Show Up and Throw Up: Discovery process killers..

Most sales teams have a listening problem. And boy do they love to tell the prospect all the details about their product. That approach seldom works... Here's my recommendation for the discovery process do's and don'ts.. and the killers!!

Discovery process killers: For your discovery session to be successful, you have to take care of these things proactively.

1. Team mates who can't shut up.The experts on your team who want to prove themselves. Make a deal with them, they will only talk in reference to a related client problem we have solved. No deep end technology of solutions discussions, please! 
2. Develop and agree upon the "shut up" signal. This is critical rule; It should be well publicized to the sales team, that non adherence to the rule should have disastrous consequences. My rule is, I want my team mates to look at me once each minute to get my clues. 
3. Jumping to conclusions; Don't assume The process could take several sessions. It could take  months across several client players, if you include ROI in the process.
4. Have umbrella questions ready: Every time we get a point in meeting when there's uncomfortable moment. Have some umbrella questions. 2-3 of them. For example, "can you give me another example". OR "You mentioned earlier this thing, can you help me understand a little more". If nothing else, ask the killer sales questions. 

Have a focus to understand the business: See the discovery process as a science project. Get their facts clear.. Make sure you can articulate, Why would they buy from me? Focus on "why buy at all" and more importantly "why now"? Reaffirm your thoughts with the client..

Avoid product talk as much as possible: Because once you start with your product talk you are in selling mode.. Can't do that too early... The client's mental door shuts down, or the perspective changes significantly after that. Also if the client brings up "Tell me what your product does" too early, have a way to get out of that quickly. You could say things like.. Before I make recommendation. , I need to understand business problems a little more.

Carefully answer the "tell me a little about your company" question: Another key aspect of opening is when they ask "tell me  little about your company". Tell them a value proposition related to their industry, like for example I'd say for my current product... "We are a consumer predictive analytics company that helps healthcare companies like yours, better market health plans to their existing and prospective members, leading to higher member satisfaction and reduced churn. Our founders were the core team for Yahoo!'s analytics products and they identified a need for enterprises to want to provide it's consumers a similar buying experience as that what Yahoo! did for millions of users. Hence they started InsightsOne". Versus "We are a big data predictive analytics silicon valley startup providing targeting, recommendations and churn predictions for enterprises". Focus on why you do what you, and the uniqueness in the how, versus company profile which can potentially distract the client with biases. Then quickly get back to discovery. 

Be prepared to sell them on value of investing time in the discovery: That shows you are unique. Selling why they should invest time with you. Paint them a vision of how you walked a client through the process and the end outcome. Ask with the problem areas identified at other clients, if they have similar situation.

Happy Selling :-)