When an owner first calls me, he’s usually confused, and he’s usually in some pain. Sales has been hard for a while. He’s not sure why. He doesn’t know how to grow from here, and he’s been sold a few things already that didn’t fix it.
If I started that first conversation by listing everything I could do for him, I would lose him at hello.
So I don’t. I start every engagement the same way, with a Sales Discovery, and I want to walk you through what actually happens in one, because most owners have a picture in their heads of a consultant showing up with a clipboard and asking “what’s working and what’s not.” That’s not it.
Why I start here and not with training
There are four or five places a sales problem can live. It might be strategy. It might be process. It might be what the numbers are telling you, or not telling you. It might be the people and how the roles are drawn. From the outside those all look the same. They produce the same symptom, which is a number that isn’t moving.
Buy training for a strategy problem and you’ve trained your team to execute the wrong plan faster. Buy a CRM for a people problem and you’ve got a very organized record of the same losses. The order matters. Diagnose first, then decide what, if anything, to buy.
That’s the whole reason a Discovery exists. It’s the most effective thing I do, by a distance, and it’s the doorway to everything else.
Step one: the assessment
It starts with forty questions, and they go to more than just you.
Those forty questions touch sixty-five separate elements across four areas: strategy, process, analytics and people. What comes back is a scored picture of where the company is strong, where it’s already broken, and where it’s about to break. The last one matters as much as the second. A red flag you can see is a problem. A red flag nobody’s noticed yet is next year’s problem, and it’s cheaper to fix now.
The part that makes this work is who fills it out. You do, and so does everybody else who touches a customer. Your leadership team. Your sales team. The service coordinator and the project manager who talk to your customers all day and don’t carry a quota.
I’ve written before about the four versions of the truth. You have one. Leadership has one. Sales is running a third most days. And the people closest to the customer hold a fourth, which is usually the most accurate one in the building and the one nobody thinks to ask for. The assessment is how I get all four on paper before I’ve talked to anybody.
Step two: the one-on-ones
Then I sit down with people individually.
Here’s the difference the assessment makes. I don’t walk in and ask what’s working and what isn’t. I already have the scores. I already know that the owner rated the sales process a seven and three of the reps rated it a three, and I walk into each conversation asking about that specific disagreement. Why did you score it that way? What happens on a deal that made you say that?
Preparation gives me better questions. Discovery gives me the answers.
Those conversations are where the real material is. People will tell an outsider things they won’t say in a meeting the boss is running, and they’ll say them in specifics. This is also where the whiteboard comes out, because what goes up on it belongs to the people in the room, not to me.
Step three: the list
Everything from the assessment and the one-on-ones gets scored and ranked into one prioritized list of what’s broken, what’s about to break, and what to fix first.
That list is the deliverable. It’s also the statement of work. There’s no separate proposal that appears afterward with a different set of priorities in it. What we found is what we fix, in the order we found it matters, and it goes into a shared portal where both of us can see the tasks and where they stand.
We might adjust as we go. What we don’t do is skip the process, because I’ve seen what happens when you do.
The uncomfortable part
I’ll be honest about this, because it’s the part nobody puts in the brochure.
A Discovery can be painful. The truth shows up in it. The owner finds out what the reps actually think of the process. The sales manager finds out what the service team has been absorbing. Some of those conversations create drama, and you have to work through it rather than around it.
But if you stick to the process, it holds. I’ve graduated a number of clients out of this work over the years, and there’s not one who wouldn’t put their name on me as a reference. Not one I’m working with today who wouldn’t either. That’s not because it was comfortable. It’s because it was true, and true is what they were paying for.
If you want one
A Sales Discovery runs about forty-five days, and it’s sold on its own. You don’t have to commit to anything after it.
Fair warning before you write to me. It surfaces disagreements inside your company you may not enjoy hearing. At the end of it you might decide to do nothing for now, and that’s a legitimate answer. You might decide to use somebody else for the fix, and if so I’ll make the introduction. What you’ll have either way is the first honest picture of how your company sells that anybody has ever put in front of you.
If that’s worth a conversation, email me at dean@salesgrowthimagination.com and tell me what’s been hard this year. That’s enough to start.
Dean