Discovery: Discovering Rewards (and Risks)

The Discovery stage of Pre-Sales, as the name would imply, is an opportunity to discover possibilities. Having validated an Opportunity, this is the stage in which Sales and Solutions get to work—rolling up their sleeves to explore the prospect’s identified needs and then document them and their associated goals, constraints, and risks. However, when you work in an innovation field, such as AI, the exploration doesn’t stop there. It’s the role of a Solutions professional to examine the prospect’s use case and continue to ask questions in an attempt to uncover additional value that the prospect hasn’t previously considered.

It’s possible to further the Discovery conversation beyond requirements gathering into a new, more enriching path that can create attractive new options for the customer to consider

A customer prospect enters Discovery conversations with expert-level knowledge of their own use case. However, their presentation of requirements is limited by their knowledge of what the selling organization offers. prospects may be unaware of the latest features. Or worse, they may misinterpret the capabilities of the selling team, which can lead them down the path to a dead-end outcome. Even if the prospect is spot-on in their understanding of the published offering from the seller, they cannot possibly be aware of the lessons learned by the selling team in recent months, weeks, or even days in some cases.

When there’s a gap between the prospect’s understanding of the offering and the full breadth of the solution’s possibility, it’s a Solutions professional’s job to identify and then reconcile that gap in understanding with utmost care. Prospects have little appetite for a brain dump by the Solutions team. By uncovering and exploring a prospect’s gap in understanding with curiosity and care, it’s possible to further the Discovery conversation beyond requirements gathering into a new, more enriching path that can create attractive new options for the customer to consider.

There is another side of the Discovery process to consider, and that’s its role in identifying risks. The risks I’m talking about are more nuanced than those that would surface as part of the validation process (e.g., budget, timing, etc.) The risks that a Solutions professional can uncover require greater understanding, such as definitions of quality acceptance criteria or data cleanliness or even such broad areas as regulatory compliance or systems architecture. In all these examples, the knowledge, awareness, and curiosity of the Solutions Pro all play into surfacing potential vulnerabilities in these critical areas.

Once such risk factors are identified, they can be considered by Sales management (i.e., is this a deal-breaker?) and mitigated (i.e., can we resolve it in pre-sales or mention it in the contract for resolution post-sales?) Most importantly, each risk identified during Discovery is one less issue that might surface later in the customer journey, putting the deal or the customer at risk of churn.

In a future post, I will go into greater depth as to how my teams utilize organizational knowledge sharing to inform their Discovery questions and track their impact on pre-sales effectiveness.