Tips for Deeper Discovery

Here are a list of questions to help you go deeper in your discovery conversations with buyers

It’s a reality that surprises most reps, and it’s the most common piece of feedback we hear once they try writing out business cases:

You’ll realize just how deep—or shallow—your discovery is.

Quality conversations = quality content. Shallow conversations = shallow content.

So here's a set of discovery tips to produce more effective content in Fluint.

Phrases for Engaging Conversations

Frame questions with these phrases to encourage deep, thoughtful replies:

• Tell me about when... (stories, not statements)
• To spend just another second on that... (higher volume of follow-up)

• The reason I’m asking this is... (state your intentions)

Problem-Focused Questions

• What makes solving for this more important than other projects you're considering?

• Has something changed inside your business, that’s making this the priority now?

• What makes you feel like you need to address this now vs. 12 months from now?

• When did you first notice X became a problem? What was happening that day?

• Have you looked into the cost of just keeping your current process as-is?

• Forgive me, but, to make sure I understand, why is that a problem?

• What did you think we could help with when you took this call?

• What other factors might be preventing you from solving this?

• How are you personally feeling about the situation?

• When you said X, what did you mean exactly?

Payoff-Focused Questions

• Crowd-sourced questions from the group.

• Once implemented, what would this enable you to do that you can't today?

• And for you, personally, how could this impact your own role and career goals?

• What's the ripple effect that solving this would have on the rest of your business?

• If this project drive X% more (metric), would that be helpful? Or not meaningful enough? Is there a specific metric your executive team would use to judge the success of this project?

• Based on an investment of X, what results would you need to deliver, to justify that level of effort?

• Could you help me understand how any short-term goals for this project differ from your long-term goals?

• If you were writing up the headline to announce the outcome of the project, what would you want it to say?

Process-Focused Questions

• Has your team setup a specific initiative to start solving this?

• Who in the company might feel left out if they weren’t involved here?

• Who from your team would share the most meaningful feedback with us?

• Who from around the company would you say is most impacted by this problem?

• If there’s something that will hold (decision maker) back, what would that be?

• What others risks are you seeing, related to switching over your workflow?

• How does your team review new projects? Any preferred approaches?

• When was the last time your team evaluated a solution like this?

• How’d that go? Any steps in the evaluation that were a surprise?