This is the most common Don’t!
Far too many vendors simply identify “pain” and then launch immediately into proposing “solutions.” This is amusingly known as “premature elaboration,” and is nearly as bad as doing no discovery at all!
Many vendors confuse qualification with discovery. Once a prospect meets their qualification criteria, they are off to the solution and proposal races!
Even qualification can be insufficient (as every mature salesperson knows). Here are some unproductive qualification criteria for your amusement:
- Marketing Qualified Lead: “Anyone who browses our website…”
- Sales Qualified Lead: “Anyone who clicks the ‘Book a Demo’ button on our website…”
- SDR Qualified Lead: “Anyone who agrees to a meeting with a salesperson…”
- Inside Salesperson Qualified Lead: “Anyone on my outbound call list…”
- Desperate Salesperson Qualified Lead: “Anyone with a heartbeat…”
In Doing Discovery, I identify seven levels of discovery:
- 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.
When vendor individuals honestly evaluate themselves, after digesting the definitions of each level, they typically place themselves at Levels 2 or 3. This leaves a lot of room for improvement!
Hospital Analogy: You arrive at a hospital and say, “I don’t feel well.” A doctor asks, “Where does it hurt?” and you reply, “My stomach…” The doctor announces, “This patient has stomach pain: Let’s get ‘em into surgery and open ‘em up right away!” (If I were you, I’d head for another hospital!)
Hospital Qualification Analogy: The doctor asks, “Do you have insurance?” to which you respond, “Yes, full healthcare insurance.” The doctor then immediately whisks you into surgery!
Solution? Define an example of what “great” looks like. One excellent approach is to generate a template based on a fully completed discovery document from a real prospect conversation that includes both the question prompts and the prospect’s responses. Optimally, it includes all the relevant portions of the full Doing Discovery methodology.
Two additional thoughts:
1. The more complex the offering, the more discovery is needed.
2. Prospects with complex problems want to be discovered, although they may push back until you’ve proven that you are worthy of their time. A Vision Generation Demo can be the solution to this! (See Chapter 11 in Great Demo!)
This is #2 from The Dirty Dozen of Discovery Don’ts – you can find all twelve here! https://greatdemo.com/stunningly-awful-discovery-the-dirty-dozen-of-discovery-donts/
You can find the full set of DO’s and DON’Ts in Doing Discovery:
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