Podcast episode
How to Train Teams on Discovery That Digs Deeper and Closes Bigger | Eleanor Dorfman
30 Minutes to President's Club23 Jan 202536 min
Description
ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS: Ban Product-Specific Language: Prohibit product-focused terms like "roles-based access" in deal reviews. Instead, prompt reps to explore the customer’s "why" behind their needs, driving better customer questioning and understanding. Tie Incentives to Certifications: Require reps to complete critical certifications (e.g., discovery certification) to access desirable benefits, such as inbound leads, ensuring alignment between AE and leadership goals. Consistency in Value Framework: Maintain your value selling framework across every sales stage—from discovery to demo to proposal—ensuring consistent messaging and alignment throughout the cycle. Embed Framework into Processes: Update all sales processes, stages, and deal reviews to reflect new frameworks. Regularly reinforce these changes in weekly reviews to ensure training sticks and drives lasting behavior changes. ELEANOR'S PATH TO PRESIDENTS CLUB: Head of Sales @ Retool Global Head of Commercial Retention & Regional Director of Commercial Sales @ Segment Global Head of Commercial Renewals and Retention @ Segment Head of Customer Success and Solutions engineering @ Clever Inc RESOURCES DISCUSSED: Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.
You can't say role-based access controls. You can't say front ends. You can't say UIs, because if you don't say those things, then you're not just saying, hey, they need this feature, which is why they want to buy something. They need to take it one or two steps deeper. They're trying to launch a new product and they need support tooling to support that. “They're trying to launch a new market.” They're trying to restructure their engineering org and drive operational efficiency. If you're not allowed to talk about certain features or retool or segment or pave specific things in a deal review, you end up talking a lot more about the business problems you're solving for a company, and you get a much richer and more productive deal review that's
In Market entry
for free on exactly how to plan a not bad. In fact, a great revenue kickoff that actually changes the way that your team sells. And the biggest one that you don't want to miss is our live sales kickoff masterclass. Go to 30 MPC.com backslash SKO to save your seat. I'll see you there. So good. What's number three? “POCs are actually an amazing place to do discover business value” in addition to technical value. So when you think about POC, it is for the technical win. You are validating your required capabilities, but it's also at a moment in a deal cycle when you have the most leverage, your prospects ready to get started. They need access to your SEs, to your resources, to your expertise.
very different. They don't care about SAML. They care about running their business. They care about growing their revenue. They care about de-risking. That evolution from feature selling of, hey, do you need these things to where are you trying to go as a company and how are we going to be part of that high-level initiative is the transition from feature “selling to value selling.” For me, it's the big difference between priority-based selling and problem-based selling. And you still sell to problems when you're doing priority-based selling. But problem-based or feature-based selling is you go into a meeting and let's say that you have an email cannon that lets
you send 10 times as many emails. You're asking questions like, how do your SDRs send emails today? How many emails would you like them to send? Et cetera. When you go into priority-based discussion, you're typically asking things around, okay, what are your pipeline goals overall? Where are you struggling the most in terms of meeting that next board goal? “And you need to find the two or three biggest business priorities.” figure out how you attach the problems that you solve to those priorities versus a lot of feature-based selling. It's like, let me see which of the four things I solve for. I can throw out the customer and then say that I have the solution to this thing. That is good enough for four and five figure deals. But if you want to sell six and seven figure
they're the foundation of the rest of the deal cycle. When you're in a POC, very tactically, you need to have required capabilities that you're testing. So what are the required capabilities that will lead to that future state? And it ties back to what I was talking about with the value selling and the business problems in the POC, because when you're putting together those required capabilities, you can say, how does this map to the future state? “How does this support your positive business outcomes?” negotiation, someone's going to be like, well, we don't really need this. So can we pay a little less? And you're like, absolutely not. This is critical because this is how you're going to X, Y, Z. And we know that that's important to you. And we're going to say that to you in the own language of your company. And it takes this feature that you deliver and you're able to