#006: Inbound vs Outbound Discovery Process

Welcome to the latest edition of the Succession newsletter where we share actionable tactics for growth-minded biotech sales professionals who want to improve their skills, exceed their quota, and take the next step in their career.

This week, we’ll discuss the differences between discovery conversations with inbound and outbound leads, as well as the pitfalls to avoid.

Read time: 5 Minutes

Discovery is the most important part of your sales process as it impacts every aspect of the sale. Poor discovery can result in lost deals, losing to competitors, and lengthy sales cycles. Most sales reps handle discovery in the same way for both inbound and outbound leads, which can prove to be a fatal mistake.

Let's dive in!

Definitions

🙋‍♀️ Inbound Lead: someone raises their hand wanting to talk to you

🎯 Outbound Lead: you proactively reach out and engage a prospect for a meeting

🔍 Discovery: The process of uncovering problems, that if not solved, have a negative impact on the prospect's business

Technical Sales Discovery Framework

Why are inbound and outbound leads different?

Inbound leads typically know your company and are reaching out because they have an active problem you can help solve. They will be more open to answering your discovery questions.

With outbound, you need to do more education and digging to identify a problem. They may be skeptical about your company and your ability to help them. It's important to frame your conversation upfront and open them up to answer your discovery questions.

Inbound Leads

Inbound leads are coming to you for a reason. The simplest way to kick start the conversation is just asking them why they reached out.

“Just curious, what was the reason you decided to reach out to us?"

Most often, they'll start sharing exactly what is going on, the challenges they are facing, etc... Now you're able to jump right into your discovery questions.

In some cases, they'll say "I just want to learn about your capabilities". If that happens, jump to the outbound section and share your discovery insight.

Challenges with inbound leads

They often come to you with a specific problem that is technical in nature. Your goal in discovery is taking that technical problem, figuring out the root cause, and connecting it to the business impact.

However, most reps respond by going into question-and-answer mode without digging into the reason behind the question. (Check out this post for how to respond)

Outbound Leads

For outbound leads who don't know much about you, you need to earn the right to ask discovery questions. To do that, frame the conversation with a discovery insight.

Create Your Discovery Insight

With any sales call it's important to do your homework on the person and company ahead of time. This is even more important for outbound leads who may not know much about you.

Your discovery insight is a quick story about how you've helped a customer who looks just like them.

As you do your homework here are a few questions to think about.

• Have you had other customers that look like them?

• What did they care most about?

• How were you able to help them?

• What was the result they were able to accomplish?

Discovery Insight Framework

"I've done some homework on your company and rather than tell you about everything we do (that would be boring) I’ll give you a quick example of how we helped [similar company to them] achieve [desired outcome]. When they came to us they had [problem] which was caused by [root cause] and led to [business impact]. The short story is, that we helped them with [solution provided] and achieve [desired outcome]. I'm curious if this resonates at all with you. What are some of the challenges you're facing?"

Here's a real-life example

"I could tell you about everything we do but that would be boring. So I’ll give you a quick example of how we helped a seed-stage company build a data package for their series A. They had a few targets they were going after, but only had the internal resources to focus on one. This meant they could waste a ton of time on this target only to have it be a bust and ultimately go out of business. The short story is, that we helped them create 8 disease models in parallel to speed up their time to data. In the end, they went forward with 2 targets that weren’t even the initial target of interest. This helped them get a data set strong enough to raise a $20M series A. I'm curious if this resonates at all with you. What are some of the challenges you're facing?"

Why it works

In 30 seconds you've been able to frame your unique value and how it helped a customer just like them. At the end of your insight, your customer will likely go off on a monologue about their current situation and challenges. You've now earned permission to ask your discovery questions.

**If your story is off base, they'll let you know and start telling you more about their situation and then you can seamlessly transition into your discovery questions.

Creating these insights is a skill you have to practice. You'll likely struggle through it the first few times.

Wrap up

With inbound leads, you can jump straight into discovery. Just avoid the trap of going down the technical Q&A rabbit holes. With outbound leads, your discovery insight builds credibility and frames your offering through the lens of a customer just like them. This gives you the right to start asking your tougher discovery questions.

Take Action

• Pick 2-3 customer profiles you encounter frequently

• Create a short discovery insight for each one

• Practice saying it a few times

• Test them out on your next discovery call

We’d love to hear from you! Reply and let us know what challenges you face with discovery. We’ll dive into them in our future content and newsletters.

If you need any help putting this into action, book a strategy call with us.