Podcast episode
How to Run Discovery Without Obsessing Over Questions | Gal Aga ft. Aligned
30 Minutes to President's Club5 Mar 202636 min
Description
Most sellers obsess over asking the perfect discovery question. In this episode, Gal Aga breaks down why great discovery has nothing to do with memorized questions and everything to do with understanding the problem, finding the root cause, and guiding the buying process. 🎙️ ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS: Focus on the problem, root cause, and impact you need to uncover, not memorizing discovery questions. Only prep the first 5–10 minutes with a POV and agenda, then let the conversation flow. Bring a point of view from research so buyers feel understood and the discussion starts deeper. Treat discovery as something you continue throughout the deal, especially with new stakeholders. GAL’S PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB: CEO & Co-Founder of Aligned 21 years in B2B sales, including AE, Sales Director, VP Sales and CRO roles Built 5 sales orgs from scratch: These Courses Will Get You to President’s Club: 👥 Leadership Course 💼 Selling to the C-Suite Course 📧 Cold Email Course ☎️ Cold Call Course 🔮 Discovery Course 🛠️ Free Toolkits 🏋 30mpc.com/training Get More Tactics: How To Win More Deals Using The Give/Gets Equilibrium Join our weekly newsletter – https://hubs.li/Q02NJQ8p0 Things you can steal and use today – https://linktr.ee/30mpc_youtube
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showing that, and so a POV really led discovery signals to me as a buyer, and I'm buying all the time, you know, this AE has done the work, this AE gets my world. So that opens up the conversation that makes a more natural flow. And it's also how to do this, right? It's so easy today with AI. “You can do account research, you can do industry research, but then what you want to come up” with is a hypothesis of what might be broken in their world and some assumptions that are tying into your product. And then during the call, just let the conversation flow from there. So for example, I was speaking with XSDR, I understand you have 10 stakeholders involved
So let's take a few examples. Let's say you reached out, a good, really solid go-to question that have just worked for me all the time is something like, I know where you reached out, but is there anything specifically going on right now that has led you to agree to take this call? And you just pause. “So when you say something like that, really it invites them to give you context.” And then it could be that this is it. The entire conversation just develops from there. You don't need anything else. And there's a really real reason that led to the call. It might be that they're even actively evaluating and they're about to close.
You'll see a lot of transactional sales motions stay there. And I think that transactional is just going to disappear from the world with AI and everything that's happening. The value of AE has to go higher, but that's another topic. “So what does it look like? It basically means typically you see qualification criteria like BANT, which is another topic I'm not a big fan of. You ask surface questions. Do you have budget? What is your timeline to make a decision? Things like that.” Discovery really leaves in your notes of the first conversation. You never revisit it. You maybe revisit it just once, maybe at the end. Just pressurize. I guess solving X problem is not a priority when you try to pressure someone
Phenomenal. Dal, thank you for joining us. Everybody, stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon. All righty, Nick, it's time for a three step recap and then one thing you can do. All right, three step recap. Number one, first thing is before you get onto a discovery call, try to think about what you're trying to get out of that discovery call. “Not the questions you're going to ask, not that new thing you saw on LinkedIn, but think” about the problems you want to get, the root causes you want to find. And then the question will come naturally. That's number one. Number two, only prep the first five to 10 minutes of the call because you don't know where they're going to take you. So plan what you want to get, plan your point of view and your agenda, but then organically listen to your prospect as you go.
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