One of the key principles in discovery is asking open-ended questions to help your prospect open up and talk about their problems. For example:
“What piqued your interest when I reached out?”
“What brought you in today?”
“What’s top of mind for you at the moment?”
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it gets inefficient for two reasons.
It forces your prospect to do all the work of articulating their own problems, which leads to vague descriptions that require multiple clarifying questions.
It opens the door to discussing problems that your product doesn’t currently solve, which immediately puts you in position of weakness having to backpedal.
The way to solve this is to use a menu where — just like in a restaurant — you tell your customers what people like them usually come in for and let them pick one. Here’s how to execute it:
Open by naming the common problems
The menu is the list of the 2-3 common problems you solve. Any more than that and it turns into a monologue that’s hard for your buyer to digest. (Note: even if you think your product solves 10 problems, the reality is 90% of your customers buy you for the same 2-3)
There are a couple of ways to structure this:
“Well look, most of [persona]s I talk to are struggling with one or more of the following: [list the problems]”
“Usually when [persona]s are evaluating [solution type]s, it’s for one or more of the following reasons [list the reasons]”
For example, when I do disco with founders exploring sales coaching, I say:
“Most founders I talk to are struggling with one or more of the following: generating leads, closing deals or upselling existing customers”