my post on every sale being a series of small sales to understand this better). So if you are early in your discovery you can postpone to specify who's approval you need in IT, but not if you are about to manage your contact through the internal approval process on his side.
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