Decided Before Discovery?
What to do when the buyer seems to have a favorite...
You could call this the 3.0 age of the internet, with AI now being fully integrated into it. The reality is the game has changed over the last couple years and the sales rep needs to adapt to it.
If you receive an inbound lead, that buyer is likely 70% down the road with his/her decision. They’ve read the reviews, got their AI summary, talked to a peer, skimmed the websites, maybe watched a demo video at 1.5x speed. Your “discovery call” is often just a formality wrapped around a decision that’s already been made and often times this decision is not you.
So how do you get inside that remaining 30%, turn the tables and beat the odds? After giving about 1,500 Zoom product demonstrations and analyzing all the results, it’s three things, in this order:
Compelling differences. Not features. Not “we’re the leader in X.” Something genuinely different that a competitor can’t say with a straight face….but they’re difference that have…see #2….
Relevance to them, specifically. A compelling difference that doesn’t map to their actual problem is just noise. It has to land on something they already feel, not something you wish they felt. This is where your discovery will help for real.
Direct delivery to the Decision Maker. Differentiation that never reaches the DM might as well not exist. I’ve watched brilliant messaging die in a middle manager’s inbox more times than I can count. If you’re not meeting with the decision maker, (which most of the time we aren’t), we need to inspire our contact to come to the table internally and say “I may have found something interesting.”
Everything else, the rapport, the follow-up is table stakes; It does not win the deal.
If you want to actually move a number that’s already 70% set, stop polishing your pitch and start asking: is this different, does it matter to them, and is it reaching the person who can say yes?
Side Note: this applies to nearly all industries. A close friend of mine is a car dealer and I asked him recently, “How often does someone walk in the door randomly and walk out with a car?” His reponse was that “Probably 85% of buyers these days, by the time they walk in they already know what they’re doing and they’re pretty much there to ask some basic questions, look it over and pick it up.”