- Last Monday we talked a little bit about the sales trainer
we hired and how we're evolving as a sales team
and we got a lot of requests for people
that wanted to see our closing questions
or the way that we structured our sales calls.
So today I'm gonna run through our entire
discovery call structure, how we structure call number one
to turn our cold leads into actual closed business.
So let's jump into it.
At the end of this video I will point you towards
this doc, you can download this whole doc
but we'll run through it first.
So here we go.
The discovery call in terms of structure
is the call that comes after the cold email.
So this is the call that you're trying to book
on those initial cold emails and the goal of this call
is to try to progress the deal, right?
Get a budget, figure out if it's the right decision maker,
figure out if there's actually a need for your service,
and try to get them to the proposal stage.
So we start with introductions on this call,
going back and forth, asking who they are.
Usually this ends up in us talking about the weather
or sports, Billy is very into sports
so that helps a lot actually.
I'm not too into sports so I don't usually talk about that.
Then we move into our short value proposition
which is basically who our company is,
what we do, all of that.
If you watch the talk that I gave,
it's like a 49 minute talk about the four strategies
that brought in all these leads for agency clients.
I actually go through that in more detail.
And then we jump into the part that I really want to cover
in this video which are our discovery questions.
So here are the discovery questions
that we ask on our discovery calls.
First we start off by asking, can you tell me
about your organization and your role within the company?
This usually gets them talking.
If they don't want to talk too much
we have some sub-questions so,
what's your main value proposition?
Who are your customers?
What type of products and services do you offer?
What type of work do you personally oversee?
Who are the other major players in the company?
So we can ask some follow up questions around there.
A lot of this we'll be researching
before we hop on the call.
Right, figuring out what their business is
or what their role is, it's good to research beforehand.
But it's also good to ask these questions
and get them to confirm a lot of research
because it's easy to make assumptions based on
research that end up being completely false
once you hop on the call itself.
Once we get a good idea of who they are
within the organization and what the company does,
then we move into, what areas of growth are you focusing on?
We're a marketing company,
obviously growth is huge for us.
For mobile app development companies
or for some other company,
it would be a question more focused on that.
A more general way of asking this question are,
what are your goals for the company for 2017?
Or, what are your goals for technology for 2017?
Something around those lines that will get them talking
about whatever it is you're trying to sell them on.
Then we dig deeper so, tell me about how you get
some of your best opportunities now.
These are all again marketing questions,
very marketing specific content here.
So where do these leads come from?
What stage are they in?
What do your best prospect customers have in common?
Basically getting them to outline,
if we were to work together,
what would this target look like?
In a mobile app development call, this would be talking
in more depth about app ideas they have,
tech stacks they use, how their tech team is structured,
things like that, but since this is marketing,
we're focusing more on marketing lead generation here.
Then we look to confirm.
So you're looking for more of these leads
and opportunities I assume?
Get them to say yes.
And then a lot of the time, once you get to this point
in the call, they'll have a pretty good idea
of how you guys work and how they want to work together.
Then we ask something like, when we reached out to you,
can you tell me what came to mind about how we might
be able to work together?
Or, when you responded to the email I sent,
could you tell me a little bit more
about how you thought of us working together?
Then we take all of the data from previous part of the call
and we retell our value proposition.
For X27 it would be something like if they're talking
about the type of leads that they want
or inbound, or literally whatever it is,
we'll restate something like that.
So let's say they get most of their leads from inbound,
we'll say something like, you know most of our
agency clients also get most of their leads from inbound,
what I found though is you can't really
rely on inbound too much because it's a lot of luck.
Right, you can't really scale inbound channels
without finding certain ways to grow
and get new cornerstone clients.
So that's where outbound comes in.
So that's how we reframe.
In the app development space it might be,
you know, they point out that they build
most of their stuff in PHP.
And you could say something like,
yeah we've got a full suite of PHP developers
and one of the biggest issues we find
when people are running a PHP team is,
you know, this, whatever you do actually find.
And then asking them to reconfirm that.
Right, pointing out some issue that they might have
based on your experience.
Then we transition the call with a statement like this so,
from what I'm hearing it sounds like we might be
a pretty good fit to work together.
I'd love to actually share some examples
of companies similar to yours that we've helped in the past.
Does that sound good?
And then if they say yes, you could move
to the closing part of the call.
We say something like, okay so let's do this.
I'm gonna put together some materials
that I'd like to share and review with you.
And I'd like to work through a marketing overview strategy
that we can both agree on.
The goal is to take them from this initial
discovery call where you get the budget
and you identify the need, to the next call
where you're actually presenting solutions to them.
Same with mobile app development,
same with web development and branding UX UI.
I know there's this anti-spec work mindset
that a lot of agencies have.
The design team, the development team doesn't
actually have to be brought in in this phase.
In my experience, the sales guy, if he's been
working close with designers and developers,
is usually able to get to this point by himself.
Or is usually able to at least come up with enough ideas
by himself to get them here.
So then we suggest setting up a screen share
where we discuss our tactics and get their input,
questions about each one so that we can come out
with a specific plan.
That way we both know exactly how we can
potentially work together.
Ask them if it sounds good.
When they say yes, we say, hey let's book some time.
How does Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. central sound?
Then we send the invite, ask if they have any
other questions and that's the end of the discovery call.
From there we move on to a proposal presentation call
which I can discuss in a future video.
If there's interest, let me know
and I can go through that as well.
Thanks for watching the video.
Feel free to like it to encourage this type of content.
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And if you need marketing support for your digital agency,
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Thanks.