Clip: Debe Rapson walks through her sales discovery process

Clip from Episode 11 featuring: Debe Rapson of Demandbase:

I always try to start in asking general questions that aren’t going to threaten people or make them more uncomfortable right. So I want to ease right into it. So I want to understand a little bit about how their marketing organizations, so I sell marketing technology, so how their organization is structured, what are the different goals that they are looking to achieve in supporting the business? I typically ask broad based questions about their business. What is the company, where are they trying to grow their revenue, what are the key initiatives that the sea-level folks are pushing forward in the incoming year etc.? So starting broad and then narrowing into what are their challenges, and what are their goals and I typically like to ask the same question a little bit differently, maybe 3 or 4 times because when I do I find that I get a different answer and so I typically do that around their challenges, and their pain points and what’s really hurting, what’s really keeping them up at night if you will in a less canned way than that, but I think it’s really valuable to go deep and to ask those questions a little bit different way, because it nudges additional information out of them, and then I like to very often to different areas, probing deeper around some of those pain points and how they support the business, what is going to make them look good, how do they measure their success. Those types of things. My first discovery call is never any less than an hour where I’m just probing and asking questions, and giving a little nugget here and there so that I’m keeping them engaged and feel like they are getting something out of it, but really focusing on their story.

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