#015: 7 pitfalls of discovery and how to avoid them

Read time: 4 minutes

Welcome to the Succession newsletter where you will improve your life science sales skills in 5 minutes per week. If you’re new here, subscribe below.

Discovery is one of, if not the most, important parts of any sales process. Whether your sales process is transactional or highly complex, discovery will make or break the deal.

What is discovery

Discovery is the mutual process of uncovering problems and needs that if not solved, have a negative impact on the prospect's business.

7 pitfalls reps make in discovery

1: Stay surface level

Discovery is about helping your customer (and yourself) get clarity around the problem and potential solutions available. Surface-level questions don’t get deep enough into the root cause of the problem. Surface-level questions are boring and don’t make your customer think. If you’re not asking hard or thought-provoking questions, you’re likely staying too surface-level.

2: Fall into the “pain and pitch”

This is the classic pitfall most reps make. Their customer mentions a problem or pain point that you can solve and so you immediately jump into how you have the solution and can fix it for them. While this seems logical (they have a problem that i can fix) it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem or pain. If your car broke down, you wouldn’t immediately start fixing it. You’d figure out why it broke down so you could apply the right solution to fix it.

3: Forcing a fit

Trying to make a deal happen even if it isn’t the best option for a customer. Not every prospect is a good fit for your solution. Don’t try and force it. They can smell your commission breath (even virtually). It’s better to find out early that they aren’t a fit than to waste precious time following up over and over only to close lost the deal months later.

4: Get happy ears

I had an old manager who told me I suffered from “happy ears”. I would leave a call and think it was a done deal. They said they liked what we offered and it could help them! Why shouldn’t I get excited? When happy ears kick in, we forget to do the basics like getting micro-commitments, multi-threading, or understanding the entire buying process.

5: Don’t address alternative solutions

Most reps are scared to bring up the competition or alternative ways the customer could solve their problem. This is extremely short-sighted. Customers have endless amounts of information at their fingertips. You better believe they are looking at competitors and alternative solutions. If you address alternatives, you can own the narrative and the pros and cons of different solutions.

6: Treating it as a one-time event

Most reps handle discovery on the first call and then don’t revisit it later in the sales process. The problem is that customer’s priorities are constantly changing. Especially when they’re in the process of updating workflows or protocols. If you don’t revisit and validate your problem statement, root cause, or the impact of not changing, you could miss out on critical information going on in your business.

7: Treat it as an interrogation

Discovery should be beneficial for the customer and give them greater clarity into their problems. If you interrogate them by asking question after question without providing your own insights, you’re not being helpful. You have spoken to numerous people in their shoes who have similar problems. Leverage your experience and insights to help guide your customers.

Now that we’ve covered some of the main pitfalls with discovery, I offer up a discovery framework you can follow to avoid these common mistakes.

It’s almost 2024! This means we’re all about to start the year back at 0. That’s the life we signed up for when we got into sales.

To set you up for success, we’re running a prospecting workshop on Tuesday, Dec 12, at noon Eastern Time.

We’ll cover how to build targeted prospecting lists, create intriguing offers, write problem-focused messages, and how AI can help.

As a bonus, you’ll hear firsthand what’s working directly from other life science sales reps.

Come join us!

Technical Sales Discovery Framework

The best way to avoid these pitfalls is to follow a simple framework.

Think of a framework as a protocol. In the lab, you create protocols to create consistency and repeatability. In sales, we use frameworks or processes to help us repeatably win more deals.

You might be thinking that sales is much more of an art than following a simple protocol in the lab. Tell that to any cell culture expert and see how they respond!

This framework should serve as a guideline for how to conduct a discovery conversation.

Current state: What’s going on in their world today?

Problem identification: What isn’t going as well as it should?

Root cause analysis: Why does that problem exist?

Business impact: What happens to the business/lab if it isn’t fixed quickly?

Solution scoping: What are all the potential solutions to solve the problem?

Agree to evaluate: Do they agree to evaluate your solution?

If you’re doing discovery well, you’re helping your customer get better clarity and understanding of their problems and potential solutions they can deploy.

Download 60+ discovery questions that follow this framework.

We go deeper into this framework in our Intro to Discovery course inside the Succession community.

Since we’re talking about discovery, here is a simple prompt you can use to get custom-designed discovery questions based on who you’re speaking with.

If you want to get really creative, you can download their LinkedIn profile as a PDF and upload it to ChatGPT to have it analyze the content and provide even more tailored questions.

To download a LinkedIn profile, click the More button and choose “save as pdf”.

1. Join the Community: The #1 community and training platform for growth-minded life science sales reps who want to improve their skills, exceed their quota and take the next step in their career.

2. Live Workshops: We’re now hosting live virtual interactive workshops for teams across a range of topics. Inquire for availability.

3. Strategy Call: In a 30-minute call we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.

4. Uncover Your Sales Blindspots: You know your sales team can do better but you're not sure where to start. This 20-question assessment is your path to clarity.