How To Leverage the Discovered Information?

Yes, discovery helps you win bigger deals faster. But how? Asking the discovery questions is one thing, what then?

You use the information you have learned. We'll explore how to turn discovered customer insights into practical arguments and sales tools. We'll cover three main areas: utilising the information in demos and customer conversations, leveraging it to strengthen positioning and build business cases, and finally applying it throughout the sales process, all the way to handover to customer success. By the end, you'll have a clear framework for making your discovery findings work harder in every opportunity and cashing in on the promises of good discovery.

Discovery Adds Depth to Following Interactions

Discovery shapes every subsequent customer conversation. When you understand your customer's situation, challenges, and goals, you can make every interaction more impactful.

Discovery Makes You Heard

Discovery helps you align your value proposition with each prospect's unique context. When you understand their specific situation, challenges, and goals, you can present your company and solution in terms that resonate with them. Instead of a generic pitch, you're telling their story back to them, with your solution as the missing piece. No one likes a generic presentation, but everybody loves to talk about themselves.

You're telling their story back to them, with your solution as the missing piece.

For example, suppose discovery reveals that a prospect's primary pain point is slow response times to customer inquiries. In that case, you can tailor your presentation to address how your solution specifically addresses that challenge. You can then highlight features and benefits that matter most to them, backed by relevant examples, case studies, and metrics that address their specific concerns. This targeted approach demonstrates that you genuinely understand their needs and have a solution tailored to their situation.

Moreover, discovery insights help you identify and address the interests of all key stakeholders. While the IT team might care about technical capabilities, the CFO focuses on ROI, and the end users want ease of use. A good discovery enables you to address each perspective effectively in your presentations, creating a comprehensive narrative that builds consensus among decision-makers.

Discovery Helps You Ace the Sales Demo

Your discovery findings become powerful tools for personalising and even customising the sales demo to each prospect. Based on what you've learned about them, you can tailor both the presentation approach and the features you highlight. Instead of showing a generic product walkthrough, focus on demonstrating how specific features directly address the pain points and objectives uncovered during the discovery process.

When showcasing features, explicitly connect them to the problems and goals the prospect shared earlier.

The most effective way to leverage discovery insights is through both personalisation and customisation. On the personalisation front, reference specific challenges they've shared, use their industry terminology, and tell relevant success stories from similar customers. For customisation, consider adapting the demo environment with their branding and setting up examples that mirror their actual workflows. This combination makes it easy for prospects to envision themselves using your solution.

Remember that your dialogue during the demo should consistently tie back to the information you have discovered. When showcasing features, explicitly connect them to the problems and goals the prospect shared earlier. Don't trust prospects to make these connections on their own. Clearly articulate how each capability addresses their specific needs. This approach demonstrates that you've not only listened but truly understand their business challenges and have a relevant solution.

Discovery Arms You Against Objections

Your discoveries are invaluable for handling objections because they allow you to ground your responses in the prospect's context and priorities. Instead of generic rebuttals, you can reference specific challenges, goals, or requirements they've shared. This makes your responses more credible and harder to dismiss since you're using their own words and situation to address their concerns. Again, you don’t speak about you or your product; you talk about their specific situation and needs.

Discovery transforms price discussions from haggling over numbers to evaluating business value in the prospect's context.

For example, suppose a prospect objects to the complexity of implementation. In that case, you can point to specific workflows you discussed during discovery and their importance to the bottom line to explain why a more complex setup is required. Or if they raise concerns about user adoption, you can reference the training preferences and team structure they shared, showing how your onboarding approach is tailored to their organisation.

When it comes to pricing, discovered insights become particularly powerful. Having uncovered their key pain points, current costs, and desired business outcomes, you can justify your pricing by demonstrating the value and ROI for them. Instead of defending a generic price point, you can show exactly how your solution addresses their unique challenges and delivers measurable value that exceeds the investment. This transforms price discussions from haggling over numbers to evaluating business value in their specific context.

Discovery Makes You The Only Viable Option

Discovery findings provide you with means for differentiating your solution in the market. When used effectively, they help position your offering as not just different, but uniquely valuable to the prospect.

Discovery Cements Your Positioning and USP

Your research enables you to tweak your positioning and unique selling proposition to align with what matters most to each prospect. Rather than relying on abstract value statements, you can highlight specific capabilities and differentiators that speak to each prospect. This makes your positioning more credible and compelling because it's grounded in the prospect's reality, rather than relying on generic marketing messages.

Rather than relying on generic value statements, you can highlight specific capabilities and differentiators that speak to each prospect.

The information gathered during discovery helps you identify which aspects of your solution and unique value props will resonate most with different stakeholders. Let's say that discovery reveals that a prospect's IT team is struggling with integration challenges while their business users need better reporting capabilities. In that case, you can emphasise your solution's advanced API framework to the technical audience while highlighting your intuitive analytics dashboard to business users. You should demonstrate how your unique capabilities deliver specific, measurable benefits to their business.

Discovery findings also help determine and validate how to present your positioning in the market. Indeed, market positioning is set outside the scope of a single opportunity, but there is still wiggle room on how to utilise positioning in the sales discussion. If discovery reveals that the prospect prioritises quality and comprehensive support over price, they are interested in premium service. Then, if another prospect emphasises the high cost of system downtime, you can present how your solution is the current quality leader with a great SLA. You then use positioning (and evidence to support it) to justify premium pricing in both examples.

Discovery Allows You to Build a Business Case

Discovery forms the foundation for building a business case that resonates with buyers. The key is understanding that buyers typically focus on five main levers: revenue growth, cost reduction, risk mitigation, customer experience improvement, and strategic flexibility. Your discovery process should deliberately uncover specific pain points and opportunities within these areas, enabling you to craft a business case that addresses the buyer's most pressing concerns directly.

Specific, contextualised calculation carries far more weight than broad claims about efficiency gains.

The most effective business cases translate discovered information into a quantifiable business impact. Instead of presenting generic ROI calculations, use actual numbers and scenarios gathered during the discovery process. For example, if you learned that a prospect has on average nine critical incidents per month, each requiring eight hours of work, and your solution can cut that by two hours per incident. In that case, you can demonstrate concrete savings: "9 x 2 hours saved monthly × 140€ blended rate ≈ 30k€/year." Take into account the costs related to your service (implementation and recurring fees), and you have a solid business case. This kind of specific, contextualised calculation carries far more weight than broad claims about efficiency gains.

When presenting your business case, always emphasise that you're working with their actual numbers and situation, not industry averages or hypotheticals. Nothing undermines credibility faster than using generic examples when you have access to real data. This is where having a strong champion becomes invaluable, as they can help validate your calculations and assumptions, making the business case more credible to other stakeholders. Working together with your champion to build and refine the business case not only ensures accuracy but also gives them ownership of the story, making them a more effective advocate during internal discussions.

Discovery Makes Your Differentiated Value Real

Thorough discovery is essential for building a compelling, differentiated value proposition. You need to find out the alternatives they're considering and the cost of inaction. This knowledge forms the foundation for calculating and demonstrating your differentiated value.

To showcase differentiated value, focus on demonstrating the monetised gap between your solution and all other alternatives.

Differentiated value represents the extra business impact your solution delivers compared to the prospect's next-best alternative. This could be a competitor's offering, an internal build, or maintaining the status quo. The key is quantifying this value using the formula: Differentiated Value = (Benefit_you – Cost_you) – (Benefit_alternative – Cost_alternative). Building on the previous example, let's say your solution costs a bit more than the competition (500€/month vs 600€/month, both without setup fees) and the competition only saves one hour per incident, we can calculate your differentiated value: (30k€-12 x 600€)-(9 x 1 x 12 x 140€ - 12 x 500€) ≈ 14k€/year.

To showcase differentiated value, focus on demonstrating the monetised gap between your solution and all other alternatives. Your discovery should reveal not just the prospect's current costs and challenges, but also their evaluation of competing solutions. This allows you to calculate and present what truly matters: the incremental net gain your solution provides. Support these calculations with proof points gathered during discovery, such as specific workflows, compliance requirements, or first-tier support that make your solution uniquely valuable to their situation.

Discovery Lays Foundation for Every Step in the Sales Process

Learnings from discovery can be leveraged throughout the entire sales process. They guide proposal design, strengthen negotiation positions, and ensure a smooth handover to customer success.

Discovery Enables Crafting a Winning Proposal

Answers to discovery questions are essential for crafting winning proposals that resonate with decision-makers. A strong proposal effectively connects discovered customer needs to the solution's features and benefits, demonstrating both an understanding of and the capability to solve their pain points.

A strong proposal effectively connects discovered customer needs to the solution's features and benefits.

The proposal structure should follow a clear logic: first presenting the customer's needs (using their language and priorities from the discovery phase), then introducing relevant solution capabilities while explicitly explaining why each feature matters for their specific case. This is where discovery proves invaluable, as you can highlight exactly how your solution addresses their unique requirements and success criteria. For instance, if discovery revealed that system integration is a primary concern, your proposal should emphasise your API capabilities and successful integration cases with similar customers.

The final crucial elements are the business case and differentiated value, both of which are built directly from discovery insights, as explained above. This combination of customer-specific needs, contextualised capabilities, and quantified value creates a compelling narrative that positions your solution as the best, even as the only choice.

Discovery Sets Up Closing and Negotiation

Discovery insights are invaluable during the closing and negotiation phases, enabling you to maintain value-based discussions rather than getting dragged into price-focused haggling. When procurement pushes for discounts, your detailed understanding of the prospect's situation enables you to reframe conversations around business impact and ROI, rather than just focusing on pure cost. You can confidently defend your pricing by referring back to specific pain points, costs, and desired outcomes, showing exactly how your solution delivers value that exceeds the investment.

Quantified value makes it much harder for procurement to treat your solution as a commodity.

The business case and differentiated value can become your strongest asset in negotiations. When faced with pricing pressure, you can demonstrate precisely how your solution delivers superior business impact compared to alternatives, whether those are competitor offerings or the status quo. As in our example before, the solution offered produced 14k€ more value annually than a slightly cheaper competing option. Quantified value makes it much harder for procurement to treat your solution as a commodity.

Moreover, discovery helps you identify and leverage the interests of multiple stakeholders during negotiations. While procurement focuses on price, you can rally support from business users who understand the operational impact, technical teams who appreciate your unique capabilities, and executives who see the strategic value. Having a comprehensive view of stakeholder needs and priorities enables you to build consensus around value rather than getting stuck in price-based deadlocks. Your findings provide the ammunition to maintain the margin.

Discovery Sets Up Customer for Success

The benefits of a well-done discovery extend to handing a won customer over to customer success. If findings are shared with CS, it eliminates the need for the customer to repeat information they've already shared. Your CS team should receive a comprehensive handover package, ensuring they understand not only what the customer bought but also why they chose your solution and what specific outcomes they expect to achieve. If they don't receive this information and the customer needs to explain everything again, you're looking at a pretty bad onboarding experience.

Discovered information helps CS teams hit the ground running.

The discovery process reveals critical context about the customer's business challenges, technical environment, and success criteria. This information helps CS teams hit the ground running, as they already understand the customer's priorities, potential implementation challenges, and key stakeholders. They might even have instant upsell or cross-sell in their sights. Instead of starting from scratch, CS can build upon the relationships and knowledge established during the sales process, immediately focusing on delivering value rather than gathering basic information.

Most importantly, the implementation plan, based on the discovery findings, provides CS with a clear roadmap for driving customer success. This plan should include specific milestones, success metrics, and potential risks identified during discovery conversations. Having this detailed foundation means CS can proactively address challenges and ensure the solution delivers the promised value, rather than spending valuable time reconstructing the customer's context and requirements.

Discovery Brings the Big Bucks

Strong discovery directly correlates with larger deal sizes and higher win rates. When sales teams invest time in thorough discovery, they uncover the full scope of customer challenges and opportunities across different departments and stakeholders. This comprehensive understanding enables them to position enterprise-wide solutions rather than point products, naturally leading to larger deals, which may include identified cross-sell opportunities. For organisations, this translates to higher average contract values and improved profit margins.

For sales professionals, mastering discovery is the fastest path to increased commissions. Deals backed by strong discovery close at higher win rates and often with higher values compared to surface-level sales conversations. This combination directly impacts quota attainment and commission earnings, making discovery a crucial skill for sales representatives aiming to maximise their income potential.