My last two posts describe the importance of thorough discovery and what good discovery looks like. See them here and here. I spend a lot of time with sales teams helping them develop the skills and processes to conduct effective discovery.
While it can be a rather complex undertaking, to boil it down (at the risk of over-simplifying), consultative sellers require three things during the discovery stage of their sales process: access, insights and commitments. Let’s take them one at a time.
1. Access: Sellers need to be talking with the right people; those who make or influence the decision to buy. In more complex deals with many decision stakeholders it can be a challenge getting to all of them. At the very least sellers need access to a “proxy” (Advocate, Champion, Mobilizer) who has enough influence to do some of this work on their behalf.
2. Insights: The equation is simple; no access = no insight. That’s why access comes first. The question is what do we do with the access once we gain it? Do we just passively acquiesce to the prospect’s notion of what they need so we can deliver a quote? I hope not. We should be guiding the conversation, probing to get a compete understanding of the prospect’s situation and issues, the consequences to them and their business, and other important insights (urgency, alternative solutions, decision process and key stakeholders, ability to pay, etc.) that will ultimately determine whether they buy and what they buy. And in modern selling, insights are a two-way street. The seller is providing insights to the buyer, based on his or her own knowledge and experience, that can influence or even change how the buyer is thinking about their challenge.
3. Commitments: None of this matters much if the seller can’t gain the necessary commitments from key stakeholders to move forward in a direction favorable to her or him. The seller’s sales process should include the commitments needed to advance the deal through each stage of the entire process. We need buyers to first make the commitments, then follow through and actually do them. This requires controlling the process and holding buyers accountable for their part in advancing their opportunity for improvement.
I see access, insights and commitments as the big three categories sellers must master to be truly consultative. Obviously, there’s a lot more detail under each.
How is your team doing in regard to these?
