Imagine closing more deals just by tweaking your discovery call questions. Use this approach to the heart of the client’s needs and how they measure success.
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Chris Orlob from Gong recently shared some fascinating statistics from analyzing 2 million minutes or 2 million hours, or just a massive amount of data that Gong, gets access to as a result of people using it to record their outbound calls.
The two things that I think are really critical to all sellers that he talks about in his TikTok video is that the very best salespeople and the best qualifiers are talking and listening But you know that, right? The next thing that he talked about, though, was that on average, in these discovery calls, the best sellers are asking between 7 and 11 questions.
And I know that that is far more questions than what the average salespeople are asking.
In fact, I was working with a sales team not too long ago whose habit was to ask a couple of questions about the technical specs and then to give pricing.
That was their entire discovery process.
They weren’t asking about the current situation or their desired situation.
They didn’t ask about measures of success or values or objectives that the customer had.
They didn’t ask about the decision making process or decision making criteria, time frames, budgets, who was involved in the decision or when a clothes could be accepted.
They didn’t ask even about who else was involved or where the decision was driving down from.
Now I’ve just listed off maybe 7 or 8 different topics that you could be asking about in a discovery.
So 7 to 11 questions should be pretty easy, because when you ask your primary question, the second one is always a follow up.
What do you mean or why? Don’t fall into the trap of only asking tactical questions in your discovery.
Make sure you truly understand what the current situation is, what’s the problem that they’re trying to accomplish, or the game that they’re trying to accomplish? And why is that important? What’s their picture of a great solution? What’s their desired state, and how are they going to measure success? Make sure that you’re asking about decision making process and criteria.
Who is involved and how will they make a decision? And of course budgets and timeframes.
And if you craft those questions together, you will be part of those top group of salespeople that closes deals far more often than you lose.
Don’t forget to check out: Improve Your Listening Skills!