How To Run A Discovery Call - Strategy Session

now most people who are starting out in sales may not realize that sales is very much a scientific process and what i mean by this is that the average sales person who doesn't realize that this is a scientific process they'll go into a meeting and just ask some questions pitch their product and service and hopefully the prospect will buy and this typically doesn't work because it's very unpredictable on how the prospect or the potential customer might respond to your offering your product or service and you don't really know what's going to happen you just kind

of jump in there right and i guess in the beginning that's all right but if you want to you know consistently close deals you got to have a scientific process and know exactly how the prospects will react during each step now over the years what i've discovered is that there is a process that you can take someone step by step and it's very predictable so when i go into a sales meeting i know already what's exactly going to happen step by step from the beginning to the end of the conversation and what i want to

do in this video is i want to shed some light on this methodology and show you exactly how you can use the exact same framework that i have used and thousands of my students have used to successfully close deals and you want to make sure you watch this video into the end because if you miss out on this framework and you don't know exactly how you can run your sales meetings or discovery calls or strategy sessions well you're not going to be able to close these deals and figure out why people are not closing and

once you learn this framework even if you're not a natural born seller or maybe you're not the best smooth talker your closing rate is going to increase dramatically just from following these steps hey what's going on everybody my name is patrick dang welcome to my channel where we're going to talk about all things sales before we get started make sure to give this video a like subscribe turn on notifications if you want to see more sales videos like this and let's go ahead and get started so i'm going to give you the step-by-step structure on

how you can run your discovery calls and strategy sessions now to quickly define discovery calls and strategy sessions all that really means is that's going to be either the first sales meeting or it could be the second sales meeting where you're just asking questions to the prospect to understand whether or not they should buy your product or service now you're not actually pitching hardcore it's not necessarily a demo or presentation quite yet most of the time 80 of the time you're just asking questions letting the prospect talk and maybe 20 of the time at the

end of the conversation that's when you actually do any type of pitching or ask the prospect to take the next step of your sales process which might be to do a demonstration or a presentation so this is where you're just uncovering or discovering the prospect's pain to see whether or not they should buy your product or service now when it comes to using this methodology the first step you want to do is you want to build rapport with the prospect right so in the beginning of the meeting sometimes i know it can be a little

awkward when you're you know chatting on the phone or meeting them in person like what exactly are you supposed to talk about right how do you get the person to like you uh during the sales conversation because you know people like to buy from other people that they enjoy or like being around right so you want to make sure that you are a likable person and when it comes to rapport you know quickly to get you the idea of how it works uh most of it is actually is going to be determined by your physical

appearance and your tonality not necessarily the words you say it's just how you look and how you sound if you're over the phone most of it is how you sound over the phone so you want to make sure the way you look and the way you present yourself you know is in a respectable manner and it actually kind of matches the way the other person represents themselves so you know people like other people that are similar to themselves so the more you're like someone else the more they will like you so that's like a quick

summary and it doesn't really matter what you say so for example if i'm on the phone and i'm talking to a prospect all i really have to say is you know go on their linkedin see where they're from and see where they're working i'll say something like hey john how's it going john says all right cool what's up patrick i said oh i saw you are from the chicago area how do you like it over there and we just start a conversation like that you know honestly it doesn't really matter what i say people just

you know resonate with my tonality we talk about the weather we talk about how things are going and then you know i just get the meeting started and after you build rapport for you maybe a minute or two um you know however long you want to do it you don't want to do it too long honestly and you just want to get the ball rolling and start the meeting so how i like to start is i would you know go into the agenda phase of the meeting you just want to set the expectations to what's

going to happen during the meeting so i'll usually start it off like this hey john um you know do you mind if you go ahead and get started john's going to say sure let's go ahead so then from there i earned permission to set the expectations for the call and i will say something like so you know i reached out to you because i want to see if i can help you with xyz so what we're gonna do with this call is i want to learn a little bit more about you what you're doing and

you know what your goals are and see if i can help you in any way and by the end of the call if we find that there's a fit to work together great you know we can move on to the next step of what that looks like but if we find that hey you know maybe it's not the best fit that's totally fine is that okay with you john and john's gonna say sure that's all right and we get the ball rolling but as you can see i set the agenda john knows exactly what's gonna

happen meeting i'm gonna ask a bunch of questions see if we can work together and then move to the next step i also made him more comfortable and made him feel like that he can tell me anything and that if he thinks it's not a good fit he can tell me right away from the agenda you move into the pain right so the pain is probably the most important part of a sales meeting and that's where you uncover the person's problems you know because if they don't have any problems that you can solve well they're

not going to buy your product or service so a majority of the sales meeting in my perspective should be spent on uncovering pain so to start things off right you can basically get an understanding of where the person is currently at and then where they're trying to go right that's simple as that so for example let's say john is trying to grow his business right so i could say hey john i noticed that you know you have a couple sales people on your team and i'm just curious to know you know how exactly were you

doing a cold email right now to reach out to new prospects and john might say like oh we're trying this but it's not working we're trying that it's not working either right so i'm getting a feel of where john is currently at okay then i will ask questions like okay well now that i understand where you're currently at and what the problems are what is your ideal goal and john might say something like you know i want my sales rep to get you know one to three meetings every single day uh i want these are

my revenue goals and and whatever it is right so we're we're basically getting where this person at and where they're trying to go and we're trying to figure out what's stopping them okay and i would ask more questions and say like okay well what exactly is stopping you from achieving the goals that you you know just told me and john's gonna tell you exactly what's stopping him and i'm uncovering more pain diving deeper into it and making sure that we are both aware of what his problems are because if there's no pain there's no sale

so you know after you spend a good amount of time understanding the pain then you want to understand whether or not this person can buy your product or service and if they're qualified to even buy right so the next step i would usually go into and you don't have to do this in this order is budget okay so i would ask john the budget you know so if this company set aside a budget to invest in a solution like i'm offering right so if i'm offering like coaching or consulting i need to understand if they

have money and if they're willing to spend money to buy my my services essentially right or if you're selling a product it's the same exact thing so you ask questions like hey john you know just curious did you have a budget set aside for something like this and john will give you here but and after you do the budget what you want to do is you want to understand the decision making process of uh this company right so this is gonna be authority okay so who exactly needs to sign off on the deal does it

is it john is it the director is it the vp is the ceo or they all have to sign you need to understand how a company internally works so that everyone is approved and you know the deal gets through and if you're selling to let's say an individual or like a solo entrepreneur or just a regular person does their wife have to approve or their spouse or their husband have to approve uh something like this before they make a purchasing decision right so you know whether you're selling to a big business or you're selling to

you know like a mom-and-pop shop you want to make sure you know everybody who needs to be involved in the decision-making process to move the deal forward so now that we have covered authority the next thing we have to figure out during the discovery call is timing you know when exactly can people move forward with the deal when it comes to signing the contract or actually getting started in implementing your services or buying your product or service so an example would be if i was selling coaching and consulting services to companies i would say something

like hey you know if we were to work together when do you want to get started and they would give me a day on you know what that looks like and it's kind of like future pacing right um i'm making them imagine what it would be like to work with me and then they give me a date in the future and then from there if you know i know they want to get started in two weeks then i have some room to figure out okay well when do you want to sign the deal then i

would say something like okay so if we're gonna get started over here when do you think we can expect to you know finish the contract and you know get all the ingredients going so we can move forward and the person we might say okay well next week it's probably a good day and that's when we get uh that's when we'll have a meeting to follow the decision makers to see if whether or not we should do this so timing is extremely important because if you don't know the timing on when someone will buy your product

or service then you know time's gonna pass and you're just gonna wait and wait and wait until they get back to you and it's gonna be really weird but if you know the timing of when uh people will actually make a decision then you can forecast your sales appropriately and finally when you get the timing down the next step is the close okay so when it comes to sales there are many different type of sales some sales you know you can actually close someone on the first call and other sales it might take multiple meetings

before you actually close a deal now i've done both before and typically if you are closing on the first call well after you you know go through this entire discovery process then you can actually pitch your product or service and then just close the deal right there and how you start that off is you could say okay well you know thanks for sharing all this with me now i might be able to help you you know solve some of your challenges do you mind if i just share a little bit about what i do and

they're going to say sure and then that's going to open it up for you to pitch your product or service if you know that people are not going to buy on the first call let's say you're selling something to the enterprise where it's like tens of thousands of dollars and you know someone's not gonna make like a fifty thousand dollar decision on one call well what's gonna happen is you know you're gonna set it up for the next call and you're gonna say okay you know thanks for sharing all that with me now i might

be able to help you do you wanted me to share with you you know what typically the next step is to move forward with our products and services and they might say sure and then from there you kind of describe to them okay so we did a discovery call next step is to do a presentation and you give outline of what that looks like and then you see whether or not they're interested enough to do a presentation or a demo or meet in person or whatever it is right so whether you're closing on the first

call or closing out the meeting to get to the next part of the sale cycle is pretty much the same thing right it's kind of like you get an idea of what you do and then you get them interested enough to move to the next step now when you get to the next step if it's a presentation then you actually do your pitching of you know what your products and services do and you tailor it to that specific uh pains that they shared with you on the discovery call so that's pretty much the general strategy

when it comes to writing your sales meetings and your discovery calls and you know understanding that the prospect should even buy your products and services when you go through this entire methodology you really have a good understanding of whether or not someone will buy you know their timeline you know the decision makers you know they have a problem you basically know everything you need to know when it comes to closing a deal so you know there's no real question to whether or not someone will buy and if they don't you know fulfill all the qualifications

for example they don't have a need they don't have a budget well you already know they're not gonna buy so go ahead and use this process apply it to your sales and you know see whether or not it makes a difference when it comes to you know understanding your prospects and closing more deals and actually let me know in the comments which step you found most valuable you know which one do you personally think is most important when it comes to running your sales meetings and if you enjoyed this video make sure to give it

a like subscribe and turn on notifications if you want to see more videos like this and if you want to dive even deeper into some of these sales strategies i actually have other sales videos which you can check out here so that said my name is patrick day and i am going to see you guys in the next one