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| ISSUE №155 · DISCOVERY CALLS | SALES |
You’ve Got To Chill The F*ck Out
I had chats with three different founders this week - their agencies are all different: different size, different verticals, different primary services…
It just so happened that each one of them had a discovery call that they were very excited about, but the prospect never set up the next call.
We are going to jump into how to make your discovery calls better, but at the core of these three different founders' mistakes wasn't really anything tactical or strategic, but an emotional issue, specifically an emotional regulation issue.
Why Do We Call It A Discovery Call Rather Than A “Sell As Hard As You Can Call”?
Discovery calls feel a lot like sales calls. You discuss issues that the prospect has. You start to unveil how you can solve that problem, but there's actually not very much selling that's happening. If there is, you are violating the core tenets of the WTF Sales Methodology & you aren't paying any attention to Permission Gates. (If you want to take a few minutes and read those masterpieces, I'll wait for you…otherwise, LFG.)
The job of a discovery call is to identify the thing the prospect wants to have another call about…THAT’S IT. Hit that target and the deal keeps moving. Miss that target, and your deal is dead in the water.
When somebody blows a discovery call, rarely is it because they don't understand how they can help the prospect. It's something less logical that happens.
It’s excitement, it's the rush of opportunity, it's the joy of seeing something that you know you can help with. All of those things give your brain a little squirt of dopamine - and that makes you feel expansive and happy, and you want to dive in deeper.
Treat Every Account like your Top 10
Every CS team has a top tier. The strategic accounts that get briefed QBRs, fast escalations, executive sponsors checking in mid-quarter. The other 190 get a generic quarterly email and a renewal scramble in week 11.
What if your top-tier playbook ran across your entire book? Every QBR briefed. Every renewal flagged 60 days out. Every usage drop surfaced before the CSM notices. Every sponsor change flagged the day it happens on LinkedIn.
That's what your CS team gets when there's a colleague in Slack reading the portfolio every morning, drafting every QBR brief, and watching the health signals around the clock. Your CSMs talk to customers. The prep work runs in the background.
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Serotonin Is Your Secret Sales Weapon
The excitement of dopamine fucks up a lot of calls. In a lot of ways, it sort of puts blinders on you, and you start chasing the joy. It's really easy to forget that there's somebody else on the call.
There's another brain chemical called serotonin, and that is sort of your well-being chemical. It regulates your mood, and it allows your prefrontal cortex, your executive function, and all of that stuff that is anti-excitement work well.
Those three different founder calls this week weren't objectively bad, but they showed signs of lack of emotional regulation. A bit of serotonin would have helped them not blow it. There's other ways that emotional regulation impacts your sales calls, like being defensive or not being an active listener, those all get in the way. Here are the three issues from this week, and now that I've really characterized them and identified the points of failure, these are things that I have heard a million times when reviewing other people's discovery calls and sadly my own calls.
The Dopamine-Fueled Disasters
Too Simple (Rushing To Close):
Your prospect says something that fits what you do. You identify an opportunity, your pattern matching kicks in & BAM…you make an offer right then and there!
You heard something you know how to fix & you jump on it.
What the prospect hears is different… They were in the middle of talking to you, and all of a sudden you started selling. Even if your offer is 100% right, your prospect feels unheard. Their experience is them talking about their issues and without warning (or showing any understanding of those issues), you jumped right into sales mode.
You didn't spend any time building trust, probing to see if they were describing symptoms of a problem or an actual problem. Nor did you take the time to understand the impact that the issue is having on them and what's the value of it being solved.
This rush to close is premature (see my Agency Sales Glossary for more on The Premature Close). And like other premature things, it diminishes the richness, texture, and satisfaction of a fully completed act. Your focus on the end has turned the conversation very transactional, and transactions aren't the beginning of a partner-focused relationship. It's typically the end of any potential relationship.Too Smart (The Generous Professor)
The prospect starts talking about the issues that they are facing. You hear an exciting problem to solve. Your brain just can’t not chase the dopamine.
You start riffing, reframing, teaching & explaining the smarter way to approach whatever the prospect just brought up & maybe their entire business.
This is what I call Generous Professor Syndrome in Call Lab Pro. It’s seductive because it feels generous in the moment - you are sharing & helping & demonstrating expertise.
In reality, you are doing both you & your prospect a disservice. There are 3 possible impacts on your prospect:
Impact 1: "You think the way I have been running my business is dumb." They get defensive & bail.
Impact 2: "I just got a free strategy session from this guy. I have what I need. No second call required." They think they have the keys to the kingdom & bail.
Impact 3: “I don’t even know what the original purpose of the call was…do I have a problem or not?” They are confused & never respond to your emails again.
They all look the same on your pipeline report.Too Ambitious (The Vision Trap):
The prospect describes one problem & you see fifty. So you start adding ideas and opportunities…and scope…and price.
Your pattern-matching wizardry starts to show through. You’ve seen this movie before, you know how it ends, and you want the prospect to see what you see. You see how all the pieces fit together.
What the prospect hears is "Holy shit, this is gonna be expensive & I don’t have that kind of budget."
Even if you are right about every single one of those things, the prospect isn’t ready to trust you enough to expand the scope. It's as if they came in looking for a bike for their ten-year-old kid, and you decided to sell them a fleet of rocket ships.
At the same time, you have taken their attention away from the thing that they want to fix, so they can no longer connect you to the problem that they feel is urgent.
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Don’t Be A Dopamine Dope
Listen, I think every agency founder I have ever worked with is guilty of one of these dopamine-fueled sales missteps. I know that even now, I still fall into the generous professor trap because I get so excited about the problems & solutions.
The best way to keep yourself on track during calls is this:
Map Out What You Think Is Going To Happen: If you are doing good call prep, you should have enough information about the prospect to be able to ask really good questions and understand the implication of the answers. You should have an idea, before the call things like revenue range, number of employees, what market they serve, what the competitive set is & based on the information you have available, you should have an idea of how thoe likely needs connect to your services. As you are asking questions and responding to their answers, make sure that you are staying close to your original map, because the map doesn't lead you to Sale or No Sale, rather it leads you to Does It Make Sense To Chat Again?
Define Your Green Flags & Red Flags: When you are developing your agency ideal customer profile & you have a solid outbound GTM motion with tight targeting happening, you've already defined the kinds of clients you can help and those that you can't help. Obviously not everybody is 100% right for you or one hundred percent wrong for you…so, if the prospect in front of you fits size, industry, and need, you can really focus on understanding their problem deeply. But if they have other attributes that don't fit well, you have to be able to identify those red flags so that you don't chase the excitement of solving their problem.
Know Your Strengths: If you are engaging with a prospect, and their primary need doesn't match up with one of your primary strengths. That's a signal to not chase them. That's a signal to you that you can pull back from the dopamine and truly examine if their needs match your strengths.
Eyes on the Real Prize: Part of the problem when you are a dopamine dope is that you are focused on the wrong reward. You get excited and expansive, and rush to a close when you think that the sale is the end game. The the real prize isn't the sale. That's just your ticket to win the real prize, which is a mutually beneficial, mutually profitable relationship with a client that lasts for years. (Editor’s Note: Most agencies have very low or negative profit in the first one to three months of an ongoing engagement. The prophets in months 12 and beyond are usually close to triple what they were in months one through three.)
Don’t Confuse Excitement With Success
Discovery is an act of restraint.
Obviously, you want to make a good impression on the prospect. You want them to think that you and your agency are smart, capable, and able to solve their problems.
But the lure of dopamine & the faux reward of closing a deal often makes you chase things that you shouldn't, or lose focus on the purpose of what you were there to do, which is to show that you understand, show that you are credible, and get to the second call where there is more trust, more vulnerability, and the real opportunity to craft a relationship.
That’s the real dopamine that your agency craves.
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