The start of the New Year… what a terrific time to perform anassessment of your own or your team’s demo skills! Doing an assessment now establishes abaseline for measuring change and improvement during the course of the year –and it only takes about 10 minutes per assessment.
For Yourself: Do anassessment of yourself. Have yourmanager do an assessment of you. Haveyour peers do assessments of their perceptions of your skills. Then compare…

For Your Team: Do thesame process, essentially – have each team member do an assessment of their ownskills; do assessments yourself of each member’s skills; and consider havingpeers do assessments of one another.

In addition to establishing a baseline for the year, gapsthat are uncovered between individuals, peers and managers can be quiteilluminating and represent opportunities for discussion, coaching, mentoring orother skills development possibilities ([warning: shameless self-promotion alert!] e.g., Great Demo!...

It shouldn’t be surprising that many sales and presales people are not be particularly skilled at doing Discovery… Why? When interviewing candidates for new sales and presales positions, we don’t explore their Discovery skills nearly in the same depth with which we evaluate other skills, such as the ability to deliver a credible presentation.

Consider the typical process for assessing a new sales or presales candidate:

- We review their resume and cover letter (note: people are perfect twice in their lives – at birth and on their resumes!). It is very rare that anyone claims to be proficient in doing Discovery as a resume “bullet”.

- Next, we bring promising candidates in for an interview, in which we ask many questions about them and allow them some questions about us and our organization – this is typically as deep that our evaluation of their Discovery skills ever goes – a handful of questions about the position, responsibilities,...

“We need a new system…” says the customer. “Great!” says the sales person, “We’ve got several possibilities for you…!” And the discussion then proceeds to explore lists of features and functions, needs and use cases. This is all wonderful, but what’s missing?

“Why do you need a new system?” is a key question to ask, when appropriate. The answer to this question may change the entire dynamic of the Discovery discussion and the resulting sales process.

For example, if the customer responds, “Well, we’ve been interested in a new system for some time…,” it may suggest that the customer is not really serious and that solving the problems inherent in the old system is not sufficiently important to change – it is not a Critical Business Issue. This sales opportunity is a good candidate for a “no decision” outcome.

On the other hand, if the customer responds, “Well, the COO has mandated implementing a new system to drive down costs and she wants it in place before...

Using provocative questions is a great way to start conversations and move a discussion into Discovery. A good provocative question causes your customer to:

- Rapidly qualify himself in or out as a reasonable prospect
- Agree that there is a problem to solve
- Open up to further questions

For example, imagine you sell sales process management/automation software and are at a conference with piles of prospects present. You join a table for lunch with 8 other people and everyone introduces themselves briefly. Someone asks you, “What do you do?” Your response can range from boring to intriguing:

Boring: “We sell sales process automation software.” (Yawn…)
Typical: “We help sales teams improve their processes.” (OK thanks, next…)
Intriguing: “Have you ever seen a sales team document their opportunities consistently?” Hmmmm, interesting…!)

For the intriguing option, a “No” response (often...