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13Discovery: The Fine Art of Building Your Case

Discovery is the process of building your case and, in turn, trust. It is the most important step in the sales process. It’s where 80% or more of your time should be spent. Depending on the complexity of the deal, discovery may last a few minutes or span many months and require meetings with a broad array of stakeholders.

During discovery, you must be patient, strategic, and methodical. The objective is to leverage strategic, artful, and provocative questions to:

• Create self-awareness that causes stakeholders to realize that there is a need to change
• Challenge the status quo and shake stakeholders from their comfort zones
• Help stakeholders see the flaws in and eliminate perceived alternatives

Except for putting the right deals into the pipeline in the first place, nothing else in the sales process has a greater impact on your position at the sales negotiation table than effective discovery.

It’s Not Sexy, but It’s the Key to Getting Ink

Discovery can be slow, time-consuming, and emotionally challenging. It requires intention, strategy, and planning. You must ask open-ended questions, demonstrate sincere interest, and listen.

It’s so much easier to quickly run through a handful of self-serving, closed-ended questions, email over a proposal, and hope for the best than it is to take the time to truly understand what is important to your prospect and their stakeholders. Human-to-human interaction gets replaced with shortcuts and ...