I recommend every rep build out 2-3 Discovery Trees – AKA a flow that ensures you always drive to deep business problems, not process problems.
Here’s an example of one tree we use at 30MPC when selling sponsorships, including questions you can ask to navigate each level of the tree.
Let’s say you’ve set an agenda on a first discovery call. Two easy ways to map the current state are to ask:
- Ask why they took the call → About 50% of the time, they’ll bring you right to the thing they want to accomplish. Especially if it’s inbound.
- For everyone else, use typically language → “Typically when talking to VPs of marketing, they’re really focused on increasing brand awareness and credibility, or *capturing* that awareness through demand generation. Which is it for you?”
Let’s say they finally tell us that it’s an awareness thing (ie: people don’t know who they are). Who cares? We need to turn that into a problem:
My path to turn a current state into a problem are:
- First, bucket the problem (creds: KD on ep 134) → “Is the focus on awareness because you feel like there are deals where they don’t even know to reach out to you <or> you feel like you have plenty of deals, but lose them because people don’t know who you are?”
- Then, get a story about the problem (creds: Charles Muhlbauer on ep 25) → If they say they’re losing deals they can’t see… all you have to do is ask: “when was the moment you realized that was a problem?”
You will almost always get a story in return about how they got to a deal too late and never even got a shot on goal.
But it’s not enough to stop at a problem. You need to figure out why that problem is bigger than any other problem in their business…
Ah, the lovely impact questions. AKA: How do you ask about someone missing a revenue target without them hanging up on you.
Last but not least, this is where the humbling disclaimer comes in (also a Muhlbauer special). You’re gonna call out the uncomfortable nature of the question, which might sound like this:
“I guess this is a somewhat awkward question… but my guess is this has to be part of the plan to hit the board goal?”
From there, we’ll tell a story about how we help other CMOs solve the whole awareness problem. See, we told you all we weren’t gonna stop selling 😃
