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Imagine
walking into a doctor’s office and, before you can open your mouth, the doctor
immediately writes prescriptions for a broad range of drugs… The doctor then says, “Let me know if any of
these drugs seem to help address any problems you have.”
Or:
Imagine
walking into a doctor’s office and (again), before you can open your mouth, the
doctor immediately writes prescriptions for a broad range of drugs… A few days later you come back, at which time
the doctor says, “So what seems to be the trouble?”
How are these
different from presenting a demo to a customer before doing any Discovery?
“No Decision” Rates Too High?
A sadly terrific way to increase the
number of “no decision” outcomes is through insufficient Discovery. The result is a long, painful and expensive
path to nothing…
Consider a typical Situation Slide with its six elements:
Job Title and Industry:
Critical Business Issue:
Problems/Reasons:
Specific Capabilities:
Delta:
Critical Data or Event:
Most vendors do gather a portion of the Problems/Reasons statement: “We need a new system…,” says the customer. “Great!” says the vendor, “We’ve got a whole
range of those to choose from…!”
What’s missing?
No Critical Business Issue: means there may be a lack of a strong driving
force for change.
No Specific Capabilities: without these, what do we show in a demo? The result is often the horror of the “Harbor
Tour” demo…
No Delta: means there is no articulated value equation
on the part of the customer.
No Critical Date: means this sales opportunity could go on
forever!
Want proof?
6 to 1 – that’s the ratio of successfully closed sales using Great Demo!
vs. “Harbor Tours”, as tracked by one Great Demo! Workshops customer. More
specifically, he reported that for business that closed during a 12 month
period, 62 sales projects used Great Demo! Discovery, preparation and delivery
methods vs. 9 sales projects where Discovery was deemed insufficient and the
resulting demos were Harbor Tours. Sales projects ranged from approximately
$200K - $1.5M in deal size.
Equally (or more) interesting were the numbers reported for “No
Decision” outcomes: For those sales projects that had a complete Situation
Slide for each key player, No Decisions ran at less than 10%. For sales
projects that had incomplete Situation Slide information No Decision rates were
above 60% (ick).
Forecast Failures and Pipeline Pain
Far too many sales organizations equate “activity” with “progress”. For example, some sales managers track (and
often incent) the “number of demos delivered” as a measure of forecast and
pipeline activity.
In the situation above, sales people were incented to schedule demos (as
many as possible!) as a key indicator of overall pipeline activity – which
resulted in a negative feedback spiral of doing more and more unproductive
demos, resulting in less closed business per demo, causing management to
increase the number of demos per sales person per quarter to try to increase
pipeline. There was much moaning,
whining and gnashing of teeth…
When senior sales management reviewed the data in the situation above,
they made two very interesting process changes:
First, it was mandated that adequate Discovery information be uncovered
prior to scheduling a demo – specifically including review of Situation Slides
prior to agreement to proceed with a demo. (There were some loopholes for
extenuating circumstances, but the gross majority of demos are now preceded by
what is considered adequate Discovery).
Second, sales pipeline measurements were changed – from the “number of
demos scheduled/completed per sales person” (a measure of activity) to the “number
of demos completed per sales person per $ of revenue” – a very clever way of
measuring the effectiveness of Discovery, demo preparation and delivery.
The bottom line? This particular
team will be having one terrific “President’s Club/Sales Kickoff” in a
wonderful location this year!
New Hire Candidates – Where It All
Begins
Are we surprised when we find that
sales and presales people (those already hired) are not particularly strong at
doing Discovery? We shouldn’t be. Most candidate interviews don’t explore the
candidates’ Discovery skills.
Interestingly, we often ask candidates
to deliver a brief presentation to test their ability to present information
clearly and compellingly – we test their ability to “tell”. However, we rarely invest similar energy in
asking candidates to perform a Discovery session of some kind – to evaluate
their ability to “ask”.
No wonder we end up with new hires
that tend to talk first and ask later (if ever…)!
OK, fine. But what about folks already on-board? Here are a few ideas to consider…
Early Adopter vs. Majority: Features vs. Solutions
Early Adopters and Technology Adopters love to talk about features – and
often identify problems themselves that
can be solved, synthesizing solutions from the feature set. They embrace change and are excited about
exploring on their own.
Everyone else – the Majority – is not interested in change, typically,
and needs to feel that a problem is critical before choosing to address it –
they are interested in solutions, not features and functions.
Early Adopters and Technology Adopters are great, as customers, but they
inadvertently train us to skip Discovery.
They simply ask us for a traditional product presentation. We get comfortable “selling” this way and so we
present the same product feature/function overview to Majority prospects – who may
not even realize that they have a
problem – and who then wonder why we are wasting their time…
Majority customers need to have Discovery done, both for our sake – and
for theirs, to help them understand the depth and breadth of their problems.
Provocative Questions – Starting
Discovery
Using provocative questions is a great way to start conversations and
move a discussion into Discovery. A good
provocative question causes your customer to:
-
Rapidly
qualify himself in or out as a reasonable prospect
-
Agree
that there is a problem to solve
-
Open
up to further questions
For example, imagine you sell sales process management/automation
software and are at a conference with piles of prospects present. You join a table for lunch with 8 other
people and everyone introduces themselves briefly. Someone asks you, “What do you do?” Your response can range from boring to
intriguing:
Boring: “We sell sales process
automation software.” (Yawn…)
Typical: “We help sales teams
improve their processes.” (OK thanks, next…)
Provocative: “Have you ever seen a sales team document
their opportunities consistently?” (Not
typically – hmmm, I’m interested…!)
For the provocative option above, a “No” response (often accompanied by
a wry smile or wince) tells you that the prospect has that problem – and the prospect may immediately volunteer more
information, “No, in fact our sales people ‘sandbag’ on deals they are
confident about and have ‘happy ears”’ on far too many opportunities that never
close…!” At this point, you can comfortably
launch into Discovery questions about the team, sales cycles, current processes
and tools, etc.
The key to formulating strong provocative questions is to take a key
indicator or qualitative measurement of what you do and rephrase in the form of
a question.
For example, in the world of demos, I love to ask, “Have you ever seen a
bad software demo?” If the response is
yes (and it often is…), we are off and rolling comfortably into a Discovery
conversation.
“Why” Questions – Uncovering the Drivers
in Discovery
“We need a new system…” says the customer. “Great!” says the sales person, “We’ve got
several possibilities for you…!” And the
discussion then proceeds to explore lists of features and functions, needs and
use cases. This is all wonderful, but
what’s missing?
“Why do you need a new
system?” is a critical question to ask, when appropriate. The answer to this question may change the
entire dynamic of the Discovery discussion and the resulting sales process.
For example, if the customer responds, “Well, we’ve been interested in a
new system for some time…” it may suggest that the customer is not really
serious and that solving the problems inherent in the old system are not
sufficiently important – it is not a Critical Business Issue. This sales opportunity is a good candidate
for a “no decision” outcome.
On the other hand, if the customer responds, “Well, the COO has mandated
implementing a new system to drive down costs and she wants it in place before
we complete an upcoming acquisition…,” then you have identified a Critical
Business Issue (“reduce costs”) and a Critical Event (before the acquisition
takes place). This sales opportunity is
much more likely to end with a completed order.
Burn Victims
“Have you tried to fix this
before?” Answers to this question can
yield interesting and sometimes surprising information.
Customers who tried to address
problems previously and failed are known as “burn victims” – and they tend to
be very careful about subsequent
solutions!
A “Yes” response requires careful
follow-up questions. “What happened?” is
a good starting point. You want to
understand what actions were taken, what tools were purchased, what was
implemented, when this all took place – and what were the outcomes for the
organization and those who were impacted.
If the answer is “No,” your response
could be “Why not?” It might be that the
problem was never big enough to address (but now it is) or that prior solutions
were perceived as insufficient (in what ways?).
What’s in a Name? More Than One Might Expect
The process
of gathering information about customers’ situations is variously labeled
“Discovery”, “Qualification”, “Analysis” and other terms. Interestingly, the name used by your organization may encourage or discourage the
effectiveness of the process.
Consider: “Qualification” is (often) about putting
boundaries around a sales opportunity:
“Is it adequately qualified?”
This may yield a limited set of answers to questions such as:
-
“Does
the customer have a problem – have they admitted ‘pain’?”
-
“Is
there budget allocated?”
-
“Is
there a time-frame in mind?”
-
“Do
we know the pathway to purchase – who will make the decision?”
-
“What
alternatives or competitors is the customer also considering?”
The answers
to these questions tend to focus inwards on getting the deal done for the
vendor.
“Discovery”,
on the other hand, is all about exploration and suggests images of uncharted
waters, novel vistas, new viewpoints and ideas.
Discovery is a process of asking questions – that may lead to more
questions. It should be perceived as an
“Archimedean Spiral” of exploration, covering more and more territory (for
those who are inclined, here’s the Wikipedia reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedean_spiral).
One nearly
consistent attribute of very successful sales people (those who consistently
make or exceed their numbers and are a pleasure, generally, to work with…) is
their ability to perform broad and deep discovery. They ask “Why, who, when, where, what, and
how” questions. They plumb for details
and search for high-level drivers. To
paraphrase a famous outdoors equipment company (The North Face), they never
stop exploring.
Interestingly,
people who are known as Discoverers or Explorers are often perceived as heroes
– those who opened new worlds or brought new knowledge to light: Captain James Cook, Louis Pasteur, Madame
Curie, Captain James T. Kirk (who was also known to boldly discover splitting
infinitives…). Contrariwise, the list of
heroic people who were known for qualifying or putting boundaries around things
may be much shorter!
A Few Stunningly Awful Analogies
Presenting a demo to a customer without performing any Discovery is
like:
-
A
doctor prescribing before doing diagnosis… (bad)
-
A
surgeon cutting random openings before doing diagnosis… (really bad)
-
Getting
in one’s car and driving with no destination in mind… (clueless)
-
Punching-in
random telephone numbers in hopes of getting connected to a specific person…
(really clueless)
-
Presenting
a 62 slide product and technology presentation on the 27 modules of a vendor’s
offering, preceded by a 14 slide corporate overview (after spending 10 minutes
introducing the vendor’s team and their individual backgrounds)… (completely
clueless – and all too common!)
Other analogies? Let me know…!
More Discovery – Less Demo
The phrase “less is more” is often applied to Great Demo! methodology – and
refers to the idea that demonstrating exactly what is needed for a customer’s
specific situation yields crisper, shorter and much more successful demos.
Interestingly, with respect to Discovery, one might say that “more requires less” – meaning that the more
Discovery that is done with the customer, the shorter the resulting demos will
need to be to secure the business.
Copyright © 2012 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.
