Does Your Discovery Phase Deliver Value to Your Customers?

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As a former “buy side” C-level executive, I believe one of the primary goals of the discovery phase of a sales process should be to deliver value to the buyer. Unfortunately, many sales people believe discovery phase conversations are all about probing and asking questions and learning. In other words, the discovery phase is designed to benefit the sales person. This disconnect during the early sales stage will likely manifest itself in longer sales cycles or worse yet, stalled deals.

The Customer’s “Discovery Phase”

Most B2B sales people I work with are surprised to hear that the customer has their own discovery phase. Buyers follow a prescriptive step by step process for buying, just like sellers follow for selling. One of the most important steps for both sides in the buying-selling process is the discovery phase. Each party must pass through this early stage gate in their respective processes in order to continue down the path to consummating a transaction.

Interestingly, buyers and sellers are both attempting to identify needs and requirements during the discovery phase. The seller wants to understand what the customer is trying to achieve and how this project relates to the attainment of their goals. On the other hand, the buyer, especially the executive-level buyer, is trying to determine if they need to spend any more time with the seller, and if they decide to move ahead, what resource requirements will be thrust on their organization in terms of time and money. After all, time and money are scarce resources that are highly-protected by executive-level buyers. If the potential financial value is compelling, the executive-level buyer will agree to spend more time with the seller and allocate scarce resources.

During the discovery phase, the executive-level buyer needs to understand the possibilities for positive financial impact on their organization. These possibilities don’t have to be accurate to ten decimal points; they just need to provide a range of potential magnitude on the KPI metrics of the customer or the project ROI. This is hard for the sales person to deliver during the discovery phase conversation since there is a lot more work to do (and questions to ask) before refining the quantification of value. But the best sales people get it done by leveraging their pre-call preparation and customer-specific due diligence.

Checklist for Making the Discovery Phase Valuable for the Customer

Here’s a checklist of questions to answer during pre-call preparations to help provide value to your customers during discovery conversations:

. What are the customer’s priority KPIs? (You should try to determine this BEFORE discovery conversations and validate in-person.)

. How are those priority KPIs trending (up or down)? What is the customer’s financial condition?

. Which KPIs will your solution impact? (The more the better, hopefully on both the Income Statement as well as the Balance Sheet.)

. By what financial magnitude have you impacted those priority KPIs at other customers? What customer impact reference stories can you tell that quantify the financial impact of your solutions?

. What customer impact reference stories can you tell that demonstrate a hard financial project ROI?

– See more at: http://fastpartners.com/financialselling/2014/04/17/47-does-your-discovery-phase-deliver-value-to-your-customers#sthash.bftxZRbj.dpuf

Jack Dean
As co-founder of FASTpartners LLC, Jack brings extensive technology buying experience as a Fortune500 Chief Financial Officer to the B2B technology sales training industry.He has facilitated client-sponsored business acumen training for 15,000 B2B technology sellers representing 150 global technology companies.Participants in Jack’s business acumen training have produced directly-attributed revenue of over $1 billion (in the 3 months after training) and training engagement ROIs averaging 500%.

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