When you make a sales call

When you make a sales call, you set an agenda at the beginning, and you preview the “ask” you are going to make at the conclusion of that sales call, gaining agreement to the agenda before you start. 

Discovery is no longer about learning about your client or trying to “diagnose” their pain. Discovery is about helping them discover something about themselves and their business. 

For decades, discovery has been about trying to find some dissatisfaction that you can grab hold of to create a compelling case for change. This dissatisfaction was what you used to move your client to action, and solving it was done through your solution. 

The shift here is more than subtle, and it is a critical skill set now. Now, instead of asking questions to discover something yourself, you are asking questions to help your client discover something that will cause them to change. 

“How do you ensure that the people that work for you are spending the appropriate amount of time on the highest value outcomes they need, and how do you presently measure that?” 

Here’s my guess. The person being asked this question has no idea how much time their people spend on the highest value outcomes, and now suspects that many of their people have no idea what those outcomes are. Other than answering “results” to the last question, they have no way of measuring this. 

The intention of my question was to help the person I asked this question to to discover that they don’t know something that they should know, and potentially something that would change their results and the results of their team. This is a consultative question, and it is one that exposes a gap. That makes it better than, “What keeps you up at night?”