3 Steps to Teardown Discovery Tapes (Without Putting Your Team To Sleep)

Stop spending an hour or more reviewing a single discovery call with your reps.

You’re pausing the discovery tape every 15 seconds to talk about the call with your reps.  

It takes a whole hour because you’re stopping to coach them on every single exchange on the call.  

Your reps' eyes glaze over in boredom and there is a 99% chance they are retaining 0% of the feedback you give.  

Ditch that marathon to nowhere right now, because we're teaching you how to run a killer tape review in less than 30 minutes that gets your reps fired up and asking the right questions to win their next discovery call:

1. Start every tape review with a point of view
2. Work the room by asking your reps the 3 golden questions
3. Skip around, a lot (do. not. watch the whole call!)

Ready to dive in? Let’s go.

1. Start Every Tape Review With a Point of View

Before you even hit play, build a POV on the potential problems you could solve based on what you know about the company and what you know about the persona.

For example, when I was a VP of Sales at Pave:

• Company: If they were between 100-200 employees... I knew they were probably running their first real compensation cycle and they were gonna need help on employee education.
• Persona: If it was a Director of HR Ops... they were gonna feel the day-to-day operational pain of running a compensation review far more than a Chief HR Officer who's thinking about broader employee retention.

This teaches your reps to run more efficient discovery and demonstrate credibility by coming prepared and knowing what problems might be relevant to any given buyer.

2. Work the Room by Asking Your Reps the 3 Golden Questions

If you pause the tape and ask a question like: “so... what do you think?” —your tape review is guaranteed to go off the rails.

Here are 3 questions that'll guide your reps through the tape.

Question 1: Ask reps to recap after any prospect monologue

This trains your reps to listen for the right information, then think of the next problem we should try to surface.

My favorite way to do this is to pause the tape and ask my reps: what was important that the prospect said and where did that drop us in our discovery tree:

For example, if a prospect said "I spend too much time in spreadsheets"—I'd pull up the tree above for the team to know we need to turn that into compensation mistakes!

Question 2: Ask reps to brainstorm the next question or story

Once you know the next problem you're trying to get, now you can brainstorm the right question or story to work your way down the tree.

So ask your team: Should we ask a question (take) or recap / tell a story (give)? Great, what's an example question we could use to uncover potential comp mistakes?

Question 3: Click play and ask the rep to give themselves feedback.

Now that you anticipated what the rep should do next, see what they actually did.

Try to let the rep give feedback on themselves first, then open it up to the team. The rep should get the chance to show that they learned first.

3. Skip Around a Lot‍

Do not watch the whole call, I repeat, do not watch the whole call.

Skip around to ensure you get to the 3 most important parts of the call: the agenda, discovery questions, and next steps.

Use the video transcript to skip around a lot:

1. Skip the rapport building to get to the agenda.
2. Skim and summarize long prospect riffs / rep monologues.
3. Skip the demo and jump to next steps.

Do not watch the entire tape at the pace of molasses.

That’s a wrap folks. Stay tuned this month for the best discovery tactics we have ever delivered in the history of 30MPC. And if you are ready to be a discovery machine TODAY, reserve a spot on the discovery course waitlist for first dibs and a one-time discount!

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