Don't Take The Bait

Great discovery takes a lot of discipline. It’s easy to get lured into pitching your solution before you’re ready to, and your customers do this to you all the time. Someone takes your cold call, or they walk up to your booth at a trade show, and they say something like…

“So, whatcha got?”

“Give me the shpiel…”

“What did you want to talk about?”

These invitations are tempting. After all, you’re here to sell something, right? 

You’re thinking, “Did they just invite me to sell them something? Is this too good to be true right now?” You also feel somewhat obligated at this point. I mean, the customer is always right... right?

Rarely, actually, but that’s a piece for another time…

When this happens, the urge to launch into a sales presentation is almost overwhelming…

…and you must resist it. 

If you’ll remember my piece from last week, one of the six outcomes of great discovery is context. Without creating context in discovery, your pitch has nowhere to land. You’re forced to give a generalized overview of what you sell and how it can help without knowing exactly what kind of help is needed.

This is why pitches don’t work, especially in B2B situations. Your offerings are far too complex to fit into a cogent one-liner elevator pitch (which is also a big reason why you have such a hard time writing one). 

What happens instead? I’ve seen this recently…

You launch into a value proposition, it doesn’t land the way you hoped it would, and now you’re on the defensive, immediately going into objection-handling-but-wait-have-you-considered-this-scenario mode (and if you’ve ever been in this situation you’re smiling right now).

It’s not an envious position to sell from. What’s worse is when it doesn’t work out, you feel really bad about shooting your shot and missing. Meanwhile, the prospect walks away and immediately forgets about you. 

“Alright, Bajorek, so what am I supposed to do instead?” Resist the urge to pitch and flip the request back around on them. Admittedly, it’s a power play, but they gave you the floor, and this is how you should use it.

“Mr. Prospect, before I start explaining how we can help you, I have a few questions to ask you about your current situation. Do you mind answering those first?”

Then, offer a provocative question about the problem you believe you can solve for them (but need to verify they have first), and you start a proper discovery session. 

No, you don’t have enough time to have a thorough session, but you have to start at the start. Skipping steps in your sales process because you don’t feel like you have enough time is not going to help your results. If you don’t have time to do it right, you definitely don’t have time to do it twice.

Here's the other side of that coin: just because they asked doesn’t make the opportunity any more credible. If they’re not willing to go through a proper discovery session or at least answer a few questions first, then they were never going to be customers of yours anyway.

The biggest factor at work here is the fear of missing out on a bluebird opportunity. While we all love the deals that fall into our laps, we still need to vet those, too. 

It’s hard, but you didn’t embark on this career because it was supposed to be easy. If there’s anything I can do for you as a reader of these weekly pieces, it’s to look around corners for you and show you another point of view of some of the things you may be missing.

I’ve stood at those trade show booths and been in those sales calls where I know they would have gone better if I had only been more patient. It was much later that I realized that these prospects do this to us on purpose. It’s usually not malicious, and you probably do it too. How often are you actually willing to listen vs how often you just want to get them out of your way?

Let’s be real about your sales process, why you worked so hard to distill and document it, and why you’d want to shortcut it for someone who hasn’t earned your time yet. 

Yep, I said that. Go back and read it again. Just because you called them or they walked up to your booth doesn’t mean they deserve to hear about your offering yet. When you put things in those terms, everything falls more neatly into place, right?

Be patient. Don’t take the bait. And never skip discovery.