Asking (more, better) questions translates well to the most successful reps.Too many sales discovery questions (15+), and you are running an interrogation. Too few, and you’re unlikely to unearth what matters – pain points.Aim for between 11 and 14 targeted questions per call.

Asking More Questions Builds Emotional Intelligence

A BDR will “follow the script” and ask, What’s your biggest strategic priority for this year? … when the buyer is already actively looking at products like yours – not the time for a diagnostic question, one that is asked to uncover pain.Leading with a diagnostic question when a buyer is not in that stage is annoying and won’t get you very far in the building trust and rapport category.

Discovery Questions Should Respect Your Prospect’s Stage In The Buying Journey

Latent pain: The first stage of the buyer’s journey. The buyer is aware they have a problem but is not quite ready to do anything about it. Said another way, their business challenge is an annoyance, but not something worth investing time/resources/money into … yet.During this stage, a question like “What do you hope to achieve by implementing a solution?” often plays well. It’s frictionless. It’s what they want to (or are willing to) talk about.When considering latent pain questions, your goal is to uncover a potential fit between your buyer’s priorities and your solution.

Sales Discovery Questions To Ask For “Latent Pain”

It’s also entirely possible – even likely – a buyer will ENTER the funnel at this stage. Inbound leads – demo form fills, sales inquiries, chatbot “I’d like to speak with a sales rep” replies, and so on.A buyer in the active pain stage has an evident, well-defined pain. They know something is broken and/or could be improved.During this stage, You are the “sales doctor,” if you will. Your job is to evaluate the patient … err, buyer … uncover their symptoms, offer current fixes, and create a sense of urgency.Any discrepancy here is more ammo you can use to move into impact questions.

Sales Discovery Questions To Ask For “Active Pain”

During the solution development stage, your buyer is gathering data and information. They want – need – to build their case for their boss, their team, and even themselves. They need to justify if and how a solution will fix their problem.Ask questions that get buyers to spell out the potential impact a solution like yours might have for your buyer.

Sales Discovery Questions To Ask For “Solutions Development”

It’s the time when your buyer is actively considering your product.This is what BDRs live for – when the buyer moves from “thinking about it” to ask their own questions.During the evaluation stage, buyers think through pricing, contract options, and feature sets, and focus on potential ROI.This is also when they may bring in other team members to ask questions and see the solution in action, though that’s often reserved for the next stage (The Decision).Your job as a salesperson is to glean as much information as possible about their expectations.

Sales Discovery Questions For “Evaluation”

To demo or not to demo. That is the decision during a sales discovery call.A “yes to demo” moves the buyer out of the discovery phase of the journey and into an active sales contact.Decisions are made by the committee. Understanding who’s a part of the decision and what their priorities are can make or break your deals.

Sales Discovery Questions For The “Decision” Stage

One-word responses to discovery questions are THE WORST.The data prove it out. According to Gong Labs, there’s a strong link between buyers’ response lengths and closed deals.The key: Provide your buyer the signal(s) that you want a lengthy response by asking open-ended questions.Consider the following question starters to draw out a longer, richer, more in-depth response from your buyer: <ul><li>Can you help me understand …?</li><li>Can you walk me through …?</li><li>Can you tell me about …?</li></ul>

Sales Discovery Questions That Trigger Long Responses

Using your prospect’s own words.We call this technique mirroring: repeating the last 2-3 words or the most critical words your prospect says. But it’s not just repeating a few words. You also need to turn their words into a question by upwardly inflecting their phrase, so it sounds like a question.And then stop talking. Just listen.

Sales Discovery Questions That Use Their Words

A sales discovery call is a conversation, a discussion. It is not an interrogation. So don’t start a new thread with each question. Instead, go deep. Your follow-up question should be natural – again, like a real conversation.Base your next question on what your buyer just told you. Your discovery call questions should feel spontaneous.Lastly, ask questions that lead to “next steps”.Ending a call without the next steps is like ending a blog post without a call to action.You are left with a bit of an empty feeling.

Sale Discovery Questions Based On What They Said

Up your discovery with these sales discovery questions. Learn how top performers nail discovery and put their deals on a fast-track to closed won.

history

History

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

startup

Startups

Sales Discovery Questions To Pinpoint Real Pain

Why are corny, formulaic attempts at humour so popular - that they’ve even caught on with cultural terminologies in the form of "dad jokes" or otherwise?People laugh at the juxtaposition of incompatible concepts and at defiance of their expectations-that is, at the incongruity between expectations and reality.The Japanese even have a name for it: oyaji gyagu, a.k.a. corny, dad jokes that young people respond to with a blank stareThese jokes thrive on their simplicity; one doesn't need the perfect punchline, a crafty delivery style, or an endless shelf life.

Why Cheesy Jokes Make Us Laugh

What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.There’s a hint of superiority in dismissing a conventionally bad joke. Recognizing a discrepancy is a show of ability and one’s calibre; it becomes a way to elevate one’s social status.Arguably, a bad joke is also a safe one, so laughing at these zingers responds to our desire for security. They become a reliable indicator of such relaxed, safe times and paved the way to playful emotions.

The Bad Joke

These anti-jokes thrive on their simplicity; they don't need the perfect punchline wit, or a crafty delivery style.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

entertainment

Entertainment

Why We Laugh at Cheesy Jokes

This is a good way to start off thinking about your month ahead.<ul><li>Strengths from the month prior. What went really well professionally?</li><li>Weakness from last month. What failed? </li><li>Opportunities ahead. What are the trends? What are customers/clients thinking about? Given your strengths, what can you capitalize on? </li><li>Threats in the coming month. This requires you to be a pure realist with a dash of cynicism.</li></ul>After you’ve outlined your SWOT and have a clear picture, you can start to think about how you’re going to dodge those threats and lean into your strengths tactically.

Do your own personal monthly SWOT analysis

Moments of self-reflection and time alone are very important. But that doesn’t mean leaning on your independence is the key to peace of mind.Around 64% of freelancers feel lonely with no support. That’s detrimental to success, creativity, and grit.Tell people what you want/need and what’s keeping you from getting there. Often, they’ll share an idea, connection, or resource that will help you overcome your most frustrating obstacles

Don’t isolate

Most worries are pointless —In her TED talk, Isabelle Mercier puts it perfectly. 92% of what most people worry about has already happened or isn’t going to happen.Every time you have a worrying thought, write it down and reframe it as an opportunity — it works 99% of the time. So, for example:Worrying Thought: “I feel like I’m going to lose this client.” Reframed Opportunity: “If I send them some creative ideas for our next project, the client is more likely to work with me again.”

Practice the art of reframing my worries

Between a new product release at my company Coworkly and launching our seed round of fundraising, I’ve been stacked with investor meetings, customer calls, product demos, mocking up new user…

productivity

Productivity

career

Career

problemsolving

Problem Solving

How to Turn Your Work-Life Worries into Opportunities

According to billionaire Marc Andreessen, startups too often underprice themselves. This may be true. But it also means that the startup has a good product. This is not always true. Startups are not prohibited from creating worthless MVPs. So before hiking up your prices, make sure you are first offering a good product. One that’s worth a higher price tag.

Advice From Marc Andreessen

People are willing to pay literally anything in return for a good product.

In this detailed story about the Ugly Pie, a pie shop in a small town in Maryland, three friends discovered a vital lesson: People are willing to pay literally anything in return for a good product…

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

How these 3 female cofounders quadrupled their sales by following Marc Andreessen’s crucial advice…

The most intuitive measure of product success, this is simply a measurement of how many people are using your product. You can easily get these numbers by tracking visitors and account activity.You should choose the most meaningful indicator of breadth for your business — whether total users, total active users, or total active accounts. Be thoughtful about your metric targets and set attainable goals for your team.

1. Breadth of Use

If a user isn’t logging into your product, it will be hard to retain them.To understand frequency, measure things like login frequency or session length.How frequently you want users returning depends on the purpose of your product, but usually more frequent is better. You need to examine the different types of users and the dynamics of who should be using your product, how often and for what reasons.

2. Frequency of Use

Understanding how many of your product features are being used is key to measuring success. One of the simplest ways to determine Depth of Use is by measuring the percentage of your product features that are used regularly.Start by identifying the top five features used by your core audience. These are the “value drivers” that keep people coming back to your product. By understanding your product's key features, you can also help keep your product successful.

3. Depth of Use

Usability is key to retaining users and the ultimate goal of any product is the ability to use it easily, correctly and as quickly as possible.<blockquote>To measure efficiency, simply look for one or more key workflows in your product — anything from registration, to onboarding, to new feature activation — and measure how far users get in that workflow before dropping off. Establish meaningful completion goals for each workflow.</blockquote>

4. Efficiency

At the end of the day, if a customer isn't willing to recommend you, that isn't success in the product world. By using Net Promoter Score (NPS) you'll be able to gather data on how satisfied your customers are with your product.

5. Satisfaction

problem with revenue as an indicator of product success is that by the time you're losing it, it's probably too

Measuring product experience can be challenging, but Pendo’s Todd Olson is here to help.

The 5 Key Measurements of Product Success

Accumulated debt can slow your shipping speeds, cause developer morale issues, or even sink your business entirely.

Technical debt

Often, engineers will know there’s the right way to do something, and the quick way to do something, but at times the team will intentionally incur Tech debt because they need to quickly deliver product to the market.To address this: You must track this type of tech debt in the backlog specifically because it is unlikely to be repaid and can turn into accidental design debt over time.

1. Deliberate tech debt

When designing software systems, we should try to balance thinking ahead and Future-Proofing designs with simplicity and quick delivery.To address this: You must refractor incrementally. This is completely natural and it needs to happen every now and then. Team/tech leads and product owners should be accountable for ensuring time is set aside to resolve this type of tech debt.

2. Accidental/outdated design tech debt

Bio rot tech debt happens over time. A component or system slowly devolves into unnecessary complexity through lots of incremental changes, often exacerbated when worked upon by several people who might not fully understand the original design. Symptoms are, among others, copy-paste and cargo-cult programming.To address this: You must do continuous refractoring. Try to avoid this type of tech debt consistently.

3. Bit rot tech debt

Not all technical debt is bad, and managing it well can yield tremendous benefits for your company.

There are 3 main types of technical debt. Here’s how to manage them.

<ol><li>A more powerful CSS - JS instead of LESS/SASS gives us the same language we know</li><li>Components - CSS in JS makes it simple to add specific CSS to a component. There is no dependency to add a link to the CSS file</li><li>Less styling code - Keeping your styling in JS should lead to fewer styling code</li><li>DRY - Many times the JS code needs access to information written in the CSS files</li><li>Developer EXP - CSS changes are hot reloaded into the browser</li><li>Gradual implementation - There’s no need for a 100% change in your codebase. You can introduce this alongside regular CSS files. </li></ol>

Reasons Why I Was Wrong Not To Use CSS in JS

When I first heard of this idea, I was shocked. For decades the best practice was to separate the HTML, CSS and JS concerns. You know, so you can just change the CSS and no need to touch the HTML and…

I swore never to use CSS in JS, here are 6 reasons why I was wrong

One of the reasons it’s so easy to slip into habitually criticizing others is that it makes us feel good: <ul><li>When you point out to yourself that someone else is dumb, you’re also implying that you’re smart. And that feels good. </li><li>When you criticize someone else for being naive, what you’re really doing is telling yourself that you’re sophisticated. And that feels good. </li><li>When you silently chuckle to yourself about how terrible someone’s fashion sense is, you’re telling yourself how refined your own taste is.</li></ul>

Criticizing Others

Chronic ruminators develop the habit of constantly replaying past mistakes. No amount of rumination or analysis of your past mistakes will change what happened. If you want to move on with your life instead of staying stuck in the past, you must accept the past for what it is. When in doubt, take action in the present instead of dwelling on the past. Do something useful, right now, now matter how small, and resist the temptation to replay yet another scene from your past.

Ruminating on the Past

Unrealistic expectations are a misguided attempt to control other people.Just like ruminating is an attempt to control the past and how we feel about it, maintaining unrealistic expectations is usually a subtle attempt to control other people.

Maintaining Unrealistic Expectations

Worrying about the future means living in denial about the fundamentally uncertain nature of life.Chronic worriers live under the illusion that thinking is always problem-solving and that planning always leads to greater levels of preparedness. But neither of those are true:<ul><li>Just because you’re thinking about a problem doesn’t mean you’re thinking about it productively.</li><li>And just because you’re planning — running through countless hypothetical future scenarios — doesn’t mean you’re any better equipped to handle them. Often, you’re just making yourself feel more prepared.</li></ul>

Worrying About the Future

“Criticism of others is a form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.”

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

“To think too much is a disease.”

“He was swimming in a sea of other people’s expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.”

Most people think about emotional intelligence as a skill, something you can build and train with practice. And while this is partly true, there’s a deeper truth about emotional intelligence that…

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

4 Things Emotionally Intelligent People Don’t Do

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” — Albert Einstein <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-you-can-quickly-become-genius-why-arent-aram-taghavi">Drawing on your genius</a> is simple in theory but hard in practice. It comes from mastering <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/post/edit/6352506283807043584">the one activity you love the most</a>.

Developing your genius

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” — George Bernhard Shaw Experiments are essential to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-principles-become-1-crowded-field-competitors-aram-taghavi/">encourage growth and new opportunities</a>.

Mistakes are inescapable

“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” — Mary Engelbreit How you decide to think determines how you handle stress and how healthy you are.

Change the way you think

<h2>“He who fears he will suffer, already suffers because he fears.” — Michel De Montaigne</h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><blockquote>Fear of missing out (FOMO) leads to suffering, yet those who suffer have FOMO.</blockquote>

Fear causes suffering

<h2>“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.” — Bill Keane</h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><blockquote>Being present every moment is the most important habit to perform my best and be happiest.</blockquote>

Remain present every moment

“If you want happiness for an hour — take a nap. If you want happiness for a day — go fishing. If you want happiness for a year — inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime — help someone else.” — Chinese proverb Happiness isn’t something that’s we can achieve, it’s a skill that’s cultivated and practised daily. Its mastery comes from serving others.

Don't pursue happiness, serve others

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.” — Helen Keller Focusing on the past or future mindlessly is a waste of time. What really matters is how well we're able to experience what we're doing now.

The door of happiness

“Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.” — Joshua J. Marine” Challenges are what get us into a state of flow, and flow makes life worth living.

Making an interesting life meaningful

"Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity." — Henry van Dyke Wealth is not measured by how much time we have to do what we want. Instead, it is measured by how much meaning we're able to derive from the time we have.

Time is eternity

<h2>“The only way that we can live is if we grow. The only way we can grow is if we change. The only way we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we are exposed is if we throw ourselves into the open.” — C. Joybell</h2><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote>Life is more exciting when things are unsure. Uncertainty teaches resilience, and resilience gives the awareness that we need to become our best self.</blockquote>

Growing means overcoming challenges

Words of wisdom from the world’s wisest thinkers are timeless, though the world continues to change every day. If you’d like me to help you manage your experiments as your consultant and coach, hop…

21 of the World’s Most Powerful Quotes Updated For Today

It's just another day, and you're doing what you need to do. And you can't help to wonder if there is more to it all. You may think about all the places you'd rather be in that is more exciting. Somewhere new, somewhere where you can find adventure and happiness.

We live in the Box of Daily experience that is routine and ordinary. The boundaries of our box define our daily life. When we dream about the prospects of an exciting future, we look outside of our box to find that hope. We hope a short contact with the outer world will change the architecture of the box, but in the end, the result is fleeting.&nbsp; For example, you think travelling to new places will leave you with excitement and happiness. But after a while, the excitement of travelling wanes and becomes part of your daily experiences.

The box of daily experience

The object of your desire can also be a new house, a new job, a new relationship, but the same pattern will emerge. All these things will become another part of normal life. You can change your external environment as much as you want, you will continue to travel with the one box that is always with you.&nbsp; The box is known as your mind. When you run away from your mind, it will always show itself in the end. That feeling of restlessness with always follow you.&nbsp;

The root of the problem is the box itself

Instead of viewing the box of daily living as a problem to escape, it is really the only thing we can hold onto. Instead of taking the regular events for granted, we can discover the genuine amazement that lives within them. The best tool one can use is the practice of gratitude. The key is not to try and rid ourselves of the Box of Daily Experience but to embrace the one we have now with its joys and flaws.

Embrace what you have

Travel is often seen as a pathway to happiness. This post is here to kindly remind you why it’s not.

Sales Discovery Questions To Pinpoint Real Pain

Why We Laugh at Cheesy Jokes

How to Turn Your Work-Life Worries into Opportunities

How these 3 female cofounders quadrupled their sales by following Marc Andreessen’s crucial advice…

The 5 Key Measurements of Product Success

Nicole Griffin