One of the most common requests that we get at RevUp Sales is to create a list of great discovery questions that reps should ask. We get this all the time. How should I be running discovery? What questions should I ask? Give me a list of questions.
And the real answer is that you don’t really need a long list of questions. The best question that you could ask in discovery is a question based on something the prospect just said. The best thing that you can ask in discovery builds off of stuff that they are talking about and makes the conversation engaging. So because of that, you actually don’t need a super long list of questions that are actually going to stress you out when you’re looking at them, because you’re going to feel like, oh my gosh, I’ve got to get to all these questions. So when it comes to the best discovery questions to ask, you can take the stress off of you. Just listen to your prospects and build off of what they’re saying.
That said, we’ve got a few tips on a few go-to questions that you might want to consider. For example, when opening or starting a call, you should have a couple of good openers. So here are a couple of our favorite openers. The first one being: what prompted you to reach out, or what prompted you to take the meeting? And the reason why we want to use “prompted” is because we want to start to understand the time element. We want to start to understand what’s going on right now that makes this of interest to them. So “what prompted you to reach out,” “what prompted you to take the meeting,” or “what prompted you to learn more” is a great opening question.
Now, throughout the call, you’re going to listen to the prospect. You need to have a plan and a sense of what you’re listening for. Certainly, you’re listening to get pain and problems quantified and defined. So the next series of questions that you can ask is all around definition. For example, when someone says to you they are dealing with a lot of issues with their current provider or current supplier, an example of a question to get things defined and quantified would be to follow up: OK, what type of issues are you dealing with? How often are those issues occurring? So our next question set is all around defining and quantifying, and we don’t exactly know what that’s going to be until we hear from the prospect. But nonetheless, if “what prompted you to take the meeting” is the opener, the second set of questions is really around defining and quantifying things that should be quantified and defined.
Now, our third recommendation in terms of questions in discovery comes at some point, usually later on in the call. It could happen at any time, though, depending on what the prospect says. As you start to feel like there is a potential business case building here, one of the questions you absolutely want to ask is: how is the decision committee going to decide to make a change? Now, this question puts out in the open, A, I already know there are multiple people involved in this, and B, it starts to give you insight into what’s going to be their underlying motivation for change. And the reason why you want to ask how the decision committee is going to decide if they’re going to buy or change: A, you certainly want to make sure you align your solution to their decision criteria, but B, you also want to offer your own insight and guidance into other things that they should be considering when making a purchase like this.
So, with just those three questions, you can run a very effective, very engaging discovery call. Hope this helps. Contact RevUp Sales if you really want to dive into this in more detail.
