Great discovery is foundational to understanding our customers and their needs. Too often, we skip it, instead rushing to pitch our products. When we do some nominal level of discovery, it’s actually a product pitch in disguise.
Our questions aren’t oriented to understanding their needs or what they seek to change. Instead they steer the customer to express their needs in terms of the capabilities/features of our products. We ask, “Do you need this capability….. How do you manage this process…. Would it help if…… Do you need real-time dashboards….. Do you need seamless integration with….?”
Our questions go through a checkbox list of our product features and functions. And in the process, we gently guide the customer into prioritizing the boxes we check and that our competitors can’t check.
And our competitors are doing the same thing.
It’s no wonder, our customers are exhausted, saying, “You are all the same!”
The problem is we structure our discovery to fit our needs, to guide the customer to expressing their needs in terms of our product capabilities, which we will later show them in a demonstration. And in this process, we still haven’t discovered our customers’ real needs. We haven’t learned about what they are trying to do, why it’s important to them, what it means to them.
Discovery has to be all about the customer and has nothing to do with our products and solutions!
We have to begin our discovery by understanding what matters to them. This is never expressed in terms of product capabilities, features, and functions. It’s discovering how they work, what they do, where they face challenges, where they might want to do more, or look at things differently. It’s engaging them in thinking about new ideas and how they might impact them. It’s exploring the “what if” about their business and how they work. It’s about what happens if they don’t change, what happens if they do change, what the risks are. It’s learning about who else is impacted, how they are involved, what the larger impact of a change might be.
We have to have the willingness, curiosity, and acumen to engage the customers in these conversations, sometimes without knowing where they may lead. But isn’t that part of the process? Isn’t part of qualifying them, knowing that we can help them, or that while this is an opportunity, it may not be ours. And we might then point the customer to an organization that could help them solve the problems.
Once we and they have gone through a collaborative discovery process, we can move into, “What do we do about this?” We can start to say, “We have a lot of expertise in this, this is how our solutions might be able to help you…”
A few quick tips:
- Start with understanding the problem. Don’t worry about your solution, but dive deeply into understanding the problem, and improving your customers’ understanding of the problems. The product pitch comes later.
- Drilling more deeply into the problem, shift your questions from solution focused questions like, “Do you need this….” to learning focused questions, “What’s getting in the way of you doing this….?”
- Understand what it means to the person you are talking to. Not their role, but how it impacts them, what concerns them,
Shift your discovery process. It is all about the customer. It is a collaborative discovery, where the customer and we learn, align, and look at how we might move forward.
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post. Enjoy!
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