Discovery in the meeting. How to ask questions so the client sells to themselves

You are not Steve Jobs, and that is fine#

When you sell a product, above all in B2B, forget the Steve Jobs story. Twenty minutes on stage, a talk about the product, and the sales fly by themselves. Sadly, life does not work like that. People do not stand in line after one good presentation.

Keep one plain thing in your head. You must talk with the client and ask questions in the meeting.

Call it what you want. Scoring, diagnosis, discovery, qualification. The name does not matter. Without this stage there is no sale.

The most frequent mistake looks like this. The meeting goes well, the client is open and listens with interest. The manager decides that the contact is there, so discovery is not necessary. In the end there is no deal.

The client does not say a clear yes or a clear no. There are no concrete objections. And all because discovery was skipped at the moment when everything went well.

How discovery differs from an interrogation#

You can think that discovery means you ask questions without end and the client answers. Sadly, this is how it looks from outside if you do it head-on. It is closer to an interrogation than to a conversation.

An interrogation does not work with a client. To be exact, it works once. After that the client stops answering, and the contact is lost.

How do you run discovery correctly?

When you ask a question, you explain why you ask it. The client gets a reason to answer in detail, because the client sees the benefit. You also sell yourself as an expert who asks for a reason, not for a tick in a box.

How it looks in practice. The dealership example#

Imagine this. You come to a car dealership to sell an advertising tool that brings more leads. The meeting is booked, and you ask the client

• Which tools do you use now?
• Where do your leads come from?
• How much is a lead from each platform?
• Do you use call tracking?
• Which analytics service do you have?
• What is your monthly advertising budget?
• What is your cost per lead now?

If you ask all this in a row, you do not look good, because it sounds like an interrogation. How do you do the same thing in a human way?

Run discovery during the presentation, not before it and not after it. You present the product and ask along the way. And you always explain why you need this information.

For example, you ask "Which call-tracking numbers do you use now?" and explain at once. "I ask because in our product these numbers are free by default for all leads".

Or like this. "How much is a lead for you? I ask because the average lead in your region costs this much. It is useful to compare it with the cost from your own listing".

With these explanations you show expertise and give the client a concrete benefit. The question stops being a question for the sake of a question.

SPIN selling. How the questions sell for you#

The same logic is the base of the SPIN technique. Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff questions. This is not a random set. It is a sequence. It leads the client to state the problem and to want to solve it.

The point is to get to the true problem of the client before the presentation. Often the client does not see it. SPIN works a little like the film "Inception". There the heroes enter another person's dreams and plant an idea, and the person thinks it is their own.

The logic with questions is similar. But you do not plant an idea. You help the client dig out what was already inside. The client did not say it aloud before.

Let us take a car purchase as an example.

Situation questions. Reconnaissance, how things are now. What do you drive now, how often do you use the car, for what purposes? City, work, long trips. The client tells you facts about their life. Nothing hard.

Problem questions. We dig into the points where the current car does not cope. Are there times when you want to go out into nature and the car is not fit for it? Dirt road, off-road, low ground clearance. How often does it happen?

Implication questions. This is the most important level, and beginners skip it most often. Here the pain stops being an inconvenience and becomes a cost.

What happens when you cannot get there? You cancel the trip, cut the route, take a detour. And on long distances, for example a trip to the south, how does it feel? Tiredness, discomfort, worry about the car on the road.

At this level the client says aloud how much this bothers them. Often the client did not put it so clearly before this moment.

Need-payoff questions. We turn the pain into the result the client wants. If you had a car that goes through a dirt road with ease and is comfortable on long distances, what would it give you? What would change in your trips to nature or to the south?

The client answers this question, and so the client sells the solution to themselves. You only confirm that your car covers exactly this. It can happen that the client starts to spend more time in nature. The client becomes healthier and stronger. And so lives longer.

This is the full power of SPIN. You do not talk about the specifications of the car. You help the client find their own reason to buy it.

How to listen to the client's answers#

It is not enough to ask the correct question. You must know how to listen to the answer. Do not interrupt the client and show that you are involved. Nod, say "yes", keep eye contact.

It sounds obvious, but this is where people lose most often. At this moment the manager already prepares the next question and does not listen to the current answer.

Two plain techniques help here.

Echo. You repeat the last word or a short phrase of the client as a question. The client says "we lose requests all the time". You repeat "lose?", and the client continues the topic. The pause and the repeated word push the client to finish the thought.

Paraphrase. You give the client's thought back in your own words. This way you check that you understood, and you take the conversation deeper. "So the requests get lost at the handover from the contact centre to the sales department. Do I understand correctly?" The client confirms and adds details, or corrects you. And then the thing that was not said at first comes up.

Discovery is not a separate stage. It is part of the presentation#

Start discovery during the presentation. Present a little, talk about the topic a little, and weave in the questions step by step. This does not mean that you say nothing about the product until you find out everything.

And do not drag discovery out too long. It must happen naturally, as the next part of the presentation. It is not a separate block with a clear line "now I move to the questions". There must be no sharp switch. One thing flows from the other.

A practical guide for a new manager#

A short checklist you can take to your first meeting.

Before the meeting

• Prepare 5 to 7 questions in advance, by SPIN levels. Two situation, two problem, at least one implication, one need-payoff
• For each question, prepare a short explanation of why you ask it. Without it the question sounds like an interrogation

During the meeting

• Do not open the meeting with a list of questions in a row. Start with the presentation and weave the questions in
• Before a question, say in short why you ask and what the client gets from it
• Move in order. First the situation, then the problem, then the implications, and only then the value. Do not skip levels, above all the implication questions. Without them the need-payoff question sounds like manipulation
• Listen to the answer. Do not prepare the next question at the same time
• Use echo when you want the client to finish the thought
• Use paraphrase when you want to make sure you understood and to get more details

What to stay away from

• Do not ask more than two or three questions in a row without a comment between them
• Do not move to the product right after a problem question, past the implication question
• Do not make discovery a separate block before the presentation. It breaks the natural flow of the conversation
• Do not think up the client's problem for them. Let the client put it in their own words through implication questions