What Are We Trying To “Discover” In Our Discovery Process?

A long time friend and colleague asked me to sit in a vendor meeting. He is the CRO of a midsized company (About $1B). We’ve been working on developing new strategies to drive growth. The organization had been very successful, but he was looking to transform much of what they did to achieve higher levels of performance.

One of the teams had been looking at leveraging some technology solutions to support the transformation. They were curious about leveraging some AI based tools as part of the transformation. More as part of their learning process, they arranged meetings with a few leading companies to see if these types of tools might support what they were trying to achieve. The team invited the CRO and me to sit in a meeting.

The seller seemed to be pretty well prepared, he had done some research. He started his discovery questions trying to identify the current platforms and technologies my client had in place. The team went through the usual litany of CRM, sales enablement, research, marketing/outreach, conversational intelligence and other platforms.

You could see him shifting into “need identification.” He asked, “We have integrations into the major technology platforms. Which are your highest priorities?”

The team shrugged their collective shoulders. One responded, “We aren’t far enough through our process to have made that determination yet.”

Undeterred, the seller said, “When you are looking at platforms like ours, what are the key features and capabilities you are looking for?”

Again, someone responded, “We don’t know yet.”

The seller persisted, “In organizations like yours, we see them getting the greatest benefit from these capabilities….. Perhaps to give you a better understanding of how these features help you, we can arrange a demo.”

The CRO intervened, “I appreciate you trying to educate us about your product. We aren’t there yet. We are really looking to transform our go to market strategies, particularly with our larger customers, in these sectors. What should we be looking at to improve our people’s ability to better engage our strategic accounts, expanding our footprint within those accounts, and becoming more of a strategic partner to those accounts. How are people leveraging AI tools to accelerate this?”

Credit the seller with persistence, “Our tools improve your teams efficiency in managing their time more effectively. They reduce the time people spend on administrative tasks, research, reporting. Your people don’t need to spend as much time with this. We can show you how to do this in a demo…..”

I’ll stop here. The meeting actually ended soon after, the sales person persisted. My client said, “we’ll get back to you.”

But you can start to see the disconnect in the discovery processes of the seller and my client.

The seller was focused on discovering the “needs” for their product. He was focused on features, functions, capabilities they might want in a solution.

My client was at very different point in their discovery process. They were looking at a strategic change in how they engaged and grew their larger customers. They were trying to figure out, “What should their people be doing differently with these customers? How do they expand relationships, how do they create greater value, how do they grow their importance to the customer?”

It turns out this disconnect is nearly universal. Sellers focus their discovery on the need for a product. Buyers are focused on their need to transform their business, to solve problems impacting their ability to achieve their goals.

Stated differently, sellers focus on solution expertise–that is the capabilities of their solutions. Customers are looking for problem expertise. These are very different.

Becoming a problem expert means understanding the problem from the customer perspective. Customers don’t express their problems in the context of product features and capabilities–at least until they are in the very latest stages of their buying process.

Customers struggle with understanding and defining problems. They may have a vague idea things aren’t working as well as they should. Or, at in the case of my CRO friend, they are looking to innovate and transform their large account strategies. They struggle to define the problem and what’s caused it. They struggle to understand the impact of the problem, and who the problem impacts. They struggle in the problem solving process, after all they don’t do this every day. They struggle with their confidence and whether they are doing the right thing. They struggle…..

The good news is our customers need help! And they actively engage those that can be helpful.

Shifting our focus to a Problem Focus, rather than a Solution Capability focus drives huge changes in customer engagement. We work with the customer on the issues most critical to them, helping them move effectively through their problem solving/buying process.

How do sellers start developing their capabilities as “Problem Experts?”  It’s pretty easy and doesn’t take a lot of time. 

Talk to your customers about the problems–not your solutions.  Learn more about how they see them, how they are defining them, how they approach all the issues impacted by the problems.  Do this with 10-15 customers, again focused solely on building your understanding of the problem.  You will be amazed at what you learn and how it helps you better engage customers.

Afterword:  For a cheat sheet on this approach, reach out to me, ask for our Problem Focused Brock Questionert.  It will give you a very fast start on becoming Problem Experts and shifting your discovery process to align with the customer.

Afterword:  This is the AI generated discussion this post.

I’m so often surprised.  This discussion is absolutely stunning.  The way they address the issues around becoming Problem Experts goes really deep.  They also look at how we apply similar approaches to discovering problems within our organization.

It’s tough to train this tool to be brief, but this is one of the times where I think investing the time in listening to the entire 18 minute discussion.  And the last 3 minutes is simply brilliant!