Playbook: Discovery Teardown

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1. 4:13

   me because I've respected him. But then you need to quickly get off it and then go to step two, which is actually setting the agenda. Right. So, now you roll into the meeting logistics and what some people call the upfront contract. There's a couple things that you got to nail right in the beginning of the meeting when you roll into the business side of things. “You got to make sure that you're good on time.” You've got to get permission to ask some questions. You can't just roll right into your interrogation, doctor's checkup. And then you've got to talk a little bit about logistics related to next steps in the beginning of the call. For me, it sounds something like, Armand, I had us down for 30 minutes here. I think that puts us at a hard stop at four o'clock. That cool with you? You got to stop sooner. Armand says, great. All right, cool.

   In Discovery meeting structure

2. 5:36

   before we get into demo. And the first question you got to ask is not tell me about your priorities “or this or that. But our favorite first question is just understanding why the heck did you take” the call? Because if you go shoot, jump in deep to like super detailed discovery questions right off the bat, oftentimes people are going to feel like, hey, like, don't you at least want to know why I'm here in the first place? And so start with why they took the call. Oftentimes, they'll

   In Discovery question design

3. 16:59

   They were facing A, B, and C type of problem just like you guys. Directionally, I'm going to mark this down so we cover it in the demo, but we're going to help you by doing E, F, and G, right? Boom, moving on. “Tell them a quick story or tell them a quick anecdote that social proofs that you've solved this problem before, but then don't get super deep into the weeds.” Save that for the demo later on. Yeah, one of the ways that you can do that, Armand, by demonstrating that social proof is if somebody shares a problem and you know that that is probably leading to another problem is by asking a really intelligent question where it's like, oh, well, it's really interesting that you're dealing with that. Typically, when I talk to folks who are dealing with X, they're also dealing with Y.

   In Outbound case studies

4. 19:22

   Would you like to see how we can? That's how I propose moving to a demo. Exactly. And now once you've gotten, and only once you've gotten the affirmative that they like what you're putting down, that's when you can start to spend the last couple minutes digging into the buying process. And this is going to largely vary for your sales cycle. “But some oftentimes things that we're going to be hitting on are things like who needs to be involved?” What is the deal process? What are other checklist items like procurement, infosec, and legal? And then most importantly, when is their target go live? And what you need to do is based on your specific deal cycle, you need to walk it back to what that means they need to do today. And so, for example, we're recording this podcast episode in July.

   In Stakeholder and champion discovery

5. 21:35

   calendar and say, hey, my guess is it's not going to work. If it does, add the other people onto the call. If it doesn't, we can move it. But, always have something that forces next steps on the book. Never leave a meeting without another meeting on the calendar, because the one time you think it's okay, that's the next time you're going to get ghosted. “Well, the great thing about that is that calendar invite serves as a reminder for everybody” to when you get to next Friday and it's like, oh, they haven't gotten back to me. Everybody sees that invite and it's a great excuse to reach out to the other person. So, Armand, this has been a really fun episode. Now, we're going to move to the final question and you got to ask me the final question one. So, I'm going to ask the final question to

   In Reminder timing and channels