Discovery: Asking deep, penetrating questions, then listening intently, really hearing the customer’s perspective, have long been the core best practices of great salespeople. The context has always been “understand the customer’s requirements, issues, objectives and pain points.” Personally, I’ve long been proud of my ability to ask good questions and to listen carefully.
Then I got to thinking about progress and obsolescence. Is there a better way?
I look around me and realize how many of the super-high-tech-sophisticated-at-the-time products, services and business processes that surrounded me early in my career now appear to be quaint or are simply gone. Getting a letter out the door, into the hands of the post office and ultimately to a customer, for example. Remember the typing pool? The IBM office I worked in right after college had a great one. We’d hand-write a letter, place it in the bin and get a draft back usually within four or five hours. Most times the second trip through that process produced something – maybe not perfect – but good enough to mail. (It was those fancy-schmancy magnetic card Selectric typewriters.)
You can easily fill in your own similar examples…
Most folks under 40 wouldn’t even be able to identify a 70s-vintage mag card typewriter. Nobody uses them anymore. Who would be foolish enough to bet the business on 50 year old technology and an even older process?
Who would be foolish enough to base their sales success on a 100 year old business process? You maybe?
The whole notion of questioning to grow sales was formalized in The Psychology of Selling by E. K. Strong in 1925. 1925??? The book on the subject is 87 years old? How old does that make the concept itself? World War 1-ish? Do you think maybe the world of sales has changed a bit since then?
Are there any customers left out there willing to invest their time in educating you? Darn few, and their numbers are dwindling every day. I think it’s time to demote “Discovery” in the hierarchy of sales best practices.
Discovery is still necessary, but it needs to happen before the customer call.
We need instead to think in terms of “Verify the Business Case.” In other words, the first time we walk in the door we need to have the solution pretty much designed and customized. We must only ask the for the customer’s time for the purposes of tweaking and polishing the solution and building internal support.
It’s different out there. It’s time to slay the “Discovery” sacred cow.
