Podcast episode
8 BRUTAL Discovery Lessons That Will SAVE Your Next Deal
30 Minutes to President's Club30 Jul 202539 min
Description
🏋 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training 📧 Cold Email Course: http://bit.ly/44K6jy3 ☎️ Cold Call Course: https://bit.ly/4jqQ4w2 🔮 Discovery Course: https://bit.ly/4cQYaM8 🛠️ Free Toolkits: http://bit.ly/4nZwvO5 Armand and Nick share the 8 most painful discovery lessons they had to learn the hard way, so you don’t have to. From broken agendas to botched first impressions, this is the real playbook for leveling up your first call. 🎙️ ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Ditch the interrogation-style discovery. Use each answer to guide your next question and go deeper instead of jumping topics. Lead with respect, not small talk. Top sellers prove they’ve done their homework in the first 90 seconds to earn credibility fast. Set a PPO agenda (Purpose, Plan, Outcome) early. It prevents the prospect from hijacking the call and builds trust through structure. Qualify before you demo. Ask: “Do you want to buy?” and “When do you want to buy?” before setting next steps or booking another call. RESOURCES DISCUSSED: Discovery Framework Recap email template Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal Save $50 on any 30MPC course with code “PODCAST” Free Sales Templates, Scripts and Guides
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If I make small talk about something that shows I prepped for this call. I know their business. And is like somewhat related to the problems that they're there to solve by looking at my product. I keep us focused on business. I show that like I'm a professional. “And it gives them a chance to talk about the thing that we were there to talk about anyway.” So what I did is I jotted down. I sold this ERP system to law firms. And I was like what are all the things that could be happening in their world that I could mention in the beginning to get their respect. And it was things like had they just won a case. Lots of law firms publicize when they win big cases. Or had they opened a new office. Or had the managing partner put out a piece of thought leadership.
What do you do for work? Oh, I work in sales. I'm literally interviewing you with like a checklist of questions. There's a certain point where you're going to be like, why are you asking me all of these questions if you're not doing anything with the answers? You're like, where are you going with this? “A good first date, a good discovery call, uses what you give me to build the next question.” So in that first answer, you're like, oh, I've played with my dog. I might be like, oh, you have a puppy. How old's the little guy? When did you get the little guy? When did you decide you wanted to get the puppy? And you're going to tell me the story around when you got the puppy. And then I might trade a story of my own. And then I might start to go into problems or stuff like that where it's like, oh my God, what was the crate training experience like?
with issuing stock options, the investor updates and all that stuff because he asked a real question instead of a checklist question. So the three layers of questions you can think of are situational questions and that just like tells you about their situation. For example, how do you manage your cap table? “From there, turn the situation into a problem.” So if you manage your cap table on spreadsheets, I can now say, hey, typically when people are managing their cap table on spreadsheets, it's either taking them a lot of time or they're spending a ton on legal fees because they're outsourcing it to lawyers. Yeah. And then I can go into impact. If they say they're doing it on lawyers, I can be like, hey, like it looks like you're around 30 employees or something like that.
That probably means you're issuing like 10 or so years. So you must be paying like. Would it be ridiculous to say you're paying 3, 4, 5 grand in legal fees per year just for the options? Or, like, give me a sense of how we can size this up because I want to make sure we're solving the right problem. Now I'm building one discovery question on the next, and I can get to one or two deep “problems in 10 minutes and then I can actually move on to the demo instead of asking them” qualification questions. Yeah, I mean, you're pulling on the thread. If I go back to that bizarre dating example that felt very uncomfortable for me, one, because it was you and me, but then also, like, your questions were just terrible. I felt like, one, today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams
And then they'll be like, yeah, I'm honestly really freaking out about overseeing all these manager comp decisions. Now, that's a problem, but if I can find a story behind that problem, there's something really terrifying behind that door. “And so the moment you find a problem, all you have to ask is, when was the moment that you realized that this was a problem?” And you will always get a story. So I would ask that question, and nine times out of 10, they would drop into this horror story where it's like, oh my God, I've got this one sales manager who had someone who had like a performance rating of a two, and they give him like a 10% comp increase, when this other engineering manager had a top performer, and they got a 7% increase.
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