Discovery Don’t #4 Make It an Inquisition

  

This is a valid concern! Too many one-way questions can feel like an interrogation or inquisition. 

 

Hospital Analogy: Imagine being handed a ten-page questionnaire that you need to complete before you can see the doctor, including line after line of detailed questions about your medical history, relatives, prescriptions, insurance, and on and on. Even worse, you don’t have answers to many of the questions, leaving you concerned that you’ll ever see the doctor at all!

 

Solution? While we need to complete gathering the information we require in our discovery processes, we must also offer information, guidance, and insights in return. Discovery needs to be perceived as a two-way conversation, where both parties each learn something new. In doing discovery, we accomplish this by offering quid pro quo comments, observations, and success stories.

 

These can range from insights into how other customers have addressed similar challenges, or even simple comments such as, “You are not alone…!” See the section on “Empathy and Quid Pro Quo” in Doing Discovery for more guidelines on this important practice.

 

Your prospect should feel that they also took away new and useful information from the discovery conversation. Think win-win.

 

This is #4 from The Dirty Dozen of Discovery Don’ts – you can find all twelve here! https://lnkd.in/evUnp8YV

 

You can find the full set of DO’s and DON’Ts in Doing Discovery: 

https://lnkd.in/g28PXx55

Are Your Automated Demos Hurting You? Bad News!

  

If you automate garbage demos, you’re just sending out lots of garbage!

 

Over the past several months I’ve reviewed dozens of automated demos and must report some very bad news: Only a few stood out as effective and compelling, most were awful!

 

-       There were a LOT of demos that were product training. 

-       There were many instances of “let’s show as many features as we can.”

-       There was a surprising lack of context with many (what problems are being solved? Who is this for?).

-       Most demos never described the value or advantages of their solutions.

-       There were surprisingly few call-to-action elements.

-       Some demos required lengthy intake forms that discouraged prospects from completing the process (and hence they never saw the demos)!

 

Here are some raw notes from my reviews:

 

-       Largely a list of features

-       Feature list

-       Feature glut

-       Feature feature feature feature feature aaaagh!

-       Terrible Tabs Death March

-       Who is this for?

-       No problem/solution discussion

-       No setup, no problem/solution

-       No communication of deliverables or value

-       No value, no advantages, no benefits

-       No value…

-       No value…

-       Focuses on "how things work" vs deliverables and outcomes

-       Too long

-       Very long

-       Waaaay too long.

-       Very confusing

-       No narrative

-       Too many options to explore

-       Zzzzzzzzzz

-       Zzzzzz 

-       Very confusing navigation!

-       Hated the overlong intake form!

-       Too much intake form

-       Training video!

-       Product training

-       Training

-       Training

-       Trai… zzzzzzzz

-       Why start with the boring example?

-       Tell-show-tell feels like a piledriver in my brain!

-       No summary

-       I have no clue what this is for!

 

Do these demos move the buying/sales processes forward? I doubt it! In fact, they may be doing more harm than good. I’d guess many prospects say, “Well, I saw their demo and I’m not interested…” This conclusion seems to be confirmed by vendors who report poor conversion rates.

 

The morals are simple:

 

-       If you amplify terrible music, you’re just making more unwanted noise!

-       If you scale up the production of lousy food, you’re just serving tons of lousy food!

-       And if you automate garbage demos, you’re just sending out lots of garbage!

 

Solution? Contact Natasja Bax (NBax@GreatDemo.com) for guidance on real best practices for automated demos. Make every automated engagement a productive one!

 

An Offer: If you’d like free feedback on your automated demo(s), send them or their URL to me at PCohan@GreatDemo.com. First come, first served!

Discovery Don’t #3 Use a “Disco Demo”

 

(This one will be contentious!)

 

“Disco Demos” or “Discovery on the Fly” are simply other terms for Harbor Tour demos, but where the vendor asks (over and over!), “Is this something of interest to you?” These are often inflicted on prospects in response to prospects’ requests to “just show me a demo!”

 

While the intent is to provide your prospect with examples of your offering and associated advantages, most of these demos devolve into a flood of features, resulting in very little useful discovery information and suffering from severe risk of Buying It Back.

 

Hospital Analogy: Imagine you’ve headed to the hospital because you feel very sick. A doctor meets you at the entrance and, instead of asking any questions, they take you on a tour of the hospital. They show you the X-ray equipment and say, “We have a terrific, state-of-the-art X-ray system – is that something you might want?” and repeat that process for each department!

 

Solution? When possible, gently (but firmly!) convince your prospect of the value of doing discovery first, followed by a demo that focuses crisply on what was learned in discovery.

 

The doctor analogy can be an effective approach: “Before I offer a diagnosis and suggest a cure, I need to perform an examination…”

 

If your prospect still demands, “Just show me a demo…,” use the highly effective Vision Generation Demo method to satisfy your prospect’s desire to “see what’s possible,” while moving them comfortably into a discovery conversation: Win-win! (Chapter 11 in Great Demo!)

 

This is #3 from The Dirty Dozen of Discovery Don’ts – you can find all twelve here! https://lnkd.in/evUnp8YV

 

You can find the full set of DO’s and DON’Ts in Doing Discovery: 

https://lnkd.in/g28PXx55

Advanced Guidance: Discovery and Demos for Renewals and Expansion

 

NOTE: This is advanced material, suitable for senior presales, sales, and customer success individual contributors and leaders! 

 

What’s in this article for you? Guidance for doing discovery and delivering demos for:

 

-        Renewals – When Things Are Good

-        Renewals – When There Was Low or No Usage

-        Renewals – Positioning and Presenting Product Improvements

-        Expansion – Same Department, Same Use Cases, More Users

-        Expansion – Upselling and Cross-Selling within Existing Customers

-        Expansion – Into Different Departments

-        Bonuses for Doing Discovery and Great Demo! practitioners

 

“Land and Expand” is the major sales strategy for many software companies. Intriguingly, while great attention is focused on new customer acquisition and corresponding sales processes, less is typically applied to securing renewals and expanding your footprint.

 

This article addresses this gap with respect to doing discovery and presenting demos for the latter group. What strategies and positionings are appropriate? How do you execute discovery and frame your demos for the broad range of renewal and expansion situations?

 

You can find the article here: https://greatdemo.com/discovery-and-demos-for-renewals-and-expansion/ 

 

Enjoy!

Discovery Don’t #2 Don’t Do Enough

 

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: 

https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Discovery-Important-Enablement-Processes/dp/B0B8RJK4C2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1U8XAZMG8HBYK&keywords=doing+discovery&qid=1659904849&s=books&sprefix=doing+discovery%2Cstripbooks%2C216&sr=1-1

Establishing Rapport vs Developing Relationships Online

I’ve been experimenting with how to build relationships when limited to online meetings. I find that reserving a few minutes at the end of the formal meeting is yielding excellent results!

 

Prior to COVID many sales calls were made face-to-face and often included time with the prospect after the formal business discussions had taken place. These interactions ranged from getting coffee/tea/water in a break room or cafeteria, to lunch or dinner off-campus, to tours of your prospect’s facilities.

 

This extra time enabled real relationships to develop where you learned about your prospect’s company culture, personal interests, intriguing stories, and more.

 

How do you accomplish this online?

 

While it is still very important to establish rapport at the beginning of a call, if you want to develop a deeper relationship with your prospect, try doing so at the end of the business discussion:

 

-       What’s that intriguing object on their shelf behind them?

-       What’s going on at their location (weather, events, etc.)?

-       What are they using for their online setup? How have they adapted?

-       How has their company culture been changing since before/after COVID?

-       How have their personal practices changed, similarly?

 

Of course, make sure to track on the time so that you can invest in this non-formal-business conversation towards the end of the call!

 

And please let me know your results!

Discovery Don’t #1 Don’t Do Discovery at All!

 

Assume that all prospects are completely alike and have exactly the same needs, interests, and situations. While parts of this may be true (that’s what defines a market), this SAD (Stunningly Awful Discovery) assumption results in stunningly awful Harbor Tour demos, unnecessary POCs, numerous No Decision outcomes, and far-too-frequent losses to your competitors who actually do discovery!

 

Here’s an analogy of how ridiculous this is:

 

Imagine you feel very sick, and you head to the hospital. A doctor meets with you, but instead of asking any questions or performing any tests, they point you to the pharmacy and say, “Try each of the medications we have available and let me know if any work…”

 

That’s prescription without diagnosis, also known as medical malpractice!

 

Solution? Do discovery! Remember, discovery is done for both parties: to enable you as the vendor to propose a precise solution and to enable your prospect to feel confident that you have a sufficient understanding of their situation to be able to propose a precise solution.

 

 

This is #1 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: 

https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Discovery-Important-Enablement-Processes/dp/B0B8RJK4C2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1U8XAZMG8HBYK&keywords=doing+discovery&qid=1659904849&s=books&sprefix=doing+discovery%2Cstripbooks%2C216&sr=1-1

 

Diary of a Sales Engineer: Engaging Conversation!

From the diarists:

 

“This week on Diary of a Sales Engineer, Ryan Krueger and I had the honor and privilege to sit down with Peter Cohan who we've coined the Godfather of Presales.

Peter was one of the first people I learned from in my presales journey and to have him sit down with us on the pod was a surreal experience.

In our conversation we talk through his journey into Presales, how he's seen the shift in the business, and why he created Great Demo! plus much more!

One of my favorite parts was when we talked about why SEs tend to go into 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘀 to this day. Peter gives some actionable insights on how to improve this.

As always, we love hearing your feedback and thoughts. Please share them in the comments :)”

Our 57-minute conversation explored:

 

-       “History of presales” – when did it really start?

-       Great Demo! origins – a story with a HUGE lesson!

-       Are demos improving?

-       Why are some many demos “training?”

-       The “Bronze” demo

-       Demo structure vs delivery

-       Why is mapping to job titles important?

-       What about groups with multiple job titles?

-       How deep should you go?

-       How do we keep from over-explaining?

-       How demos get hijacked

-       What is a demo expert?

-       Three types of change

-       What’s cool about demos and Monday morning?

-       What do you do when things go wrong?

-       Demos and storytelling: another perspective

-       Another take on introducing yourself

-       Dig beneath the nuggets!

You can enjoy the conversation here:

YouTube: https://lnkd.in/dy9F3z74
Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dqKTX3rk