Bright Lights - Tips & Solutions

Sales 101

One Key to Success is Discovery

One of the major keys to success in sales is Discovery, and how in-depth you understand your prospects situation before you provide a viable solution. 

One of the tendencies we have as salespeople is to tell prospects all we know, rather than asking questions and finding out what they actually need.  We work on assumptions rather than finding out the details of the situation.  We want to show them all of our “stuff”, so to speak.  In doing this, we usually accomplish giving away our information including the solutions, and solving the problem for our prospect. It also has the possibly of opening the door for our competitor.  Our prospect could take the information and send it to your competitor and ask, “How much would you charge to do this, Joe is charging me $XX.XX to do this”.    That usually leads to a polite “I’ll think it over” or a “no” because I don’t need you anymore.  Thank you for solving my problem.  The sale goes away.

The key to Discovery success is finding out what the customer really needs by asking questions, leading to discovery before you offer any kind of solution.  Discovery is that first critical step where you ask questions and educate your prospect after you have their commitment for the sale.

An example would be questions such as:

• “Mr. /Mrs. Prospect, could you tell me a little more about how this situation is affecting your company’s performance.
• What is this costing you a year in actual dollars if you let this continue?
• What have you tried to do to fix this problem

Remember; use the Discovery Process of asking questions to find out the details of the real problem. This should help you avoid losing those precious sales.