Sales Tip 1869: The 3 Best Discovery Questions – Krysten Conner

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Krysten Conner.Krysten started her journey in sales after working as a History teacher & in a family business. After making the leap to tech sales, she quickly became an enterprise AE at companies including Tableau, Outreach & Salesforce.

Krysten now creates resources for other AE’s in their journey to becoming top performers. Here she is:

Kristen Conner: One of the biggest things that’s difficult about discovery is that there’s a tension immediately on the call because the buyer and seller both want to know information, but they want to know different things. When we craft a good buying experience, buyers want to work with us. We need to have some sort of framework. That’s why I came up with what I call the EMT framework for discovery. And I think of it that way because prospects are in pain, and when people are in pain, they need an emt. So, so what is emt? E is excavate their pain. We want to not only uncover that surface level pain, but we want to act like an excavator and dig deep, get that second and third level pain and the impact that that’s causing to the business. The M stands for match.

We want to match their urgency. Are they coming to this call with a problem they needed solved six months ago or are they in education mode? Understanding that helps buyers and sellers know how to proceed from there and then t is teach them to buy. Buyers are experts in how to do. They are not experts in how to buy our stuff. So we have to teach them to buy. We want to excavate their pain with what I call the menu of pain. Nobody likes essay questions. Everybody would prefer multiple choice, so we give them multiple choice.

And that sounds like this. Hey, Mary, it’s good to meet you. Glad we got a chance to be on the call today. I talk with VPs in this industry all day long and I find that they talk about heartburn with three things. Problem A, problem B, problem C, how much of that sounds like your world and what did I miss? When we outline problem, problem A, B and C, and that sounds familiar to them, we earn some credibility. And then when we say, what did I miss? We give them a chance to do what humans love to do, which is correct other people. And when they correct us, that’s when we start to hear that second and third level pain that we can start to dig a little deeper on. And this is where sellers start to get happy ears because we hear like, oh, problem I can solve.

And so we sometimes we stop asking questions, but we miss the chance to actually excavate, to actually go a little deeper, to ask second and third level discovery questions. Those questions sound like how many other teams in the company is this affecting? What ripple effects are happening across the business because of this issue? When your CFO gets on a call and does an all hands, where does this problem stack rank? How does this stack up with what the CEO is emphasizing in every call they have? When we broaden out those questions, not just around the features and functions of our product, but just understanding more about the impact that those problems are actually causing, that’s where the gold is and that’s the whole point of excavation, is to get to gold. We want to understand how urgent is this problem that they’re trying to solve and that helps both of us. So matching their urgency sounds like find that. Typically when folks take these calls, they come for a couple of reasons. They’re in education mode. They just want to know what’s out there. They have a big problem that they needed solved.

Frankly, they needed it solved six months ago and they’re hoping we could help with with that. The last one is they’ve got some pain in the organization. They probably need to do something about it in the next 12 months. But if it doesn’t get fixed right away, it’s not that big a deal. I’m just curious where you’d put yourself on that spectrum. And I’m asking because I never want to be the one that chases anything. I don’t want to blow up your inbox and then they’ll put themselves on that spectrum. That allows us to be real and give them an opt out.

That way we don’t open a deal for something that’s not really a deal. It was just education. But it also allows us to move very quickly. If they want to move quickly. It helps everybody on that call. When we match their urgency. Then we say, Mary, thanks so much for going into that. It sounds like X, Y and Z is happening and the impact of that is this.

Do I have that about right? And what did I miss? And then once they’ve confirmed that that’s actually what we heard, then we tell them a little about ourselves, but only in the context of what is relevant to the questions they’ve given us. We don’t start going in autopilot and give them the standard spiel. We tailor what we’re going to say and the little bit that we’re going to show based on what they said. As we’re ending the call, we want to get to that T of emt. We want to teach them to buy. Buyers are experts in how to do their jobs. They are not experts in how to buy our stuff. So we want to guide them.

What that sounds like is another T word, which is typically everybody wants to know what everybody else is doing. When we look at something on Amazon, it will say, hey, folks that looked at this also bought this or they also looked at this. That’s because we want to know how other people do things. It feels safer to us. So we can say, okay, Mary, it sounds like you have a problem that we may be able to help with. Typically what comes next is we get another VP on the call, we do a custom demo, or we bring in the IT person to understand how we work with integrations. Whatever the options are for our next steps, we give them some multiple choice. That way the burden is not on them to think of what comes next.

They can just pick and then we can go from there. And that should happen not just at the end of a discovery call. That should happen at the end of every call. In a sales process, typically what comes next is A, B or C. And they can choose their own adventure because we’re guiding them through every step of that buying process.

Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Krysten, to grab her free discovery resource & to sign up for her newsletter, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1869. Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!