Ep. 155 - You’re Probably Doing Discovery Wrong—And It’s Costing You Deals

Guest: Peter Cohan, Author of Doing Discovery

Most sales teams think they’re great at discovery. The reality? About 80% are getting it wrong—and it’s the single biggest reason why deals stall, go to a competitor, or die with “no decision.”

Peter Cohan, author of Doing Discovery, breaks down why traditional discovery methods are failing and what SaaS sales teams must do differently to uncover real customer value, build compelling business cases, and stop losing winnable deals.

The biggest mistake sellers make? Rushing to the demo before fully quantifying business pain. If you can’t pin down the numbers behind a buyer’s problem and desired outcome, you’re making it nearly impossible for them to justify the purchase—let alone get buy-in from their team.

Peter shares practical strategies to flip the script on outdated discovery calls, avoid the “interrogation” trap, and use discovery to drive urgency, not just collect pain points.

Key Takeaways:

✅ Uncover the Value Gap: The secret to avoiding “no decision” isn’t just probing for pain—it’s quantifying the gap between today’s reality and the desired future state.

✅ Vision Reengineering: Most buyers don’t know what they don’t know. Learn how to introduce new ideas without losing control of the deal or giving away discounts.

✅ Turn Discovery Into a Two-Way Conversation: Stop making prospects feel like they’re on trial—use quid pro quo techniques to make discovery a collaborative process.

Get ready to rethink how you approach discovery—or risk losing more deals than you should.

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Transcript

Jason Myers: Welcome to SaaS Backwards, the podcast that helps SaaS revenue leaders to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is a repeat guest. It's Peter Cohan. He's the author of Doing Discovery, The Single Most Important Element of Software Sales and Buyer Enablement Processes. So Peter's mission is to transform how sales teams approach discovery, one conversation at a time, helping them uncover real customer needs and drive better outcomes. Peter, welcome to the podcast again. 

Peter Cohan: Thank you so much for having me. Delighted. 

Jason Myers: You bet. Now in your book, you emphasize that many sales teams believe they excel at discovery, but often fall short.

So why don't you talk a little bit about what effective discovery entails and why it's pivotal to the B2B SaaS sales process. 

Peter Cohan: So let me answer that in the form of a small story. Real dialogue that took place a few years ago that actually precipitated me drafting the book. I was having a conversation with the head of sales and we were talking about his sales team, which is fairly extensive.

And at one point I said, so tell me what percent of your team would you say does a good job with Discovery? And he thinks for a moment, he says, probably about 20% and I scratched my chin and I thought for a moment, I said, 

well, 

tell me what percent of your team thinks they do a good job with discovery.

But you know, they really don't. And he says, hang on a moment. And I hear this clunk, clunk, clunk. And then He says, let me close my door. And I hear the sound of the door closing, kachunk. And he comes back and he says about 80%. And so what we're seeing here is a beautiful example of the Dunning Kruger effect where people believe.

They are well skilled in a practice, and in fact, they're literally 

just, 

just scratching the surface. So, 

you know, 

to answer your question, what does good discovery or great discovery look like? It's a lot more than uncovering pain. Let me pause, let me pause with that and we can explore this in a couple of different dimensions.

Jason Myers: Yeah, I think that's, that's a good direction to go because, you know, like I'm Sandler trained our consultative sales methodology, but I think exactly what they train you to do in discovery is to probe for pain and then twist the knife and see if we can make that gap between where they are now and their desired future state.

Let's see what we can do to build some momentum so that they want to fix it right? 

Peter Cohan: Exactly that. And so that is the thrust. That's the thrust of most sales methodologies. That's the thrust of most training. Let's uncover pain, let's explore it. And then we're already thinking about a solution. I've had the pleasure and pain of listening to literally hundreds, perhaps even thousands of discovery conversations recordings, and I can give you the the summary of the typical 30 minute discovery call, which consists of the first few minutes are amusing efforts to establish rapport, often by over zoom today, looking at objects by the vendor, looking at objects in the prospects background and making comments about, Oh, you like the Chicago Bears, et cetera, et cetera.

So now rapport has been established, followed by. So tell me what's keeping you up at night, or similar kinds of questions. And exposure of a pain a little bit of discussion around that. And then about the 15 minute mark into the call the vendor turns to well, let me give you an overview about us and our offerings and the vendor goes into a corporate overview presentation followed very, very closely, often by a product overview.

And then it's a wrap up with next steps. So total time elapsed actually doing discovery is often somewhere on the order of 10 to 15 minutes at the max, and that is Insufficient. 

Jason Myers: Yeah, that's woefully insufficient. 

Peter Cohan: So let me just let me just give you some additional dimensions of parameters that people are missing most typically today, and perhaps the biggest one and the one that has the most impact and actually.

The ability for vendors to close business and for prospects to build business cases is the elucidation of value. I, I cannot tell you how many times I'll hear head of sales exhort their teams when they're presenting demos, communicate the business value, they say, communicate the business value.

But if they've not uncovered the business value and discovery, then they've really got nothing to talk about other than broad generalities or personal experience. And, you know, the seasoned reps with great personal experience survive this because they're able to use examples of other similar prospects and customers.

But the gross majority of folks never uncover value in discovery, which makes it difficult to drive the project for both parties. One of the things I teach people is anytime you hear your prospect admit pain, you want to ask two additional questions. Number one, how long, how much, how often, in other words quantify the current state of that pain, quantify it in terms of tangible numbers, tangible metrics.

So you ask, what's the current state? And then you ask, the second question is, Which is what would you like it to be or what do you need it to be to feel you have a solution in place? That difference is what I call the delta. It's the difference between the current state and the future state communicated in terms of tangible value elements could be time.

It could be people it could be money It could be reduction of errors. It could be elimination of manual processes and that maps to time and so forth. So that's the beginnings of a solution that challenge of not quantifying value. Is that does that resonate? 

Jason Myers: It does. And in fact when you were talking, it reminds me of the book Gap Selling, right? 

You know, A lot of times what we're trying to do is, take where they are now, their desired future state, understand the gap in between. And then what I think is really important is make sure or validate that, that future state is like a 10 out of 10 in terms of yes, we have to get there. Because if it's Less than that you're in danger of losing to no decision like or it being a problem, but not worth solving at this time 

Peter Cohan: And you just highlighted two of the three major reasons for no decision outcomes, that prospect agrees and they may agree wholeheartedly that they're suffering a serious problem.

But if they have not attached that problem to a quarterly, annual, project based goal or objective that is at risk, then they may live with that pain forever. And we do it all the time. Each one of us and as businesses. 

Jason Myers: One of the examples I like to use is like a bank. Like, how often do you switch your bank account?

And the answer is, I'm in a lot of pain. Like I gotta be really mad at my bank to go switch it because it's just a pain in the butt. 

Peter Cohan: The cost of change is not worth the reward in those cases. And that's number two is the value equation is insufficient to drive a change, and that's, that's why it's so important to uncover tangible value.

That by the way, the third element is no critical date. When do you need to have the solution in place? And if the answer is, eh, this may never get done. And this is those three the lack of any one or more of those three elements, no critical business issue, insufficient value, or no critical date

are the three major components for no decision outcomes, which correlates about 45% on average of all forecasted opportunities, according to Gartner and others. 

 So here's something else that is really fascinating.

Prospects don't know what they don't know. And why is this important? Because today vendors are being taught by the various assessment organizations like Gartner and Forbes that prospects are, what is it, what's the percent, 72% they're buying Journey before they engage with a vendor. What is the actual, what's the percent that people are calling out these days?

Jason Myers: I've, I've seen different figures, but it, you're, you're in that range. It's in the seventies and some I've seen in the eighties where they're, they're pretty much already figured out who they want to talk to when they come to your website. I think. The six cents report on buyer behavior says like 86 percent of companies by the time they, you know, reaching out to a salesperson already got like three or four vendors on a short list.

And if you're, you're getting a call because you're on that short list, you're not getting a call. There's really not much you can do to get on the short list if you haven't done the work up front of being known to the audience.  

Peter Cohan: And with that comes an interesting and dangerous assumption, and that on the vendor's part, actually on both parties part, and that is that the prospect at this point knows what they want and need.

And that's inaccurate because the assumption is that prospects have done all the homework they need to know to determine their needs and wants, their desires, and what they don't want. But the fact of the matter is that no prospect can possibly know what each vendor's offerings actually include.

Because we know vendors don't put all that information on their websites and so it's not in the public domain. So prospects don't know what they don't know. And that is an opportunity for the wise vendor to explore, well, what does that prospect know, what do they not know about, and to do vision re engineering.

Vision re engineering is a process of helping your prospect understand what might be possible that they were unaware of previously. And I teach the use of what are known as bias questions to do this, so that you avoid the the risks of buying it back. Let me explain briefly. So if you're, if you're doing a demo and you suddenly realize, Oh, Oh, this prospect doesn't know about our biphramulator capability.

It's so cool. Typical vendor says, Hey, dear prospect, let me show you the biphramulator capability. It's really cool. And they show it. Prospect says we'd never use that. So now you're in a situation where you've, you've shown a capability that prospect doesn't believe they need. We'll never use. And so when it comes time to negotiate that license agreement, they say, you know, you showed me that really expensive piece of software component called the biphramulator. 

We don't need that. So either take it out of the offering or. You need to give us a 

Jason Myers: Discount  

Peter Cohan: A discount. Exactly that. That's called buying it back. So let's go back again. And let's say that you've just realized that your prospect really could use that biphamular capability. You use a biased question to introduce it, which goes something like this.

You look thoughtful. Like you've never done this before and you take that capability out in a virtual sense from behind your back and you hold it up here sort of sideways and you say, you know, many of the other customers we've worked with who were in very similar situations to what you've outlined so far

found that the ability to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever the biphramulator capability does, enabled them to enjoy the following kinds of tangible rewards they were able to generate an additional $2 million in revenue. They were able to redeploy for full time equivalents other more valuable tasks, etc.

And then, you ask, is this something that might also be useful in your practice? There are two possible answers. The prospect says, Oh, wow. I haven't thought of that yet. That sounds really interesting. You then say terrific. Let's plan to include that in the demo. Or if you're in the live demo now, you could say, would you like to see it?

Prospect says yes or no, you move forward. The prospect says, when you ask, is this something that might also be useful in your practice? I say, no, no, we, we'd never have that, that kind of need. You say, okay, fine, and you take that capability in a virtual sense, put it back behind your back since you've never demonstrated it.

No harm, no foul. You're not at risk of buying it back. So bias questions along the lines that I just suggested are a terrific way to do vision generation. A brief example. I lived for years and you did, I'm sure as well in a world of Excel forecasting systems. You remember using Excel to do forecasting?

Jason Myers: Oh, yes. Mm hmm. 

Peter Cohan: So imagine using Excel and somebody comes to you with a Salesforce like offering that's that SaaS that has dashboards and drill downable live reports and so forth. You can't even conceive of that if you're living in an Excel universe. So Visionary engineering is the way to then build that vision of what's possible with those kinds of live, drill downable dashboards, reports and so forth.

Does that, does that resonate? 

Jason Myers: It does. And I think it leads to a bigger, bigger question. So I want to talk about like how discovery should be done differently today than it may be how we've been traditionally taught to do it. And I'm asking because, you know, there's been a lot of changes in the way that we do go to market across the board.

Like, you know, the predictable revenue model kind of fallen apart. But prior to that, you know, salespeople, they had to set their own appointments. Basically they had to generate most of the demand people would come to. Salespeople or whatever to understand what, what do you got and, or what's different today, what are new products.

And, you know, to a large extent, you know, we can do that, all of our research on our own today, right? And so that's, what's leading to like, I'm not going to talk to a salesperson till I'm ready. That's what's leading to you know, this 86% or whatever the statistic is that, you know, people already have the shortlist because I know these products.

I know these, the names of these buyers or these products before I even go to visit the websites. So one thing that's different about discovery calls today is that it can be a little bit annoying for, let's say a CEO or whatever, that's already done a lot of this research and they show up on the call, whether they know what they want or not, I think it's a different issue.

But they show up on the call and then the sales rep starts probing for pain, right? Because that's what we've been taught to do. so I guess my broader question is, were we expecting, marketing to pick up the initial I call it problem agreement like we want to attract people that agree that this is a problem in the first place because that limits the amount of probing that I have to do as a salesperson.

Like I already kind of understand. They're coming to me. They agree with the problem. So now all I have to do is drive a wedge in the gap, right? In the discovery call. Like I have to, but if I'm, if I'm sitting here going. Well, do you have this problem? Or do you have this problem? Or do you have this problem?

It's kind of off putting. So, I'm just wondering, it's a long way to set it up, but give me your thoughts about, like, how marketing and sales needs to change today to match today's buyer. 

Peter Cohan: Interesting, interesting approach. So, starting with marketing, I think the most effective marketing tools are reference stories.

Here is how a customer understood they had a problem, addressed their problem, and here are the rewards they're enjoying as a result of addressing that problem. Publishing those success stories those reference stories are the examples that prospects use to align. Is this similar enough to me that this person take action and are they enjoying, you know, the results because of that?

So that's, I think, what marketing needs to look at most typically. But sales and the rest of the customer facing team. You break down a discovery call. If you're looking at a new way or perhaps more effective way of looking at it, we can use a visit to the doctor's office as an example. So first of all, you only go to a doctor when you're really in pain.

Okay. You don't go to a doc, but unless you're doing an annual checkup, but let's leave that off. You only go to a doctor when you're in pain, that you need a solution and that pain has to be great enough or fearful enough to get out of the house and go to the hospital. Now, that already partitions the population in terms of people that need or want to get help versus those who are willing to live with it.

And that's an important distinction because prospects that actually, generally speaking, reach out to you want to be discovered. That's an important element that people should recognize. Now, when you go to the doctor, the first thing that happens is When you hit the doctor's office, they give you an intake form to complete.

That intake form is, you know, asks about your insurance, it asks about any existing conditions, any, any prescriptions you're taking now, family history, et cetera, et cetera. What they're collecting is demographic information or the equivalent of demographic information, questions that are easy to ask for the vendor and easy to answer for the prospect.

When that is complete, your next step is not to go see the doctor, but in fact, another round of slightly more personal demographics, they take you to the nurse's station. So the nurse takes your blood pressure. And it's, it's a way station. You're out of the, the waiting room, but you're not in the examination room.

But the point here is the first two steps of the doctor's interaction with you are collecting demographics information, and this is an elegant and very effective way to begin a discovery conversation. Don't ask about pain right up. Tell me about your team. How many folks how long have they been with the organization?

What are their backgrounds like demographics? Where are your sites located? How many, you know, how many widgets do you produce in a unit time whatsoever? All of this information is important just as the demographics information, the intake form, the vitals that the doctor's office collects, that's all equally important.

It sets the prospect up for the more the deeper and more painful questions. So beginning discovery with exploration of demographics, questions that are easy to ask and easy to answer. It's a terrific way to begin that conversation. Executives don't want to do much more than say, I have this problem.

Let me connect you with the people who you can then grill to find out the details. And that's an important difference, by the way, between Executives and everybody who works below them. So, Demographics then enable you to move to let's talk about your real problem, your prospect. Now you can talk about pain.

I think that's good because, you can probe for a lot of that up front, and sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes they might fill out a form ahead of the call, or you've done some of that, and if they don't, then at least, you know, they've looked at it, they kind of know what's coming in the beginning, and it's not about me immediately trying to probe for pain, I'm getting some background information to where then I can then make some assumptions as a salesperson of where to start asking the right questions, right? 

Absolutely and both parties need to communicate that information the typically the one major element that the prospect is going to ask about is price and in order to be able to provide either a specific price or at least a reasonable range that vendor needs to understand the pricing parameters.

Peter Cohan: Well, how many users or how many types of users or how many workflows or how many instances or whatsoever? That's demographic information. Let's change degree angles a little bit, talking again about what's changed in doing discovery. Many, many vendor reps are concerned about discovery feeling like an inquisition or feeling like an interrogation.

And where were you on the night of October 25th, 1923? That's right. That's, yeah, it's a huge issue. What is your objective?  

 What is your objective? Nobody is expecting a Spanish Inquisition. For the Monty Python fans. So, the answer to that is quid pro quo. This for that. So, I position Discovery as a conversation, a two way bi directional conversation.

And that requires That the vendor needs to give some things in return, hence quid pro quo. So they can be just small things, or they can be very significant things, but you've got to have a conversation where you're giving information, ideas, support in return. Small example. The prospect says, we're suffering from this, and it, and it's really, really troubling.

 The vendor can say, you are not alone. Even that Satan, you're not alone, tells the prospect that, oh, okay, I'm in good company with others that have suffered from this, and the vendor already has experience. So even a small phrase like that can help build a conversation. Anytime there's something unusual, evince real curiosity and explore it.

So the first time you hear a prospect say, say You know, we've, we have this, this particular flavor, this problem. If you've never heard this before or it's rare, you say, wow, that's unusual. That is actually a really important quid pro quo, because now you're letting the prospect know, well, they are unusual.

They are unique and understanding prospects uniqueness or perceived uniqueness is a key element of doing discovery as well. But having a plan to be able to offer small comments like you're not alone or wow, that's really intriguing. Tell me more about it. Or, oh, hey, you know what? We had another customer who was very, very similar to you.

They were suffering the same kind of thing. And what they were able to do was XYZ. Those are quid pro quo that enable a conversation to take place and basically eliminate the possibility of feeling like an interrogation. 

Couple of other dimensions I'll just mention there are four boxes here to think about in terms of prospects and their experience.

So are you dealing with an experienced buyer of complex offerings or an inexperienced buyer of complex offerings, for example, because an experienced buyer as a rep or a vendor team, you should say, okay. If you could map out your buying process, I'll do my very best to map to it. In other words, you know, my job is to enable your buying process since you already know what it is you need to do.

On the other hand, if the prospect is inexperienced, you may need to say something like, would you like an example or two of how others manage a buying process? Be happy to share that with you and then see how that compares with what you have to do internally. Again, though my job as a vendor is to help you through that process.

That's my job as a vendor rep. So that's, that's two boxes. And then the other two are, if this is a moderate or high level person, hopefully do they have experience being a champion? Do they know how to manage a buying committee? Do they know how to assemble and manage a team of people that are evaluating a purchase or evaluating one or more vendors?

And again, if they're experienced, map to it, understand what their experience is, what are their, you know, what, what is their process for doing this most typically and map to it. On the other hand, if they're inexperienced at being a champion, you may need once again to give them guidance. So that represents two very simple, but wonderfully eye opening and brain opening questions to ask a prospect as you're going through this process.

Well, how experienced you buying enterprise software? You know, at this company or ever before and have you ever been a champion? Easy questions intriguing and illuminating answers. 

Jason Myers: Yeah, and I'm wondering if we could delve in a little bit deeper on that topic to like not just uncovering the buying process, but also uncovering who's involved in the buying committee and then in the book challenge your customer format.

You know, it's not just enough about identifying the champion, but that champion also needs to be an innovator or a change agent and how you deal with blockers. So I'm just wondering, like, the question is like in the discovery, how do you recommend uncovering those different players, what those different players care about, and then the best way to handle that, instead of like letting the customer handle it, like trying to figure out how you can deal with those issues or objections separately.

Peter Cohan: Yeah. So this goes back to that fundamental question. Do you have experience buying at this organization and, or do you have experience as a champion driving a purchase in this organization or others? The answers to those two questions then give you guidance because if they're experienced, then you can, you can ask them, Hey, Let's lay out, or would you please lay out the pathway you need to follow.

Who are the people who are involved? Where are their sentiments? What do they lay? What do we need to do to support the people that want to move this forward? Are there detractors, blockers, people that are just going to obfuscate? What do we need to do? What are their issues?

What's going to make them change? This moves beautifully to one of the elements that I teach in doing discovery and that is what is the impact on not just your organization, but on other organizations, other departments. So for example, if you're looking at typical workflow workflow, the process invoices, and you're selling a invoice processing software for accounting.

You could look at the workflow. It's a current workflow is manual. There's a lot of errors that creep into this. Okay, you dig into all that and you find, okay, there's a lot of improvements that could be made. There's a direct value equation out of that. However. Let's look beyond that workflow. Who else is impacted when that workflow fails, struggles, is a bottleneck, somebody's gone whatsoever.

Oh, well, let's see. If you're not getting the invoices out on time, that's going to delay. Uh, The time it takes to actually get payment. If there's errors on those invoices, ooh, that's going to impact potentially customer success because now they're dealing with those issues.

What about the inputs to that workflow? Oh, well, sales and let's say legal is not providing us with the parameters we need to actually build out and put together the plan for accurate invoicing. Well, we can't even start that process. Solution selling had, it was Michael Bosworth had a great phrase for this.

He would say, once you've, you've expanded that you've looked at the impact, not just on the one department, but on other departments, you're able to say, Oh, well, this just isn't just your department's issue. This is an organizational challenge. 

Jason Myers: And speaking of organizational challenges wondering how you recommend

training sales teams to be able to do better discovery because I'm assuming that it's a lot harder than just picking up the book and having a book club. 

Peter Cohan: It's all about exercises, role play and repetition. We as humans, we need to practice things multiple times, particularly once we become adults in order to actually affect change.

And so when we're doing training. We do an enormous amount of role play. So we break people up and do individual groups of two or three people most typically, and we have one person play vendor, one person play prospect, and one person play coach, basically listening on the conversation and track it.

And we have them practice each of these individual skills. So we're going to take 10 minutes, folks, and choose a capability that your customers are likely or prospects are likely unaware of and practice doing a vision generation discussion where you're using these bias questions, such as the example I referenced earlier.

So it's role play, and you've got to repeat, you've got to repeat, you've got to repeat. And by the way, that's, that's why the book, Doing Discovery, has the exercises every few pages. And I urge people in the introduction, I urge people when they're doing book clubs, don't just read it. You actually have to practice it.

There was a study done, I forgot who did this, but it turns out, that when we read a book, a learning book, a fact based book, we take away about 10% of what we read. That's it. Which is why you see people highlighting dog earing pages in the real books underlining things and so forth.

But it turns out that when we try those ideas out in real life, we do actual role play. The stickiness, the learning that takes place goes from 10% to about 75% for people. 

Jason Myers: Wow, that's dramatic. 

Peter Cohan: It's really dramatic. That's why role play is so important. So important. 

Jason Myers: Very good Well, I think that's a pretty good place to land the episode. So if anybody wants to get a hold of you or buy your books, how do they do that?

Peter Cohan: So, Great Demo and Doing Discovery are both on Amazon in paperback Kindle and audiobook formats. That's probably the easiest way to go and if they want to reach out to me I am at pcohan@greatdemo.com, that's  pcohan@greatdemo.com. And we also have an enormous body of resources, including links to the books, articles on Doing Discovery. Demonstration skills and other related types of sales and pre sales practices.

That website is greatdemo.com. 

Jason Myers: Fantastic. And for us, our agency is called Austin Lawrence Group. You can find us at austinlawrence.com, just like the two cities, Austin, Texas, Lawrence, Kansas. Also, if you'd like some help figuring out how to optimize your messaging for today's buyer. Take us up on a free offer to do a messaging and marketing review.

We're going to look at your website, messaging, content, advertising, whatever you want to throw at us. We'll give you some ideas about how you can maximize those SQL conversions. And hopefully attract some people that are ready for your discovery calls. So just reach out to me at jm@austinlawrence.com and we'll get you started on that.

And please, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do that wherever your podcasts are distributed. Peter, thanks for joining us again on the podcast. Been a great discussion. 

Peter Cohan: Truly my pleasure.