Your deal looked real
Your deal looked real. The buyer said it was urgent. You rushed the demo.
Then nothing happened. No decision.
No next step. No reply.
You lost the deal in discovery.
Here is why. You heard a problem. You never made it expensive. So the deal stayed optional.
And optional deals do not close.
Most reps treat discovery like a checkpoint. A few questions, then straight to the demo.
But discovery is the deal.
If the cost of doing nothing is not clear before the demo, there is nothing to decide after it.
This is not a closing problem. It is a discovery problem.
In serious deals, the best reps go deep before they ever present.
A simple way to think about it is SCOPE.
If they cannot walk all five steps, they do not demo.
S — Symptoms What is happening that should not be happening? In their words.
C — Context How does the work actually run today? Where does friction show up?
O — Origin Why does this exist?
P — Penalty If nothing changes, what happens next? What does this look like in 3 months? 6 months? If doing nothing has no cost, there is no deal.
E — End State If this is fixed, what changes? What improves? What gets measured differently?
Discovery is controlled pressure.
Open question. Tight follow up.
Go deeper. Do not demo until the cost of doing nothing is undeniable.
When discovery is done properly, you do not need to push the deal forward.
The buyer pulls it forward.
Follow this link to access a custom GPT that will help you build your own SCOPE questions. https://lnkd.in/ggU7ibYu
So you can stop getting ghosted after demos and wasting time on deals that were never real.
♻️ Repost to help someone in your network 🔔 Follow Barry Flanagan for Daily Tech Sales + AI insights