Lesson 28 - Learn your prospect’s current state and desired future

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Understanding your prospect’s current challenges and their desired outcomes is critical to positioning your solution effectively. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to identify and map these insights. Your assignment will involve writing a summary of a prospect’s current state and their desired future based on your research.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, we're going to learn what to say to your prospect once you're actually in the room with them. This is the first part of our discussion on the value framework, also known as a value based conversation. What it essentially comes down to is that you need to take steps and ask the right questions to understand your prospects, needs, challenges and goals. And there are a couple of different steps to doing that. Two things you need to know before we dive into the value based conversation. First, you should never start by trying to sell your solution. Right off the bat, the first part of any valuable conversation is you listening and asking questions you need to be seeking to understand, seeking to understand what your prospect is going through. What are the negative impacts? Where do they want to be? What are the challenges and roadblocks to getting there? What are they looking for in your solution? What are the metrics they're going to use to to to measure and evaluate that? And then you can finally start to think about earning the right to talk about your solution. So first thing to know, you're not there to sell yet. You're there to learn. Second thing you need to know is you really need to have the right people in the room to have a productive conversation. If you're talking to someone that is brand new, they're an end user. They don't have any influence or power. They don't really know how the organization works or what the high level challenges are, and you're just not talking to the right person. And you should, you should leverage the people that you are talking to. It's not that they're not valuable. You can learn what you can from them, but ultimately, you want to get a referral to the person with the influence and credibility to get an opportunity done. That way you can learn kind of the high level goals and initiatives. So now that we have those two things out of the way, right, we're not selling yet. We're listening, and we need to have the right person in the room. Let's talk about the different steps to a value based conversation. The first thing that you need to know, the first thing that you need to do to kick off is to ask questions about your prospect's current state now, current state questions have no judgment attached. They are neither good nor bad. What you're asked when you're asking about current state, you're just asking, What are they doing today as it relates to your solution, right? So you want to think about, how are they solving problems related to your solution today? What are the tools or workarounds they're using? Are they currently facing the challenges that you typically see when you talk to prospects in their role, who's all involved in their current prospect process? So it's really just like, What is your setup? Who are the people involved? What are the processes involved? What is the technology involved? What solutions have you tried before? Again? No good or bad, just talking it out once you have the lay of the land. Well, actually, let me give you an example. Let's say that I'm a salesperson. We're not going to work for Sprout Social this time. Let's work for Tableau. If you haven't heard of Tableau, they are a data visualization platform. So if I were a salesperson working for Tableau, they do data visualization, I might reach out and say, um, you know, what are the current what is the current tool set that you have in place to support data analytics today, which teams are involved in the collection and analysis of data at your organization. What are the limitations you're encountering with your present data visualization software? Do you face any challenges sharing data insights with multiple stakeholders? So what I've done there is I've asked about technology, I've asked about people, I've asked about challenges, and I've asked if those and I've asked about challenges that I normally hear. Once we have a full understanding of the current state, then we move to the second part of the conversation, which is arguably more important. We need to uncover the negative consequences of that current state. This is where we want to start uncovering the pain. We want to start uncovering why those challenges are so bad, why they can no longer live with that current state. This is so so important, and I'm going to talk about this again when we get to med pick, and we're talking about identifying pain, when you are talking about the negative consequences of their current state. It can't just be, oh, this is a bad problem that you have. It needs to be. This is a $10,000 problem, a $50,000 problem, a $200,000 problem, right? You really need for them to sit in that pain and understand why. Why these negative consequences are so dire that being said, once we're thinking about their negative consequences, we need to be asking, Why is what they're doing today not working for them? What challenges is it causing? How is it affecting top line business initiatives? How is it personally affecting the person you're talking to, and their team and their function. What are the specific metrics that are being negatively impacted today, and how much is it costing them when it comes to time, productivity, cost, reputation, risk, right? You want to spend a lot of time here every day they don't do something. They are losing time. They are losing money. They are creating risk. It needs to be a timely problem. Now, if I were a salesperson working for Tableau, going back to our example, I might ask questions like, Hey, you mentioned that your current data analytics tools were slow to generate insights. Can you quantify the impact of these data processing delays on your project timelines? Have there been instances where decision making was hindered due to data visualization issues? Can you walk me through an example of that? I want to get them telling stories about these negative consequences once you've left no stone unturned in determining the negative consequences of their current state, it's time to move forward. We want to show them a light at the end of the tunnel. So here we're asking about their desired future state in a perfect world, how would their work get done? What would that solution look like? How would they ideally like to see their operations improved. How would their people work together? How would the processes fall into place? How would the technology support this? I know that this sounds a little kitschy, but I actually like to think about it like a like a fairy tale, right? What does their happily ever after look like? What does that happy ending? How is that visualized for them? So if I were a salesperson working for Tableau, I might ask questions like, hey, in an ideal scenario, what are the changes you'd like to see in your data handling processes? Can you describe your ideal data dashboard setup? What key information would it display to streamline your workflows? And then finally, once you've asked about their desired future state, then it's time to ask questions that fully uncover the positive business outcomes that would result if that future state were put into place. So again, you want to spend a little bit of time here, but here we want to say, like, paint the picture of what that world would do for them. What are the metrics that would be impacted? How would it personally benefit the person that you're talking to, their team, their organization? Um, if I were a salesperson working for Tableau, I might say something like, Hey, if these improvements were made, how would that impact your role specifically. How would that make things easier for your team? What would it impact when it comes to the amount of time you spend pulling data and building reports? How would it impact your ability to present data to key decision makers? Could enhancing your data visualization capabilities help you achieve your department's quarterly goals? Could it reduce the risk of making decisions with limited information? So when it comes to having a value based conversation, I'm talking about their current state. I'm talking about the negative consequences of that current state. I'm moving into their potential, desired future state, and then I'm painting the positive business outcomes of that. Notice that nowhere in any of that, did I actually talk about my product? Nowhere. Nowhere. Did I try to sell them on Tableau. Nowhere. Did I say, well, our solution can help you with that, not yet. What I'm doing here is I am fully understanding their situation, both now and where they want to be. So in the next lesson, we'll talk a little bit about where we take this. We're not done with the value based conversation yet, but for now, it's your turn. I want you to write down three discovery questions that are specific to your solution for each of these four areas, so their current state, negative consequences, desired future state and positive business outcomes. You can use AI for this. AI is actually really helpful for this. Let them know who you work for, what you do, some some details on the product, and ask AI to generate some discovery questions based on this, you know, current state and negative consequences, etc, for these four areas. So. Um. And once you've written these down, submit them to your mentor manager, new hire buddy for feedback, and use them in your next discovery call. Right? These are relevant questions. This is what you should be asking once you get in front of the prospect, this is the bread and butter of discovery for you. You should really be starting to understand these areas, your study guide will walk you through it, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.