When salespeople express their struggles with closing deals or overcoming objections, they often attribute it to a lack of "closing skills." However, the root cause of these issues is usually an improper or incomplete "discovery" process.

At SAYA we always reinforce to our clients the non-negotiable that we don’t sell things to people that don’t need our solution or wouldn’t find any value in it.

Well, in order to do that, you need to discover information regarding your prospect’s current issues, how it is impacting them and their business, and how a proper solution might impact their future.

Because, without this you are just pitching your product and service, not providing a specific solution in order to fix a problem. 

In the 6-step SAYA System, after you’ve done your Expectations Check [check out this blog for a refresher!] it’s time to transition into the second step in the SAYA System: Discovery.

A proper close starts with a thorough Discovery. Conversely, an improper discovery can sabotage a proposal and lose an opportunity to work with someone who may really need your help.

 Components of Your Discovery

1. Understand Their “Prison”. At SAYA we teach our clients how to effectively uncover their prospect’s “prison”. This involves gathering the Details, Impact, Cause, and Emotional Impact of the issues that your prospect is dealing with. We call these “DICE panels”. This helps you more fully understand their problem and how it is impacting them, personal and professionally. 
2. Envision Their “Paradise”. From there, guide your prospect to share with you their future vision. What do they want their future to look like? How will it impact them? How could you potentially help? This helps both you and the prospect fully understand the implications of choosing to make a change, or not.
3. Why Now? After you have an understanding of the prospect’s “prison” and “paradise”, you can start to get an idea of how much value you could potentially bring. But, often we don’t lose deals to our competition, but instead because our prospects chose not to change.   

With this in mind, ask your Prospect why they are talking to you now. Is it just a case of coincidental timing? Is there something specific that is pushing them toward this conversation? Is there an urgency that they haven’t shared with you?

Once you have successfully completed these three steps, you will have a full understanding of the problem the prospect is looking to fix, the value the solution would bring, and why it may be an urgent situation. 

This will set you up to determine if you can help the prospect with this problem, what that solution may look like and understand whether that would be valuable to them. 

Don’t Rescue!
Throughout a proper Discovery, you may think of many questions you would like to ask your prospect, but you choose not to because of your own discomfort. If there is information you need to understand if you could truly provide value to them, then ask it. You will show them that you care enough about helping them that you’re willing to ask some hard questions. 

 Don’t rescue them. Don’t rescue yourself.

You don’t want to learn new information while being told no.
When you are able to execute a proper Discovery, you have a really good understanding of exactly why the prospect would tell you “yes” AND why they would tell you “no”.

And this is important, because the last thing you want is to learn new information while someone is telling you “no”.

Don’t show up and throw up.
It is such a natural instinct to want to talk about ourselves and how we help people. We are passionate about what we do and we want to share it with the world…especially when it’s our job. 

But your prospects are interested in solving their problem more than they are in the specific aspects of the solution. And in order to fully understand whether you could provide value, you need to learn about them, not tell them about yourself. 

Parking Lot Method
While you are guiding your prospect through Discovery, stay focused. There will be a lot of different “rabbit holes” you could find yourself potentially going down, Don’t take the bait. If some intriguing topics come up in conversation, set them aside and revisit them during a natural transition in the conversation.

After you’ve gathered around 3-5 D.I.C.E. panels, it’s time to transition into Step 3: The Buying Process. More on that later…

 If you’re interested in learning more about the SAYA System and want to start implementing it in your sales process, check out the Accelerator Online program. I’ll walk you through step by step! Questions? Book a call so we can talk more.