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.

Making Solutions a Habit

Making Solutions a Habit for the Sales Team

When I first accepted the role to build and lead a new Solutions team at CloudFactory, I knew I was joining an organization that had experienced significant success. I also knew the selling process that had taken them thus far would not scale to support the following growth milestones they hoped to achieve. 

My early assessments were as follows: 

1. Solutions involvement was uneven across the sales team. The single determining factor for a Solutions Consultant’s participation in a deal was their relationship with the Account Executive rather than the Solutions requirements of the given Opportunity. 

2. Sales had grown accustomed to following an “Organic” sales process, with only one common thread: close inbound leads as quickly as possible, which induced a behavior that I like to call a “Rush to Sign” (RTS).  

3. The consequences of RTS included incomplete client Discovery, incomplete success criteria, and inconsistent Solutions Architecture from deal to deal. 

My approach to address the assessed condition and put us on a scalable path was to pursue three main objectives.

1. Normalize the Sales-Solutions Relationship - i.e., Make Solutions a Habit

2. Define the roles and responsibilities within the PreSales Journey

3. Apply targeted standardization within the Pre-sales process. 

Making Solutions a Habit

There were three different levels of experience among the AE team, and each of these groups approached their relationship with the Solutions team in their own way. 

• The Grizzled Veterans had been around the company for a while and had each figured out a formula for sales success. To this group, Solutions Consultants added complexity and friction to their deals. They would avoid working with an SC whenever possible. 

• The Noobs had a year or two of experience in the AE role and relied heavily on the guidance of their manager and the Grizzled Veterans. Noobs had no idea who SCs were or what they did. Their interpretation was that SCs were a threat that they should avoid. 

• The New Seniors were recent hires who had been around the block a while and knew the benefits of working with SCs from past companies. The New Seniors worked with SCs whenever possible. 

My goal for normalization was to eclipse the prevailing thought that Solutions Consultant involvement was a matter of choice with a new concept: SCs were copilots for the Account Executives' deals. 

I employed a carrot-and-stick approach to achieve this normalization.

• Carrot: Document wins from the New Seniors, then use their testimonials to highlight the benefits of working with SCs.

• Stick: Actively monitor the Opportunity Pipeline for high-value opportunities without SC involvement. Engage the AEs manager to “encourage” SC engagement. Note: None of these steps are possible without Sales Leadership's full partnership and involvement. 

• Carrot: I became a fixture at Sales team meetings to share lessons learned, invite questions, and address concerns in the open for all to hear. 

• Stick: Working with RevOps, we set a rule in Salesforce that prevented qualifying Opportunities from advancing past validation without an SC assigned to the Opportunity. Note: Some AEs would game this rule (SHOCKER!), so continued vigilance in pipeline monitoring was necessary.

• Carrot: Dealwire announcements were updated to include recognition of the SC involved in all wins. I would actively monitor and comment on these wins, pointing out value added or obstacles addressed contributing to the ultimate success. 

• Stick: This stick was for my team. We promised to do no harm; i.e., we would not slow things down. Working with RevOps, we started tracking various aspects of “Close Velocity”(e.g., Time for Validation) to hold ourselves accountable to our promise. 

The results from these changes were phenomenal. Within a single quarter, the SC utilization quadrupled (as measured in both the Number of Opportunities and Pipeline MRR$), setting the stage for a record sales performance in the following quarter.