Getting out of the script for more effective Gap Selling (Keenan, Author of Gap Selling)

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1. 3:21

   Okay. When you do that, that then gives you a compass to ask problem-centric questions like I just told you before. You fill that out. You memorize that. That is going to be your talk track and your compass to having business dialogue as opposed to product dialogue. Okay. And the last one, stop using BAM. Just cut it out. “Stop asking if they have budget.” Stop asking if they're the authority. Stop asking what the need is. Stop asking when they're looking to get this done. You look like a clown. Cut it out. So I want to run a scenario by you. I recently started a new job and I had like one of my first discovery calls with somebody.

   In Discovery question design

2. 7:30

   So this is what you should have done. So you should, first off, everybody's message here was don't get caught in a script. The mere fact that he told you all of that information, you either assumed it or just moved past it to get to the script. Well, what I really like to do is before I do this and this and this, I'd like to see what you'd like to get out of the call. That's a script, “dog. So once you did that script, first don't do the script. I gave you the way to handle it before.” He gave the information. You should have jumped right when he started talking. Okay. Number two, once you did find yourself down that script and he started asking about SLAs, et cetera, you could have stopped and said, Tommy, we do have an SLA, but I find it interesting. That's the very first question you asked. Could you walk me through what's behind that and what you're

   In Call scripts and talk tracks

3. 8:43

   they lost X amount of billings that they weren't expecting, or they spent so much time trying to get it back up that they lost billing and they couldn't bill. So they lost time to cash because not only did they lose the billing, but it took them a while to figure out who they had to bill, blah, blah, blah. So then that gives you the conversation, right? So let's talk about this billing piece. How are you guys doing it today? Like, let's forget about this. How are you doing “How much do you think you're losing? Like it was a natural move back to the business” problem, right? So Keenan, I'm curious because naturally they're going to have questions for us and some of them will be valid questions and they probably want to know a little bit about how we can solve their problems. And so are you withholding how you could potentially solve the problems until you go all the way 20 minutes deep into understanding the deep impact of those

   In Cost of inaction

4. 9:41

   help you. I don't know what the problem is. Like people, look, I have this happen all the time. People come up to me and say, Keenan, I need your advice, man. You know, my wife and I were fighting all the time. My husband and I were fighting all the time. I really know what I need to do. Can you help me out? Like, I think I need to get divorced. What do you think? And you know what my answer is every time? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what you “should do. Tell me what's going on. Why are you guys fighting? How long have you been fighting?” What have you done to fix it in the past? How did that work out? It ends up being a long conversation so I can truly understand where you are, what you've done, how you got here, what the root causes are, how it's impacted. What you actually want to get out of it. It's like a gap sell.

   In Discovery question design

5. 13:06

   Customer sat addition of new attorneys, day sales outstanding. You see what I'm saying? And that you just have to understand what that nuisance is, my man. Like the key here is you use the word nuisance. You have to define that. You cannot just accept that as a term. What is a nuisance about and how big is the nuisance? “And you'll determine whether or not it's worth paying for your product.” So you talked about in that scenario that I I botched the definition of the term, like when the guy said we were more buttoned up at a different firm and you were like, boom, Nick, there's your big red circle of something you've got to dig into. Can you talk about like how you identify what those are like?

   In Problem and use-case fit

6. 15:48

   And the last part of the pick is bringing them back to the root causes, right? And one thing you always say is, you always say like, hey, don't ask people to self-diagnose. So can you tell me more about what I should be doing instead? So once you find the problem, right, and you know they're losing all these billable hours, “then you ask process questions.” This is where process questions come in. I love process questions after the problem questions. So you admit this and say, sorry, tell me a little bit about how the team is billing hours now. And then I get more, this is why understanding the business is important. Then I'd listen to you for a while and based on what you said, I might ask more questions or I might say, okay, that makes sense.

   In Buying process discovery

7. 16:43

   do you believe that your attorneys probably only capture that 50% of the time? You see what I'm doing? I'm asking process questions because process or tool questions, because those give me the root causes. And then when the buyer says, yeah, I'm pretty sure only 50% do it because it's only 10 minutes right now. It takes too long. “So I would say, how would they capture that normally?” And they would explain it. It's probably cumbersome and difficult where they're supposed to go into their app, but they know the guy they just had on for an hour is now, the other guy's coming an hour and they just, it's not worth it to them to go into the, do this and do that. So they just let it go. And then if your product is simply a button on their phone, what makes that process to capture that 10 minutes is a far less cumbersome.

   In Discovery question design

8. 17:05

   It's probably cumbersome and difficult where they're supposed to go into their app, but they know the guy they just had on for an hour is now, the other guy's coming an hour and they just, it's not worth it to them to go into the, do this and do that. So they just let it go. And then if your product is simply a button on their phone, what makes that process to capture that 10 minutes is a far less cumbersome. You see what I'm saying? “Then you show them why you'll capture that now.” Root cause, interruptions for 10 minute calls, we bill in 10 minute increments, but they just pass it on because it's stuck between two big ones. Wait, you can capture that in one step. Oh my God. You see what I did there guys? Yeah. Root cause is how you demonstrate your product, but you've got to ask process questions to dig into how they're doing the things today that are causing the problems and then show how you fix it.

   In Mechanism-led messaging

9. 17:05

   It's probably cumbersome and difficult where they're supposed to go into their app, but they know the guy they just had on for an hour is now, the other guy's coming an hour and they just, it's not worth it to them to go into the, do this and do that. So they just let it go. And then if your product is simply a button on their phone, what makes that process to capture that 10 minutes is a far less cumbersome. You see what I'm saying? “Then you show them why you'll capture that now.” Root cause, interruptions for 10 minute calls, we bill in 10 minute increments, but they just pass it on because it's stuck between two big ones. Wait, you can capture that in one step. Oh my God. You see what I did there guys? Yeah. Root cause is how you demonstrate your product, but you've got to ask process questions to dig into how they're doing the things today that are causing the problems and then show how you fix it.

   In Value proposition

10. 21:34

    If I know that you're losing a million dollars a year I might ask, okay Where is this million dollars affecting the organization now? If I wanted to know that Right Or if you guys got this million dollars back Are there projects or other types of things “that you haven't been able to execute because of this?” Or would this just go straight back to the partners? So, what I did there I didn't basically show it I understand your business And partners take They all share the profits, right? Because they're LLPs So, I might just do this I'll go back to the partners And therefore, the return to the partner is going to be higher Or there's some projects you'd like to allocate this money to But just don't ask stupid questions

    In Cost of inaction

11. 29:10

    past state so much. Stop getting people to wallow in what's behind them. Instead, be keenly aware of any statement that is indicative of their desired future state. And then lastly, number four, if someone's asking you about weird stuff up front, like, hey, do you have a 99.99995 SLA up front? “You should probably ask them, hey, is there a reason you're asking me this stuff up front?” Because there's probably a reason. All righty, Nick, how can people help us out? Well, Armand, we're talking about SLAs, and did you know that we have a 100% SLA? We've never missed an episode. We've been publishing for a year and a half, and you and I have never once

    In Objection diagnosis and probing