4 Step Sales Discovery Call Mastery Framework

Hey everyone, Kevin McCann here. And in today’s blog, we’re going to cover what happens when you finally get the first meeting scheduled with a brand new prospect that you’ve been targeting for days, weeks, or even months. And you don’t want to screw it up. So now, what do you do to prepare?

I’ve been working with a client recently, and he’s been successful at scheduling meetings, but nothing’s really happening after the meetings. It turns out he’s not generating very many proposals, and he’s stuck as to what’s been going wrong. I reviewed a few of his meeting recordings and quickly saw his issue; he has no structure or process going into the call. And don’t get me wrong. He’s researching the prospect, but he has no preparation strategy for how we want these discovery calls to go. Also, he has no clear outcome that he’s looking to achieve. As a result, he’s all over the map and can even lead some of these conversations right down into a rabbit hole, leaving the prospect confused. The question is, how do you run a discovery meeting that will provide value to your prospect, and you get everything out of that call, or that meeting that you need to, to kick your sales opportunity into action? The answer is that you use this four step sales discovery call framework to guide all of your initial conversations with new prospects to determine two key things. One, if they’re experiencing a problem or a pain that you can solve. And two, if they’re a qualified opportunity that you want to continue working with. I’m going to give you a high-level overview of the four-step sales discovery call mastery framework that you can use for every one of your first calls or meetings with your ideal prospects. Before I show you the slide overview, let me give you the backstory of how I came up with this framework. In the late 90s, I had just been recruited to go to work for Cisco Systems, the 800-pound gorilla in the computer networking industry. And when I got there, I was blown away by all the marketing and sales tools they made available to me as a sales rep. They had hundreds of presentations, tons of corporate overviews, basically anything I needed for every single one of their 1000s of products that they sold. But the problem was that every one of these slide decks began with slides about Cisco, the company, the number of employees, how they were number one or number two in every market that they entered, and generally how great they were. Then the slides went into detail on every single one of each product’s features in excruciating detail. Then the slides are showcase studies and examples of how great these products were and what they could do for the companies that bought them. All. This is great information. However, as I kept going through these slides, I was like, where’s the customer in all of this? Where in this presentation do we start diagnosing the pains or identifying the goals of our customer. These presentations were all what I would call “show up and throw up presentations.” I decided to change up the slides to make them more about the customer, and then that led me to this four-step framework I’m about to teach you. Where is your prospect today? What are they experiencing? What’s going on in their world? What’s going on in their business? What are some of the challenges that they’re currently experiencing? And how do they communicate their challenges? So, you want to understand what the current present moment looks like for the customer? The second thing you want to figure out is where do they want to be? What’s their future pace look like? Where’s their top of the mountain? Or what would their world be like if they got over this hurdle or over this challenge that they’re currently experiencing? And then the third step is, how will it happen? How will they get there? You want to get a sense of their plan to get to that top of the mountain if you weren’t going to be having this conversation today. You want to get a sense for, if we weren’t having this conversation today, what was your intention? How are you going to get to the top of the mountain and overcome this challenge? That will lead to step four, which is the engagement proposal or the offer that you’re offering this prospect, and the next steps for them to get started working with you. In this section, this is where you’re going to go into, here’s how we can help you here’s the services or the products we have to help you achieve those goals or overcome those challenges. That’s the framework that you want to use for every new discovery conversation that you have to keep you on track and understand where the customer is, where they want to be, how they intended to get there, and then you go into how I can help you achieve these goals or the challenges that you’re looking to uncover. In the next blog videos, I’m going to go a little deeper into each of these four steps. I’ll unpack the types of questions to ask and what to listen for along the way. I’ve also put together a cheat sheet that you can keep in front of you and refer to when making your calls.

And last but not least, I would love to hear from you in the comments below this blog. What challenges are you dealing with in your meetings? Whether it’s getting more meetings or what to say in the meeting or after the meeting. Let me know where you’re struggling, and I’ll provide more insights on what you can do to get past those current hurdles and those roadblocks.