😵 Is the Disco Call Dead? 😵
A prospect asks, "why do I have to talk to sales? Can't I see a demo?" We may not believe it, but our buyers are pissed and wondering why buying a product or service has to be so hard.
The best sales reps understand “discovery” is a journey from lead to qualified prospect to customer. It's ongoing and never complete after a single sales meeting.
But, too many of us as leaders or frontline contributors treat qualification and discovery as a standalone sales stage and fail to uncover other pain points or “jobs to be done” as more stakeholders enter the fold.
Worse yet, Gartner research shows sellers only get 5% of the total customer's time in the B2B sales journey.
Translation? Let's kill the disco call with our qualifying questions and let our buyers qualify themselves. Our time with customers and prospects is precious.
Here's how we can do it while still delivering value:
Give to get
No matter what we sell – can we turn this old-school concept on its head and be the first to give? Instead of asking our prospects to give first with form fills, paywalls, and answers to 20 discovery questions, could we provide the following:
- Access to customer references
- Deliverables like assessments, benchmarks, research, or surveys
- Free trial periods
- Interactive (or group) product demos
- Money-back guarantees
Imagine if our buyer says yes and follows through. We have a qualified prospect who took us up on our offer, committed to one or more of the bullets listed above, and will give back and share more. Those who don't follow through aren't qualified, and we've saved ourselves wasted effort.
When we give first, we control the next step – learning about our prospect's business, current challenges, and how they think this product or service will help them. We turn into a guide at that point with less skepticism.
As we see in the chart from Gartner below, it's essential to keep this “give to get” concept if we're working with Millennial buyers:
Remember the business value hierarchy
Discovery is fluid. If we kill the standalone “disco” call, it's nice to reference last week's issue, where we explored the “business value hierarchy.”
By now, we all know multiple stakeholders (five to ten is common) are needed to sign off on a deal. Make sure we deliver value in each stakeholder's unique language:
- For the C-Suite, it's making money
- Finance, GMs, and P&L leaders, it's saving money
- Second-line or third-line execs, it's saving time
- HR or Legal, it's minimizing risk
- IT, it's security and data protection
- End-users or practitioners, it's the product or service
Nixing the disco call only means our discovery efforts should intensify as we approach the finish line. Get our buyers through the early sales stages quickly, so we can thrive more effectively when it counts – building the value prop and ROI, how we're different, and negotiating a fair price with reasonable terms.
