There are three steps to Applying Discovery:
What did we learn in CDIM?
The processing part is internalizing what we've heard to determine a strategy.
The execution, how does this show up in my next engagement?
We conduct Discovery to help us create the most impact in our client communications and sales engagements. To move your deals forward, you must apply discovery properly. Let's revisit the discovery process and answer the question, "How can we internalize what we've just heard to devise a strategy?"
We need to be intentional about the liminal stage of processing. "How am I going to process this?" In Discovery2Win, we are very deliberate about breaking down the Win Plan. For those who have taken Discovery2Win, this will be a refresher. For those who haven't taken Discovery2Win, this might be a new concept.
A Win Plan is not a contract; we are not bound to its conditions, and breaking it will not be enforceable. A Win Plan is a dynamic strategy that bends and adjusts to your client's needs and represents the ultimate destination of where your client is trying to go. Some of the questions a Win Plan answers include; how does a benefit align with the impact statement? Does the Win Plan show a clear relation to information from Discovery?
The impact statement is found out through CDIM™. It is the impact (I) that your solution will have on the organization. For instance, an impact statement might sound something like, "Increase in efficiency to allow for a 30% increase in customers without adding headcount."
At 2Win, we love a good check box. That's why we've broken down the impact statement into a simple formula to help you develop your own.
Impact Statement = Key Impact + Metric
The key impact you learn in discovery, plus whatever metric you were able to gather or provide, equals your impact statement. This is a great tool to help you sit down and think through these key messages, how are you going to support that statement operationally.
This comes from the current and desired phases of the CDIM™ framework. It is important to uncover what the need is, inside of that operational organization. This need could be:
A pain
A goal
A challenge
A desired state
It could sound something like, "Key project communications are often lost in the clutter." One action we could take is to use Document Management and Workflow to automatically route information to the correct resource.
Pro Tip: Use the clients' terminology to ensure they attribute their success to your solution.
To explain the result of the fulfilled need, we need to know:
What is the key impact statement?
What are the elements of the conversation, presentation, or demonstration that we need to include to prove the impact statement?
Now that we have that information, we know the exact message and key points we have to make.
Pro Tip: This is a great time to partner with someone. If they ask you what is this deal about and it takes you 5 minutes to answer, it's probably because you are processing as you go. If you had a Win Plan and they asked you the same question, you'd give them the impact statement and they would know with crystal clarity the points you need to make.
You only have so many opportunities to make your message impactful and build to the impact statement. The Win Plan provides clarity in the prioritization of those few items that are going to make the biggest difference. It helps focus the conversation when it could go a million different directions. Depending on where a deal originated from, we might work the Win Plan differently and prioritize different messaging. Below are examples of how to use a Win Plan, depending on the deal origination.
This is when someone at the top of an organization has a problem that they need fixed or they want to improve a key metric. This dictates how we are going to use the Win Plan because we are going to start with the impact statement. If we are starting at the top level our conversations are probably going to be end of the story first.
Get to the point
Fill in the details later
A bottom up deal is much more in the weeds. Not necessarily in a bad way, there are just a long list of things that need to be done before you get to top level conversations. Bottom up deals are more operationally driven. Depending on how you work, the Win Plan gives us insight on how we should approach an operationally driven engagement.
Here's how they are doing it today
This is what we're understanding
This is the change you are hoping to accomplish
This is how we do the change
This is the impact to the business.
Pro Tip: In each situation, we are walking up and down the value pyramid. Ensuring that everyone understands the impact you can have throughout the organization.
The degree to which your solution can be personalized influences how you will approach the engagement. Solutions that are highly customized, creates an expectation in a buyer to receive customization throughout the process. But what do you do if there is only so much you can customize?
When you have a hard product to personalize, like an ERP, 80% is going to be the same for every customer because we need consistency, but 20% is going to be personalized with the language we use, because that is where we can really tailor our message.
Not all of us will have the information we need to conduct a thorough Win Plan. Sometimes, we get time to develop our Win Plan and other times, we have to perform Discovery On-The-Fly to round out our understanding. Nonetheless, you can still use the Win Plan framework to create a hypothesis of what we think is likely going to be discussed in the areas we are unsure about. For instance:
Top-Down Deal: You may know what the impact statements are but you aren't sure specifically what technical changes are going to be made.
Bottom-Up Deal: You might feel pretty comfortable about the operational changes that need to be made but you might have to make some hypothesis on what the impacts of that change might be.
The Win Plan is a tool for you to work with your broader sales engagement team on an opportunity. It helps you prioritize the most important messaging for that particular deal, making sure everyone on the sales engagement team is aligned on the key messaging to maximize impact in front of the customer.