The humble discovery call is one of the most common meetings you’ll run in sales, but it’s also one of the toughest to manage.
In 28 minutes (do your prospects show up on time?) you somehow have to balance making a positive first impression while also “discovering” enough to sell your product. It gets even trickier because every prospect is a little different from the last.
Today, we’re covering how to build your minimum viable discovery playbook to:
- Build your call structure
- Control the call with a PPO Agenda
- Find a problem worth solving with Discovery Trees
- Prove you can solve it with a Harbor Tour Demo
- Drive next steps with the 5-Minute Drill
This won’t cover every possible edge case, but it will give you a simple, repeatable way to control your calls and uncover problems prospects will spend money to solve.
Ready? Let’s do this.
Step 1: Build Your Call Structure
The first step is to decide how to allocate your time across the 30 short minutes you have.
Break the call into 4 main sections:
- Small Talk + Agenda (5 min): Build rapport and set expectations for the call flow.
- The Meat of the Call (15 min): Conversation about the problem they want to solve.
- Harbor Tour Demo (5 min): Prove you solve the problem + get them excited for more.
- Next Steps (5 min): If they like what they saw, talk timing and buying process.
Now that you have your high-level outline, let’s build your playbook for each call section.
Step 2: Build Your PPO Agenda Script
A good agenda prevents confusion and tug-of-war on the direction of the call. Without an agenda, your prospect is left wondering:
- Why is this person asking me so many questions?
- I requested a demo…why aren’t they showing me the product?
- When will I see pricing? Are they hiding something?
Take 2 seconds upfront to align expectations with a simple PPO Agenda:
Replace the Pave-specific language with your company, and this talk track is 100% steal-able.
Step 3: Build Your Discovery Trees and Question Toolkit
It’s easy to get lost in discovery because not every piece of information your prospect shares will be relevant to your product.
To know what to ask about and listen for, build Discovery Trees to map the relationship between the:
- Most common problems your product solves
- Reasons those problems exist
- Business impact of those problems
Mapping these relationships in advance helps you uncover the right information faster. Here’s an example of a discovery tree for Pave’s compensation planning product:
Building these can get tricky. If your team wants help from 30MPC, get in touch with us here.
The basic process is simple:
Step 1: Start with the Operational Problem and list out the most common problems you solve. Think: What do I hear champions complain about the most?
Step 2: Ask yourself under what Situations do those Operational Problems exist? Focus on situations your product can actually fix, not every possible reason.
Step 3: Ask “so what” to get down to Business Impact. This should be a C-level metric, risk or business initiative.
Depending on the complexity of what you sell, you may need multiple trees for different products, verticals or competitors.
Once you’ve built your trees, it becomes much easier to know what questions to ask. While we don’t recommend memorizing questions, here are 3 that will help you navigate the trees:
1) Ask why they took the call to figure out their situation:
“My guess is you don't take every sales call that comes your way. What prompted you to take this one in the first place?”
(Oftentimes they'd complain that they're running compensation reviews on spreadsheets, which isn't really a problem yet... so let's turn it into one!)
2) Use multiple choice questions to find a problem:
“Typically when someone's tired of running compensation on spreadsheets, it's because it's taking so much time <or> it's because they can't oversee manager decisions across a million compensation workbooks. Which is it for you?”
(They often would say... both! But let's pick the tougher one -- it's taking so much time. Time savings doesn't sell a 6-figure deal. So I have to turn it into real business impact.)
3) Use magic moment questions to get an impact story
“I have to imagine you didn't wake up yesterday and think 'these spreadsheets have to go today!' -- I guess, when'd you realize that this was a problem?”
(At this point they'll usually go on a long rant about how they spent 17 hours doing compensation reviews and accidentally made a mistake on one of their 3000 spreadsheets or lost 2 HR employees in the making of this merit cycle).
Step 4: Build Your Harbor Tour Demo
Uncovering the right problem means nothing if your prospect doesn’t believe you can solve it.
Budget 5 minutes to give your prospect a taste of how you solve the problem they just told you about. To get your discovery and demo talking to each other, follow this very complex talk track formula:
“You said you wanted to fix X. Here’s how we help with X”
AKA:
“You said you wanted better oversight on manager comp decisions. Here’s our dashboard where you can see all those decisions on one screen.”
Literally just repeat the problem they told you and show how you solve it.
You want to end the call on a high note to create momentum for next steps.
Step 5: Build Your 5-Minute Drill to Set Next Steps
In the last 5 minutes, your goal is to validate they have intent to buy within a reasonable timeframe and then set a next step.
There are three questions you’ll ask to wrap things.
Question 1: Do you wanna buy?
Don’t actually phrase it that way, but that’s the intent of the question. Confirm this is going somewhere and that your time won’t be wasted and ask:
"So... what do you think?"
If they give you a wishy-washy answer, pressure-test them:
“Before we talk next steps, I know this evaluation will require both of us to invest a good amount of time together -- pulling teams together for a demo, partnering together to build a business case, etc. -- so knowing what you know today, is it worth continuing to invest more time together based on what you've seen so far?”
Yes? On to question #2!
Question 2: When do you wanna buy?
You can’t suggest next steps that make sense if you don’t understand their timeline for solving the problem. Use what you know to seed the timeline, and then make the ask:
“Great, you mentioned that your merit cycle was happening in Q3. I know we’re still early, but assuming all goes well in our next few meetings, when’s the latest you’d want something like this in place?”
Intent to buy within a reasonable timeframe? Set those next steps!
Question 3: How do you wanna buy. (suggest, don't ask)
Okay sellers ask for next steps.
Good sellers suggest next steps to steer the sales cycle in the right direction.
Great sellers suggest next-next steps to get their prospects bought into a sales process:
“Keeping that in mind, we’d normally spend an hour diving into a deep dive next week. If that goes well, we’d get in front of someone like your CHRO, Jane. How does that align with how you’ve bought things in the past?
And that’s a wrap!
That’s your minimum viable discovery playbook: Control the beginning, control the end, and uncover one or two problems worth solving.
Then layer in the fancy tricks.
