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Six Key Steps to Discovery Call Success
sdrhuddle.com
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Set the Agenda –It’s important that from the outset of the call, you get your prospect clearly bought into the objective of the discovery call, and what next steps will look like if the call has been a success. This achieves two things; Firstly, it helps to start educate your buyer about your own sales process and presents an expectation of getting to the demo stage, if you achieve your objectives on the call. This I find has been crucial, particularly for inexperienced buyers who need direction and/or hand-holding through a sales process. Secondly, it prepares the prospect for questioning. If they buy into the agenda, they are likely to be bought into opening up and giving you answers. It warms them up. The other thing to always check here is how much time the prospect has for the call. If they have a ‘hard stop’ at 30 minutes, then make sure you don’t overrun on their time. The last thing you want is to show you have a lack of respect for their time. “Literally two minutes looking your prospect up on Twitter can result in a much warmer conversation and make you stand out from the other salespeople your buyer will be speaking with that day or week.” Commence questioning-Start by asking what I call ‘level one’ questions about how they are currently setup internally before drilling down into ‘level two’ questions which start to probe pain or opportunity. As an example here, alevel one questionfor myself would be:
I stipulated that that purpose of the discovery call is – ‘to identify areas where a salesperson can help a prospect to warrant a further meeting/conversation.’ “The discovery call is as much an opportunity to identify those prospects who cannot be helped by your company, and where investing further time in the sales process is not a valuable time for either yourself or the prospect.” Here are my six key steps to running effective discovery calls: