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Your prospect shares, “It’s a manual process.”
You reply, “Does it typically go smoothly? What happens when someone is on vacation?”
“It’s a mess! We literally have tickets piling up on people’s desks…!” divulges your prospect.
Congratulations! You’ve just deepened and broadened your prospect’s pain using the essential discovery skill of Expansion Questions. So, what are they, how do you use them, and when?
Expansion Questions are a series of interrelated questions designed to span five of the seven discovery skills levels, from uncovering pain to reengineering vision. They are a simple, yet essential skill to master in doing discovery, enabling you to extend, deepen, and quantify your prospects’ pains and related impacted areas.
Expansion Questions leverage your experiences with other prospects and customers, providing you with lists of likely problem areas, impacts, and outcomes to explore with new prospects.
An Example
Let’s return to the conversation above. A skilled vendor and their prospect are talking about the prospect’s current workflow that handles customer requests and issues. Let’s listen:
Prospect comments, “It’s a manual process…”
Vendor responds, “Sorry to hear this – what takes place today?”
Prospect explains, “Well, each request is entered, reviewed, processed, escalated, and closed in a series of steps, with each step done manually by an individual, then passed to the next person in line.”
The vendor asks an Expansion Question, “Does it typically go smoothly? For example, what happens when someone is on vacation?”
The vendor knows, based on previous experience with similar prospects, that vacations often have serious negative impact on these workflows.
Prospect replies, “It’s a mess! We literally have tickets piling up on people’s desks…!”
Vendor responds, “What happens then?”
Prospect offers, “At minimum, it causes delays in response time which impacts customer satisfaction.”
Our vendor makes a note to come back to this impact statement later, but focuses on the current issue for now:
Vendor asks, “I see… How many folks are involved on your team?”
Prospect says, “We have a total of 12 people doing this, and it is far too many!”
Vendor pursues, “Understood. And what would you like to reduce this to?”
Prospect states, “I’d love to get this down to two people. There’s plenty on the team’s plate that needs to be done in addition to this process!”
Note that our vendor has quantified a desired outcome – a Delta – reducing the number of people in the workflow from twelve to two. Next, knowing that manual processes typically result in errors, our vendor introduces another Expansion Question…
You can enjoy the balance of this article here:
https://greatdemo.com/expansion-questions-an-essential-discovery-skill/