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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
Now’s the time when you deploy those nuggets of information you surfaced ahead of time and do some hypercharged rapport building. The goal of this part of the pitch is to form a bridge of shared experience that raises trust levels.
importantYou need to have a plan for transitioning things to getting down to business. There’s a certain amount of time, two or three minutes, that you can spend on this sort of thing before it starts to wear thin. Not to mention, you’re eating into the time that was budgeted for the rest of your pitch. A great way to do this is to move from less to more professional topics as you go. It’s nice to talk about the Red Sox if the prospect is from Boston, but you’ll want to switch it up to “How long have you been recruiting?” or remark on professional components of his role as a segue to the commercial discussion at hand. “Well that’s great. I’m glad we got to talk about that stuff! So…” And then begin.
cautionDiscovery is where you take the time to ask questions of prospects to both qualify them and set yourself up for a more productive pitch. It’s also the thing that first-time salespeople bungle the worst. Eager to hop into their pitch, instead of digging into the prospect’s business realities, they just start firing from the hip—and miss a huge opportunity to tailor the conversation to the prospect’s pains. Or, worse, they waste time and energy presenting to someone who isn’t even qualified. Discovery is an extremely important part of the pitching process, and you should allocate the first five or ten minutes of your presentation to it (depending on the total time your presentation and demo take).
It’s best to set this up at the beginning of your pitch and characterize it as a benefit to the prospect. Something like, “I like to start with some questions so I have a better idea of how your team goes about its day-to-day, and so I can do a better job of focusing on things you’ll get more value out of.”
There are a variety of qualification frameworks that sales folks will often refer to, each with its own helpful acronym. There’s the classic BANT, which stands for “budget, authority, need, timeline”—as in, the prospect isn’t qualified unless he has those four things: budget to pay for a solution, authority to command that budget, need for the solution, and a timeline as to when he wants to solve this pain. ANUM is another one I like, standing for “authority, need, urgency, money.” And I recently came across ChAMP, or “challenges, authority, money, prioritization.”
You’re probably seeing a pattern here. During the discovery process, you want to make sure that the prospect has the problem you’re solving, but that’s not necessarily sufficient. You also want to know that he does indeed have a process by which he considers and purchases technology to solve problems. You want to know who the person, or group of people, is who makes these purchasing decisions. And you want to know the level of urgency with which they want to solve this problem. Discovery is how you figure this out (to start).
The problem with strict letter of the law qualification when you’re selling an early-stage product is that, oftentimes, you’re having a conversation with someone who had no idea that this solution existed. If he didn’t even know that it existed, it’s probably pretty hard to have a set budget for it, right? And probably pretty hard to have a timeline. This is why some of the other qualification frameworks I mentioned focus on how big the problem is and how much urgency there is around solving it (even though our early prospects didn’t know that internet talent search engines like TalentBin existed, they certainly knew that technical hiring was a big challenge for them, and one that they were eager to solve).
In Early Prospecting we discussed how, thanks to the magic of the internet, you can often uncover discovery information ahead of interacting with prospects, and even use that information to engage them. Depending on how much of this information you are able to gather for a particular prospect, you could be pretty well informed ahead of your pitch. But you’ll still want to validate that information to make sure that it’s accurate and also, importantly, to ensure that the prospect knows that you know it. You’re diligent and have done your homework, so set the tone for the conversation: you have good informational backing for the argument that your solution is likely a fit.
Moreover, because you have this information, you’ll be able to position your discovery questions in a leading way, focusing on the part of the prospect’s business pain that is aligned with your solution.
exampleIf you’re from LifeGuides, makers of recruiting brand software, and you’re talking to someone whose company has a 2.5-star Glassdoor rating, rather than asking, “Are you familiar with Glassdoor?” the question would be, “You’re probably aware that your company has a 2.5-star rating on Glassdoor. Do you find it frustrating that negative employee content is crowding out the employer story you’d like to tell?” Or you might try, “When I Googled ‘working at ____,’ that Glassdoor page was the top result. Do you find it frustrating that they own that top result and hijack candidates who are looking for you?”
exampleOr if you’re Immediately, makers of an awesome sales-centric mobile email and CRM client, and you’ve determined that the prospect likely has primarily outside-based sales reps (based on the geographic distribution of their sales reps’ LinkedIn profiles), instead of asking, “Do you have outside sales reps?” you might instead say, “Based on what I saw on LinkedIn, you have sales reps in the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, and Dallas. That’s quite the outside team! Do you find that, like with most outside sales teams, they have a tendency to do a poor job of logging meetings and activities in the CRM because they’re not at a desk?”
Lastly, as with your other sales materials, your discovery questions will be a work in progress. But even while in progress, they should be documented. Make sure they are saved as a living list in a Google Doc that you can refer to (and, later, hand to reps that you hire).
The goal of all of this is to have the information you need for a productive pitch and down-funnel process. Or, if the account lacks important qualification criteria (like no pain, little urgency, or no ability to pay), discovery enables you to helpfully truncate the conversation, respecting the time of the prospect and, most importantly, keeping you from burning your time on something that will never turn into a sale.
importantThe critical thing to converge on is whether the prospect has the actual business pain that your solution is seeking to solve. If she doesn’t, this is going to be a useless conversation. Having done that, you can seek to discover the magnitude of that pain and if she has tried to solve it previously, along with how successful those attempts have been. All of this will give you a nuanced understanding of the prospect’s business situation as relates to your solution.
exampleTake TalentBin’s discovery process. We would start by asking what sort of technical roles an organization was hiring for, and how many. So this might have been something like, “I saw a few technical roles on your careers site, but over the next twelve months, what software engineering headcount do you think you’ll be hiring for? And what proportion of your hires do you think this will be?” Once we had an answer, we’d get into pain associated with the organization’s current means of solving this problem, as in, “When you think about how you currently do technical hiring, would you consider it easy?” (A leading question. No one is going to call his or her job easy!) Once the prospect had responded to that, we would then cascade further: “Do you find job postings insufficient to get the sort of software engineer applicant flow that you want? Have you had to do passive-candidate recruiting and outreach, for instance via LinkedIn?” If she answered no to this, then we knew the organization may not even have the pain we solved, and we’d have an uphill battle. If she answered yes, we’d cascade further, into problems that we knew many prospects were likely to have. For instance, “Interesting. Are you like most of the folks I talk to, struggling to get the level of responsiveness to LinkedIn outreach that you’d like? Is it a lot of time for not a lot of response? Right, well, many folks don’t check their LinkedIn messages. Do you try to fix this by searching out personal email addresses so you can have a direct messaging path with better responsiveness? Yeah, I don’t blame you. Who has the time?” or, “Very nice. Yeah, it’s kind of a lot of time, huh? But it can be worth it, because the response rates are so much higher.” The idea is to keep cascading down the prospect’s pain—its size and urgency, how it’s currently solved, and the downsides of those approaches (sounds like your sales narrative, right?!)—all while recording this information in your handy dandy lab notebook.
You’ll also want to touch on the downstream business implications of not solving this pain point.
exampleIf you’re Textio, the service for job-posting text optimization that is particularly helpful for raising the number of female and people-of-color applicants, it might be something like, “Why is diversity hiring so important to you? What will happen if you aren’t able to hit your diversity hiring goals?” To which the answer might be, “Well, the CEO has publicly committed to these goals, so I’ll kinda be in a lot of trouble nervous chuckle]!”
Lastly, you’ll want to try to tie your discovery questions to the features you’ve built to solve those pain points.
exampleFor LifeGuides, not only would that be asking questions about Google search results and Glassdoor average ratings, but it might also be things like “It seems you’re concerned about getting your employer branding story told. Have you thought about interviewing or recording video of your employees talking about their jobs? Yeah, it is a lot of work. It’s no wonder you haven’t gotten around to it.” LifeGuides makes it extremely easy for employees to use their laptop webcams to record testimonials about what it’s like working at a company, so they remove that time cost. Or, “I saw that you have a careers Twitter handle and a premium LinkedIn company page—that’s great, it shows that you’re ahead of the pack! How do you find content to distribute on there? Yeah, it is a struggle to constantly find new things to publish that present the recruiting brand voice. I get it.” LifeGuides makes recruiting brand content production easy, and high volume, so you’re teasing out the pain associated with needing large amounts of recruiting brand content to share.
Think about doing the same with the features your team has built, by targeting discovery questions to validate the existence of the business pain those features intend to solve.
Assuming that your discovery questions about business pain and urgency point to a worthwhile opportunity, next you need to understand the ins and outs of how this particular organization goes about purchasing things to solve business pain. Start with the people who would be using your solution. Do they exist in the organization? If not, it’s going to be hard for your solution to get used! How many are there? Do people on the team have particular specialties?
Then it comes down to authority and commercials. Who is the person or group of people that makes decisions about buying solutions for the organization or this particular slice of it? Have they done it before? Do they know what this process is? Is there a formal evaluation period for this sort of thing (“We buy all our tools in November and December for the year ahead.”)? Or is there discretionary budget that can be utilized outside of typical budget cycles? This is why it’s particularly good to cover other common solutions in the pain and urgency section of your pitch—if a prospect has spent money on solving this problem before, they clearly have a process for doing so.
importantThough it may feel weird to directly ask about this sort of thing, it’s very important to do. It’s great if an organization has business pain, but if they are unable to spend money on anything, let alone your solution, you’re wasting your time. And if your point of contact can’t make purchasing decisions, that’s fine—but you need to sort out who can, so you can make the case to the person with decision-making authority.
While the main goal of discovery is to qualify the prospect, you’ll find yourself uncovering other valuable information. You’ll start to get a sense of the general maturity level of the organization and their ability to solve the problems your solution addresses. You’ll understand how forthcoming your point of contact is and how readily he shares information. You’ll even start settling into a better back-and-forth communication pattern, which is what you want the rest of your presentation, and the rest of your pipeline journey, to look like. And beyond all that, you’ll benefit from demonstrating your commitment to making the conversation about the prospect’s needs and business realities.
Once you’ve completed discovery, you’ll move from the part of the conversation where you are primarily consuming information to one where you are both consuming information and communicating it. Note that I didn’t say that you’ll be moving from listening to talking. If you are doing it right, you will still be consuming lots of information, asking lots of questions, and eliciting lots of feedback. However, you will be doing this while communicating your sales narrative, as documented in your slides, presentation, and demo scripting.
Before we talk about specific parts of your presentation and demo, here are some overarching guidelines on things that will make you successful in your approach (and which may be different than prior presentations you’ve likely done).