Discovery should be perceived by your prospects as a two-way conversation, where both parties take away useful information.
"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue."
– Truman Capote
A long time ago in a country far away, my boss (the regional head of sales) and I were in a discovery conversation with a prospect at a large Swiss pharmaceutical company. The prospect was the head of research computing, and we were working to sell our new cheminformatics flagship product into his organization.
The three of us were face-to-face in our prospect’s office, sitting beside a small table. I’d started the conversation with demographics questions, and, at a logical point, we began to explore pain and impact.
My boss and I had been trading questions which, in retrospect, must have really felt like an inquisition, because as we continued, our prospect began to twist himself into a pretzel-like knot. He wound his legs together about as tightly as one might do without self-injury. As this progressed, he folded his arms – but not across his chest – he folded his arms tightly above and behind his head!
Obviously, he was not comfortable! And intriguingly, in our debrief afterwards, my boss and I both believed that our prospect’s actions were involuntary: he didn’t realize he was showing severely strained body language.
It was clear that we needed to change our approach, and this is when we realized that there needed to be a kinder, gentler, balanced approach to discovery where both parties learn things and enjoy the experience.
Moral: Make discovery a real conversation by giving as well as gathering information!
Learn how to give (and not just gather) starting on page 199 in Doing Discovery: https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Discovery-Important-Enablement-Processes/dp/B0B8RJK4C2/
If you missed some of these knowledge nuggets, you’ll find another dozen more waiting for you at https://greatdemo.com/blog/.
And you’ll find 35 additional story gems in “Suspending Disbelief: A Collection of Sales, Presales, and Marketing Stories (and Lessons Learned)” here: https://tinyurl.com/yc7rsrmy
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