Benjamin Ard (00:56)
Welcome back to another episode of Content to Close. Today I'm joined by Nick. Nick, welcome to the show.
Nick Lopez (01:02)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Benjamin Ard (01:03)
Yeah, Nick, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun subject. This is episode 10 of the series. I'm excited to see where we go. We haven't covered this subject at all on the podcast, so it's going to be great. But before we dive in, Nick, let's get to know you, your background, work history, all that fun stuff. So the audience gets to know you.
Nick Lopez (01:21)
Yeah, so I have a background within sales and marketing, starting off with marketing for a variety of different companies, including a plastic surgeon, a theater, and a travel exchange company. But then from there, my career path led me into sales, which I really enjoyed doing. I was able to sell within the multifamily industry under marketing, which allowed me to take all the knowledge that I had acquired by doing the marketing tasks, getting other clients to actually use these different tools and expanding their businesses. And as I went through my sales career, I started to be able to join different teams and help them, like with new hires, helping them elevate their teams. And that's what led me into learning and development still within the sales realm, which I really, really enjoy.
Benjamin Ard (02:14)
I love it. That's amazing. Well, Nick, what we decided to talk about today is operationalizing discovery. And it was cool — in our emails back and forth, you called out this idea that as we move beyond surface level questions, it really does make a significant impact on the deal and the client life cycle. And I really latched onto that. I think that this is a great point. So to kick it off, what are some of the mistakes that you see people getting wrong when it comes to discovery questions?
Nick Lopez (02:57)
Yeah. So discovery is your opportunity to learn all about your client, to learn their processes, uncover any pain points, find out what their need is, just everything you can about your client. And a lot of times we skim over that or go through the motions. We're taught to do this with open-ended questions. And what we really want is the client to divulge as much information as possible. But there are a couple of pitfalls that come up time and time again. I think the first one is just asking surface level questions, not digging deep enough into the topic that you're talking about at that time. And if you think of each topic like a pillar, you'll ask your first question and then all the questions after it need to pertain to that same topic and you're digging as deep as possible in order to uncover as much information. And it's not until you've learned everything that you can that you move on to the next pillar.
The other thing too is a lot of times when we ask surface level questions, we're bouncing between topics which can get the client very confused. If we're asking multiple questions at a time, they may answer one, but forgot the other two that you had just asked. And then just really having just surface level questions and brushing through them, we sometimes can miss the pain points that they're actually saying, but we're not latching onto.
I think the other pitfall that sometimes comes about is not truly active listening, not allowing the client to talk or not asking engaging enough questions to get them to open up. That's the discovery meeting. It's all about them and you're there to learn. So following the 80-20 rule is really good where you're talking 20% of the time, mostly asking questions, and then they're speaking 80% of the time so you can learn everything there is about them.
And when you take these two things — just asking surface level questions or not actively listening — I think a lot of times when we just quickly brush through these items, sellers tend to go into pitch mode. They want to talk about what they want to talk about. And this happens a lot whenever the client doesn't seem very engaged or they're offering short answers to your questions. A lot of times we fall back on what we know and that's our solutions, that's our product. And so your discovery meeting now turns into a pitch, which could be very detrimental to the whole overall sales process, because you're pitching on something that you think you know, or you assume you know about this client, and so it could be misinformation, or you're pitching on something that is not even closely related to their actual needs.
Benjamin Ard (05:44)
I also love how I cut you off right when you were about to talk about active listening — perfect example of not what to do. So I apologize. So when you go into these calls and I love how you're digging deep, you're not doing surface level. I love this visual of the pillars. Do you typically as a rep, as I'm going into a discovery call, do I know what those pillars are in advance and it's a matter of digging down deep, or does that discovery call actually identify the pillars I need to focus on?
Nick Lopez (06:21)
I think it's a little bit of both. So I do think you need to do your prep work. You need to have your standard questions that you want to ask, not only around the client to learn about them, but also around your product to know if they have something in place or who their current provider is. And then from there you can dig deep. But I think that if they say something that uncovers something completely different than you wanted to talk about, continue down that path. Because it's important to them, they wouldn't have said it if it wasn't important. So it may be a pillar that you didn't even think was important, and maybe even a pillar that isn't 100% pertained to your solution. However, it's something you may need to explore, because there could be a part of it that does pertain to your solution and something that you can expand.
Benjamin Ard (07:14)
Well, and I feel like, correct me if I'm wrong, as you're discovering, I love how you talked about — this pillar may not be the perfect fit for your product, but there's components that you can solve. I feel like the honesty during that conversation is also really important to say, "Hey, this is a giant problem you have. Here's the part of it we can solve. Here's the part we can't, but I'd love to be able to give you resources." I feel like that is also a great trust building opportunity.
Nick Lopez (07:45)
100%. Yeah, even if you're not able to solve for it, if you're able to build a relationship, build trust, or have really great rapport because you're listening to them and understanding and relating and empathizing with their situation, I think at the very least you're building that relationship. But at the same time, you're learning more about them. And even if you're not able to solve for it, you've heard them out and you can steer back into the direction that you want to take the conversation.
Benjamin Ard (08:16)
How do you know when to stop digging on a pillar? How do you know you have discovered it and asking more questions would just be painful?
Nick Lopez (08:32)
You always want to ask another question. That's the part of digging deeper. That's peeling back that onion and getting to the root. But I do think there are times where you need to move on to the next subject, maybe because of time constraints, or maybe you start to realize that the client is saying the exact same answers to you. You're realizing that they're not going to go deeper because it may uncover private information that they're not able to talk about. And so you just want to pick up on those cues. You want to definitely dig deeper to make sure you've collected all the information that you can. But if you feel like you're in a situation where it's not really going any deeper, then you need to move on to the next pillar.
Benjamin Ard (09:16)
Okay, Nick, we were emailing as well and you had this cool concept that I feel like every seller wants to have in their process. When you do this right, the discovery process, the actual buyer can start selling themselves almost on the solution as opposed to you having to pitch them. What does that look like? How does that transition happen during this discovery phase?
Nick Lopez (09:43)
Yeah, so that's probably my favorite part of the whole sales process is when you start to see light bulbs go off in the client's mind. So as you go through discovery and you're asking questions, you're peeling back that onion and digging deeper, a lot of times clients realize this is an issue or this is a challenge for me and it's annoying and it makes my team gripe about it. And for the most part, they understand what the impact is. But sometimes they don't really understand long-term, what is this impact to us? Or what does this mean for our team? And how is this affecting my team's morale?
So as you dig deeper into your line of questioning, you can start to uncover situations and really press on the pain points. And how this looks like in practice is asking them questions: How is this affecting your team on a daily basis? If we were able to solve for this, how would this free up your team's time to focus on other things? How does upper management look at your KPIs and what is most important to them as far as goals? And are you reaching those goals as of right now in your current situation?
And I think one of my favorite questions to ask is, "If this continues, what does that look like for your team? How does that impact your company?" And so it starts to get the wheels turning in your client to say, "This is more of a situation than I actually thought it was. And it's not only affecting our company, it's affecting my team, it's affecting me because we're not hitting the goals, I'm not getting the bonus." A lot of times, if a situation doesn't affect them almost personally, it's still very surface level. But when you get down into your goals and your promotion and your bonuses, that's where it's like, "Alright, this is a big deal. And if it continues, it's only going to continue to affect us negatively. So I need to do something about this now."
And then you can even ask questions like, "If you are able to solve for this, how does that make you look and how does that make your team look in the eyes of upper management? Can you be the hero or can I help you be the hero?" And so they start to look at it as a personal level and say, "I need to solve for this and from what you're telling me, I think your solution might be the one that can help me get there."
Benjamin Ard (12:08)
I absolutely love everything you just said. I love the personal approach. And I think this also goes back to the pillars you were talking about where as I'm digging, I need to find out what pain, not only the business is experiencing, but the person I'm talking to, what is their personal pain point? So we've done all this cool discovery work. We've learned about the client. We found the personal pains, the company pains. It's not surface level. How are you saving and storing and building this knowledge up so that as that customer progresses from sales to success, the rest of your organization, that that stuff doesn't get lost and that knowledge is actually usable for the rest of the organization, especially like client success and other groups?
Nick Lopez (13:26)
Yeah, I think having a good handoff, a good transition is definitely crucial because you want to continue that rapport. You want to continue that relationship that's built and you want to continue that positive client experience and make sure that it resonates throughout the whole company. Anybody who's going to talk to this client, we have the same messaging and the consistency throughout our company.
So two ways I think that are good practices to have is one, document everything. I know a lot of sales teams, I was the same way — I go through and talk to all my clients. I'm out in the field. It's a long day. And the last thing I want to do is my admin work. I don't want to have to remember and type everything into a CRM. But for me, I was very much like, I need to write this down now. Otherwise I'm going to forget what happened, which made it easier at the end of the day because I just copied and pasted off of my notebook.
So documenting everything is definitely crucial. Not only what happened or what was said or the fact that I did a discovery meeting, but information about the client, anything that's crucial — like this client really loves data, or this client is very relationship based and said they only like to talk to people on the phone versus email. Any crucial bits of information are always good too. And then of course, any type of expectations that were set, any type of deliverables that you said we're going to be able to do, any type of level setting or expectations that the client will bring to the next phase, whether that's onboarding or client success, make sure those are documented as well.
And then I think another best practice would be to have a prep meeting. It doesn't have to be a huge, long prep meeting, but when the transition is going to happen, sales connect with success real quickly to say, "Hey, this has been the sales process. This has been the client. Here's everything you need to know about them. Here's the expectations that we set. Here's the timeline that I told them is going to happen." And they have the agenda and the layout of how we operate. That way the client success person can pick up from there and even refer back — "I know you and salesperson Steve talked about XYZ. I want to just reassure you that that's the same plan we're going after." Building that relationship and having that client experience is just going to make advocates for your company and allow you to really grow with long-term clients.
Benjamin Ard (16:09)
Do you recommend having that handoff meeting with the client or without the client? Or is it kind of a case by case scenario?
Nick Lopez (16:16)
I would recommend both. So I would have a first prep meeting without the client, just so you can talk about things. And let's be honest, there are some clients that are very challenging. They're very tough. They want things exactly the same way. And so I think having an honest conversation internally is always good to say, "Hey, we met some roadblocks. This is how I got past those. I foresee this could happen again. I want to prepare you because they are very by the book. They know what they want. They don't like a lot of fluff. They may come across a little bit stoic or more harsh than some of our other clients, but just know this is how they operate because they're getting it from their ownership or their upper management."
But then if you're able to, or maybe for some of the clients that you've deemed as enterprise clients or special clients that you want to give a little bit more handholding, then have that meeting with the client to say, "Let me introduce you to your client success team. Here's how the transition will happen. I'm always around if you need me, however, they will be your point of contact." Let's make sure that transition is good and that client feels very comfortable moving to the next department.
Benjamin Ard (17:40)
All right, Nick, we're almost out of time. So one final question. One of the big focuses for this podcast is how content plays a role in the whole process of everything we're doing. I love everything we've talked about, but how do you view content as a part of the discovery process? How does that play a role?
Nick Lopez (17:58)
So with the discovery process, the main goal is to learn about your client. So definitely don't want to lose focus of that. We don't want to revert to a pitch. So I would say keeping content at a minimum is probably ideal. But with that said, in my past companies, we used to use a diagnostic checklist to give them a visual so they could relate to certain things and uncover things. This helped when they really didn't know what their pain points were. They didn't know a lot because maybe they were new to the position or something like that. That checklist allowed them to get a visual and relate things. We also had collateral that showed them what was happening in the industry. It asked questions like, "If this sounds familiar to you, maybe you're in this boat as well, or maybe you're in this category." And so it got their wheels turning because they could relate to other clients within the industry.
I do think that any type of leave behinds are always great as well. After your conversation, if you are able to leave something that has a little bit of information or little nuggets about your company and about your solutions, this can get their wheels turning. And hopefully we'll get them to learn a little bit about the solutions that you have, other than what you've already told them. But also we'll get them thinking about the questions they want to ask, because you've set up your next meeting, which is going to be your presentation or your pitch. Then you can have a deeper conversation around the solutions. But at the same time, they're intrigued and that collateral allows them to prepare for those meetings.
Benjamin Ard (19:41)
Plus my two cents on the subject. If you're doing that deep dive discovery and then can find the proper leave behind that actually addresses the subject or the pain they've experienced, it's just trust building to say, "Hey, it wasn't lip service that the rep said, yeah, we can absolutely solve those." All of a sudden it's like, "Oh, there's content here that talks about this pain point. Okay. They must really solve it because they didn't just make that up all of a sudden. This has to be something they actually take care of."
Nick Lopez (20:10)
Most definitely.
Benjamin Ard (20:11)
Nick, this has been amazing. We are out of time. I really do appreciate all the insights today. For anyone who's listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Nick Lopez (20:22)
So LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. I am on LinkedIn with all my contact information on there.
Benjamin Ard (20:29)
For anyone listening, scroll down to the show notes. We will have Nick's LinkedIn profile right there. Nick, thank you so much. Really do appreciate the time and insights today.
Nick Lopez (20:43)
Thank you, thank you for having me.
