You may have heard it said that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. In the 21st century, this dogma extends beyond face-to-face conversations and into the virtual communication that comprises inside sales.
As such, successful modern sellers are able to kick off relationships with productive, valuable conversations, setting the tone for an entire deal. Most commonly, that first impression is the discovery call. The first date of a sale, it gives your potential buyer the chance to feel out so much more than just your product. They’ll look for cues to see how much research you did, how much you’re willing to listen, and ultimately, how genuine you are.
All this said – it’s not a call to take lightly. On the flip side, adeptly uncovering a prospect’s pain points on a business, financial, and personal level is a nuanced skill that A+ reps excel at. Today, we’re joined by Milena Flament to discuss how you can level up your discovery calls and uncover pain successfully:
Transcript
Hey, it’s Milena Flament here at Salesloft. I’m one of the sales managers here. Today I want to talk to you about the importance of discovery calls for the sales team, particularly as the discovery pertains to pain. This is one of the most valuable lessons I learned from one of our sales leaders here, Kyle Martin, so Kyle, thank you so much and I hope everybody out there gets as much value as I did from this. The discovery call is a crucial part of a sales rep’s repertoire because it opens up the business relationship, right? It also helps to understand whether there might be a fit between what your company offers and the challenges that your potential client is suffering from.
So today, I want to share three focal points of the discovery call that will help you uncover the prospect’s pain and jump-start a great relationship with a prospect that’s not going to be founded on the weather, but rather how you’re going to help them solve their business challenges.
The first level of pain that we like to talk about, which is typically the easiest thing to talk about, are the general business challenges that your prospect might be suffering from. Generally speaking, these actually can be just a symptom of the problem, rather than the root of the problem. For example, one of the common challenges that Salesloft helps to solve is when reps are overwhelmed by manual tasks. Manual tasks can be a symptom of the inability to hit quota. By gathering a sense of what their general business challenges are, you’ll be very well set up to understand specifics later. I have seen the most successful reps actually show a list of the most common challenges that their business helps to solve for most of their clients. And then the buyer then has to look at that list, and think about which of those challenges resonate the most with him or her. Other great questions to ask in this part of the discovery include, hey can you please share some examples of that? Or even something as simple as, how so?
Now that we’ve established the business challenges, it’s critical that we quantify these problems by understanding what their Level Two, or financial pain is. This is not impossible to get, although it’s a little bit harder than getting the business pain. One thing you can do is to highlight how expensive the status quo is and what it’s costing them today. The other thing that you can do is ask the prospect, hey, if we could help solve challenges A, B, C, from what you learned earlier on in the business challenges, how could that impact their expenses, or how could that impact their sales? How can we minimize those expenses or maximize those sales? Some of the questions you can use to uncover the Level Two financial pain include, so what do you think that’s costing you, or what would you think the impact would be if we did X to Y? Or finally, what is your average sales price? If we could help you close one more deal, the solution especially pays for itself. Questions like these put a price tag on the business challenges, and help to justify the investment in your solution earlier on. So you now have a much better understanding of what the business pains are, as well as what the financial pains are.
The last step in truly getting a full picture of the pain, and I would argue this is the hardest thing to ask for, is the Level Three pain, which is that personal pain. The personal pain is where you take a stab at understanding how buying or not buying your solution is going to impact the buyer as a person, not the company that he or she works for. It will give you a sense of how much skin they have in the game and how serious they are about truly evaluating your solution. So if you decide to advance a conversation or part as friends, you’ll feel confident in either decision. I hope this video was helpful for you to help uncover the three levels of pain that we just discussed, so you can help your buyer get to a decision that they’re excited about as quickly as possible, so that ultimately you can get to your quota regularly, each month, each quarter, and each year. So guys, thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to drop them below.
Want to learn more about the intricacies and keys to success of each and every discovery call? Download the full Discovery Call Benchmark Report for free:
