Discovering Outcomes

We have spent the past three posts talking about discovery, and I would like to continue the series as it is such a vast topic that influences so much of the sales cycle.

It is human nature to want to be one of two things; either a trendsetter, or risk averse. Being a trendsetter means that you are a tastemaker and others are following your choices. Being risk averse means that you would like to know the outcome of everything before trying it. The drive to be perceived as a trendsetter is strong but it is very heavily related to personal goals and visible manifestations of social currency like style and taste. This means that when it comes to a business setting, this drive can become a bit more muted. At the same time, risk aversion becomes more dominant in business settings because people’s careers are held dearly, and the potential of losing face, or losing status, or even losing a job is seen as very traumatic, and rightfully so. For these reasons and others, risk aversion becomes a dominant factor in decision making in the business world.

The focus should be on the buyer’s current situation, the status quo, the buyer’s desired outcomes, and the change to the status quo. It should have nothing to do with solutions and how your product will get them where they want to go. In discovery, it is the salesperson’s job to get the client to paint a picture, in their own mind, of where they want to be. In order to complete this task, we want the buyer to describe their situation in their own terms, describe how that situation affects them, describe what that means for the business, and describe what the ideal outcome looks like and how much that is worth to them. Notice that nowhere in the discovery description did we discuss how to solve the problem, and the details of the journey, we just helped the buyer describe the journey. The how-to will come later.

The reason the how-to comes later is because if we try to understand the situation, and the problem, and present the solution all at once, we run into a credibility problem. As you learn about a complicated problem, moving straight into a solution explanation that happens to solve all the points of the complicated problem, just does not seem probable. Either your solution is a one size fits all, which is perceived as less desirable to buyers, or it is customizable to their exact needs, which would mean you would have to take time to put together a solution that works for what they told you. Additionally, as we have discussed in other posts, as soon as you move to a discussion that includes the solution, you move the buyer from a collaborative position where they are working with you to build a vision of the desired outcome, to an adversarial position where they are sitting in judgment of the solutions. This is why it is so important to spend this learning and insight sharing time talking about the situations, and the problems, and the value and the outcomes, but leaving the solutions off the table.

So, all of this leaves the question; how do we get from situation and problem, to desired outcome, without traveling through the solution that bridges the gap? And, how do we do it in a collaborative way where we are positioning the client to drive the conversation?

It is important to be aware of the psychological, and emotional burden that you are placing on the client throughout the process. Look for signs of stress, annoyance, and mental laziness. These all indicate that the buyer is not in the mood to think deeply about problems, and / or not in the mood to share the answers with you. Seeing signs like this should indicate to you that you need to introduce a change of pace to the meeting. Whether it is moving back to easy situational questions, or presenting an insight, or even a teaser about your products that they had been asking to see, or it could even mean dropping the business conversation completely, and trying to move to a lighter topic.

Being aware of the buyer’s mental state is incredibly important and that is one of the reasons that the next step here is about outcomes. As the buyer starts to think about the problems caused by the situation, you can start to invite them to opine on their theories about what it does to the business and how the bottom line of their business unit and the overall company are affected by those problems. From there, it is not much of a leap to start to discuss desired outcomes. The buyer is encouraged to envision a world in which their problems are fixed, and where they don’t have to deal with the problems of the status quo anymore or the business implications of those problems. Since you have already eased them into the discussion, they have been primed to move into a state of mind that is more conducive to answering questions like these, and when done right, their comfort level with the asker of the questions allows them to move into more psychologically and emotionally burdensome answers without developing a strong negative association with the asker. In addition, the nature of these questions, allowing them to think about desired outcomes is inherently hopeful, as opposed to questions more focused on problems.

Discovery cannot be completely about pain and problems. If it is, your client will always associate you with negative feelings, and eventually they will find a reason to stop talking to you. The needs/ payoff questions that we discussed in my post on SPIN Selling on November 21st are designed to understand value, and the lens through which that works is a lens where the buyer is encouraged to envision a world in which their problems are fixed, and where they don’t have to deal with the problems of the status quo anymore. This line of questioning builds directly off the implication questions, and asks the buyer to envision the desired outcome and to start placing a value on it. If your questions can push the buyer to talk about this desired outcome state, you can then start to establish the value of that state, and then, conversely, the negative value associated with the status quo state.

Remember that discovery is not about selling. It is not about solving problems, and it is certainly not about your solutions. Your first job in discovery is to earn enough license and allowance from the client that they are not constantly expecting you to put on a demo like every other seller. Your goal is to derail their idea of a pitch, and turn it into your mutual idea of a business conversation. Sometimes that means giving them a little bit of what they want, or a teaser, but from there, it is important to move to conversation and collaboration. After you have accomplished earning that allowance, the next big job in discovery is to position the questions so that the buyer spends their time comparing the problematic and boring status quo with an exciting, and hopeful desired outcome. Again, none of this has anything to do with solutions, it has to do with their status quo, and their vision for the future.