Assessing Discovery Skill Levels – How Do You Rate?

 

A Never Stop Learning! Article

“80% of my team believes they do a good job with discovery, but sadly they do not. They don’t know what they don’t know…!”

 - Head of Sales

What’s in This Article for You?

• Assess your discovery skills level 
• The impact of insufficient discovery
• Discovery skills Levels 1-6 defined
• The importance of methodology
• And a medical analogy sprinkled throughout!

Initial Assessment

Many sales and presales practitioners say they are skilled at doing discovery, but are they? Are you? Here’s a simple method to assess, based on seven levels of increasing proficiency:

Level 1:  Uncovers statements of pain.

Level 2:  Uncovers pain and explores more deeply.

Level 3:  Uncovers pain, explores deeply, broadens the pain and investigates the impact.

Level 4:  Uncovers pain, explores and broadens, investigates impact, and quantifies.

Level 5:  Uncovers pain, explores and broadens, investigates impact, quantifies, and reengineers vision.

Level 6:  Applies these skills to the broad range of prospects represented across the Technology Adoption Curve, “burn victims,” disruptive and new product categories, transactional sales cycles, and other scenarios.

Level 7:  Integrates and aligns the skills above into a cohesive discovery methodology.

The Impact of Insufficient Discovery

Insufficient discovery is the leading cause of a multitude of addressable sales process errors and failures. 

For example, typical SaaS software vendors suffer No Decision rates at an average of 45% of their forecasted opportunities. That’s nearly half of the sales projects worked on each year that go … nowhere!

Similarly, vendors report that roughly 30% of all demos delivered were “wasted,” largely due to a lack of discovery. These are frequently “overview demos,” delivered to satisfy prospects’ desires to “see what’s possible.” (See Chapter 11 “Vision Generation Demos” in the Third Edition of Great Demo! for a delightful and effective cure to this problem.)

What is your current No Decision rate? What percent of your demos are wasted?

You can find the balance of this article here – enjoy!