Many sales and presales practitioners say they are skilled at doing Discovery – but are they? Here’s a simple method to assess, based on five levels of increasing proficiency:<\/p>\r\n
Let’s explore each of these briefly…<\/p>\r\n
Level 1<\/strong><\/p>\r\n When doing Discovery, if your presales or salespeople simply uncover “Pain” and go no further, then they are novices.<\/p>\r\n For example, the prospect offers, “Our current process is manual…”Many vendors leap to propose a solution at this point – let’s call this Level 1 Discovery. <\/p>\r\n Basic – and clearly insufficient…!<\/p>\r\n Level 2<\/strong><\/p>\r\n Vendor representatives with slightly deeper Discovery skills ask follow-up questions to explore the pain more deeply. <\/p>\r\n Example:<\/p>\r\n This shows a step up in skills attainment – Level 2.The pain is a bit deeper and the impact is beginning to be understood, but we can go (much) further…<\/p>\r\n Level 3<\/strong><\/p>\r\n Practitioners at Level 3 seek to understand more about the impact of the pain on the immediate and extended prospect organization – let’s continue the conversation:<\/p>\r\n This conversation continues, exploring the content of the reports, how they are consumed, the nature of the problems, how the user population is impacted, and how addressing the process impacts the prospect’s goals and objectives.<\/p>\r\n This discussion broadens and deepens the exploration of the pain and seeks to look beyond the workflow.Who else is impacted and in which departments?Is this a local pain or something that affects the organization more extensively?<\/p>\r\n Level 3 is all about understanding impact<\/em>. <\/p>\r\n Where can we go from here?To uncover value!<\/p>\r\n Level 4<\/strong><\/p>\r\n At Level 4, presales and salespeople quantify<\/em> the pain, using the prospect’s own numbers. <\/p>\r\n For example:<\/p>\r\n Now we have a tangible Delta of value – the difference between the prospect’s current state and their desired future state – of 4.5 days.Our vendor should further explore this by asking how often the reports are generated, how often errors occur (and what happens when they do) and how much time is consumed by the team creating these reports. <\/p>\r\n The answers to these questions might result in the following exchange:<\/p>\r\n Level 4 skills are all about uncovering value.<\/em><\/p>\r\n Can we do better than this?Absolutely…! <\/p>\r\n Level 5<\/strong><\/p>\r\n Practitioners at Level 5 reengineer<\/em> the prospect’ vision of a solution. <\/p>\r\n In our conversation from above, our vendor asks the prospect to describe or share an example of the report currently used.After viewing the report, the vendor realizes that it is lacking certain capabilities or possibilities, and explores these with the prospect:<\/p>\r\n Our vendor has now proposed an improved version of the report – and the prospect has agreed this would be better.This is one example of Vision Reengineering – going beyond the prospect’s initial vision of a solution. <\/p>\r\n The ability to execute this kind of Vision Reengineering is a Level 5 skill. <\/p>\r\n Level 5 with a Differentiating Twist<\/strong><\/p>\r\n Vision Reengineering is also<\/em> an opportunity to outflank competition. <\/p>\r\n In our example conversation, our vendor realizes that he\/she has a relevant capability that is not matched by the competition and introduces it as follows:<\/p>\r\n Here, our vendor rep has introduced the alert-based capability – a key differentiator – and turned it into a Specific Capability that the prospect wants and expects in a solution. <\/p>\r\n The folks at Level 5 not only reengineer vision but also competitively outflank.<\/p>\r\n 5 Skill Levels for Doing Discovery<\/strong><\/p>\r\n Recapping:<\/p>\r\n These 5 levels represent a simple method of assessing the state of your team’s Discovery skills.Note that there are many other skills not addressed in this simple ranking system, including managing timing and flow, probing methods, workflow analysis, going beyond the workflow, dealing with “burn victims”, starting Discovery, “Why” questions, uniqueness, and many more.(Contact us<\/a> if you would like to discuss.)<\/p>\r\n What do you use to assess your<\/em> team’s Discovery skills?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many sales and presales practitioners say they are skilled at doing Discovery \u2013 but are they? Here\u2019s a simple method to assess, based on five levels of increasing proficiency:<\/p>\n Level 1: Uncovers statements of pain.\r\n
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\nLevel 2: Uncovers …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6517,"featured_media":333287,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,14,85],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983328"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6517"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=983328"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":983675,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983328\/revisions\/983675"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=983328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=983328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=983328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}