Discover why most MSP deals are actually won or lost during the discovery phase, not at the close! In this video, I break down how to engineer your discovery process to address objections before they even come up.

I'll show you how to plant the seeds early by asking strategic questions that uncover pain points, buying motivations, urgency levels, and decision-making processes - then use their own words as your most powerful rebuttals later. Instead of scrambling to overcome predictable objections like "it's too expensive" or "we're not ready yet" at the end, you'll learn to reverse-engineer these concerns into discovery questions that make closing feel natural and almost anticlimactic.

I'll walk you through my proven 4-step process to transform your discovery from a technical fact-finding mission into the real close of your deal

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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.

About Ray:

→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.

→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.

→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com

→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.

→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com

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Speaker 1

Here's something I get a lot of pushback on from people selling MSP services. What do you do at the end of the process is important, right? Like how you close, how you overcome objections. The questions you ask at that point. Very important. However, most MSP deals are actually won and lost early in the process. In discovery. If your discovery is strong, meaning it's targeted, it's strategic, you're asking the right questions, then the close is actually going to feel.

Speaker 1

It's gonna feel natural, right? I get almost, I would say anticlimactic. And what I'm going to do in this video is share why discovery is actually the real close. And I'm going to help you engineer your discovery so that the objections that you would be facing at the end of the process don't even come up. I reviewed hundreds of sales calls, write discovery proposal.

Speaker 1

When people go to close, they ask for the sale. If they're asking for the sale, then they're getting hit with objections that are completely predictable. It's not the right time. It's more than I thought. I need to check with someone. I'm in an agreement or a contract that I can't get out of. All of these things are objections that we've we've heard before that we could predict.

Speaker 1

And that's why they're not really proposal stage problems. Right? Like they're discovery stage problems and they're coming up because most MSP sellers are actually using their discovery process to ask like technical questions. And you know, factual, like, hey, tell me how many servers you've got. Tell me users this and that. They're trying to get the technical specs in that discovery process instead of really understanding the buying motivations, the buying process, and the things that you need to truly close the deal.

Speaker 1

Now, here's the way I think of discovery. You're basically planting all of the seeds that you need to to close the deal. Every question that you're running in your discovery should be to uncover pain, to clarify, like what the gap is between where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow. Like in between like that change is actually the gap.

Speaker 1

So the questions are identifying what is that gap where you say where you want to be. They should define or clarify what level of urgency we have. Help us understand what the buying process is going to be. Who's involved in this buying process? What steps do you typically go through? What is that going to look like after we leave this discovery process or discovery call and identify any price sensitivity.

Speaker 1

And all of these types of questions are really designed to help you identify what are all the reasons that this deal is going to close, right? Like what are your motivations? What do you really want? What are your aspirations? What are your goals like? How does buying this service help you achieve that or move your business forward or help you identify all the reasons that this deal isn't going to close?

Speaker 1

Meaning what are the obstacles I can expect? What are the the objections that I can anticipate? And fundamentally, what you're doing is you're using the early stage process to help you create everything that you need later in the process. Meaning, when I ask the right questions and I proactively identify some of what the objections are going to be later, and I get your answer to that, that becomes my rebuttal later on.

Speaker 1

Like when people are looking for the the silver bullet, like, what do you say when? What do you say went well, what I say is what they told me back in the discovery phase. One thing that comes up a lot of times is this issue of not ready yet, right? Like that's somebody that wants to change. Like they have some reasons to change, but maybe the cost of switching isn't high enough and you get to the end.

Speaker 1

It's like you have some good ammo early on, right? Like you ask good questions and you've got some answers and you feel like, hey, they want to switch providers. They don't like their current provider, whatever it is. And you get to the end and they're like, you know, it's all well and good, but we're just not ready to move yet.

Speaker 1

What could I ask early to help me address that later? Well, one question I love to ask all the time is, hey, so what makes this a now conversation? Why not six months from now? Why not six months ago? Why is it we're we're talking today, and I want them to tell me what is the reason that you're in with this process today that's going to help me determine is there some urgency.

Speaker 1

And if they tell me, well, you know, we've we've had a couple issues with our provider today. And, you know, they failed to do this and they failed to do this. And it screwed up some client call in some relationship and we missed a deadline, whatever that is. When we get to the end and they say I'm not ready to move forward yet, I say, hey, I totally understand.

Speaker 1

I'm confused. So when we were talking earlier, you had mentioned that staying with the current provider, you were having some challenges with response time and that was distracting your employees. There were some issues with productivity, and I think there was even, you know, an issue with a client call. And it seemed like those were important priorities for those not important anymore.

Speaker 1

My best rebuttal are their words, which means I've got to ask the right questions to have that later on. Now, on the flip side, I'll tell you why not doing this makes it so costly. It's almost human nature to to want to avoid objections. But you know, most people, they want to avoid the price conversation. They want to avoid some of the objections, you know, the tension or whatever is associated with that.

Speaker 1

So they avoid these things until later in the process, until after they've asked for money is a huge mistake, because half of the time, you're never even going to hear what the actual objection is, right? When you get to the very end of the process, there are a lot of times you never even hear what the real objection is, right?

Speaker 1

You as a salesperson are left wondering, what was it like? Let me try to reverse engineer this. There goes to me they're not responding or they just told me, no, I don't have a full explanation. I never got a chance to actually handle the objections. Even if you do hear the objections at the end of the process by that time, a lot of times the decision is already made.

Speaker 1

Assume you're talking to a business. You're talking to a business owner who has a CEO, a CFO, the snap. You run your discovery, you give your presentation, you give them the proposal. They go make their decision, and then they come back and they tell you, hey, here's what we decided. And you say, well, let me dig in. Let me understand that.

Speaker 1

Why don't you moving forward? Well, at that point, they've already convened, they've made a decision and they've said we're not going to move forward. So you as a salesperson, you're kind of fighting from your back. Whereas when you flip this whole thing around and you say, I'm going to identify what the most common objections are, I'm going to engineer my discovery so that I'm proactively addressing those.

Speaker 1

I'm one going to hit the most common ones. I'm going to hit them proactively. Right. I'm not going to wait for those to come up. And two, I'm not going to wait until a decision has already been made to try to address them. I'm going to get them out of the gates. And the reality is, discovery is the cheapest time to address objections.

Speaker 1

The prospect's defenses are lowest. It's when they're most open with information because it's you're going through like a Q and A, you're going through a process of learning about their business. You're understanding how they use tech, and they're more willing to give you information as you go through it. Right? Once you've gone through, you've given the presentation, they've seen the price.

Speaker 1

You've asked for the sale. Like now they're they're a little bit more defensive. It's before they actually turn to install deals, which is why you as a salesperson want to like hunt those things out. Like as a salesperson, like, I know I can't get a decision and have people move forward and give me a yes without addressing the questions, the objections.

Speaker 1

I need to understand what they are and I need to resolve them. And resolving them in discovery is a hell of a lot easier than it is. After you've asked for the sale. So how do you do this? Well, the first step you document the top five objections that you know you get to think through. Look at your your loss deals.

Speaker 1

Look at the last presentations you've had. If you have transcripts or recorded calls, go back to those and just listen. What are the top five reasons that you're that you're losing deals? Typically it's going to be the standard stuff. It's going to be it's too expensive or the price is higher than I thought it's going to be that I need to talk to someone else.

Speaker 1

There's another decision maker in the process. It's going to be we're not ready yet. The timing's not right. Something along those lines were in a contract that, you know, we we didn't realize that we couldn't get out of. And we're and we're kind of stuck in this deal. Think through how do we reverse engineer that objection and turn it into a question that we can address or have a conversation about early in the process?

Speaker 1

You know, a lot of times you hear to talk to somebody who says, this is more than I thought. This is, you know, it's too expensive, something along those lines. So what are some questions that you can ask in the discovery phase? Well, you can ask some indirect questions that allow you to contrast the cost of security or the investment security and in managed services to the cost of not having it in their business.

Speaker 1

Right. So you can do it indirectly. You could say something along the lines of, so when you have a network outage or you have, you know, some downtime or something like that, what's the impact of the team? Like what typically happens, like who's hit the worst? Like, well, I'd walk me through that and ask them to talk through the consequences of shitty service.

Speaker 1

Or you can address price directly upfront and discovery like you can just ask directly something along the lines of, hey, so what are you? What are you currently investing in? Managed services? What are you currently investing in it? You know, your total I.T span, have you have you thought through what it takes more than that? Or what if it requires additional investment to get what you actually need?

Speaker 1

Has that been part of the conversation at all. Right. So you can address price sensitivity and budget and things like that in discovery. Now another one that comes up all the time is I need to talk to someone. Okay, well, let's reverse engineer that. Let's go back to discovery early on. One of the questions I like to ask is, hey, so when you're when you're talking about it, right, like the challenges you're having here with the outages or you're just what you'd like it to be more scalable, something like that.

Speaker 1

Who's typically just involved in that discussion typically, or another one that comes up frequently is I need to talk to someone, right? Like I need to I need to run this by somebody. I need to talk to somebody, run it to a borrower, to a committee, something like that. And what I typically say, like, get them in a discovery thing.

Speaker 1

If I reverse engineer that into the discovery, one of the questions I like is when you're talking about it, right, like managed services and you know, scaling your tech or some of the challenges you've had with response time or what good looks like, who's typically involved in that discussion. Right. Like, I'm just I want names, I want other people.

Speaker 1

I understand who it is because that gives me the opportunity to then have a conversation or ask a question about their involvement in this whole process. Right. So you take that reverse engineer. The one that I used earlier is one that I use in almost all my sales processes, right? Where I if there's an issue of timing, urgency, something like that, I ask early on.

Speaker 1

So what makes this a now conversation, not six months from now, six months ago. So you can see what we're doing. Like you grab those five objections, then you pull those forward and you say, what are questions that enable us to have that conversation right now? Then the third step is you ask those questions in discovery. You write down their answers, you track their answers, and you leverage those later on.

Speaker 1

Right. Like I'm actually a big fan right now of the I note takers, you know, like having, devices, there's limit lists, there's plod. I'm not endorsed by any of them, but they're recording devices. And, you know, we train our salespeople like one of them slaps on the back of your phone, and we train salespeople to say, hey, when, you know, the note takers that you see on teams or on zoom, like, I note takers, I've got one here.

Speaker 1

And it'll just help me make sure I'm paying attention to our conversation and that I don't miss anything. Is that cool with you? Right. So, you know, capture all of that, right, so that you can use that information later. Go back and take the answers to that document to get ready for it, so that when you go into proposer presentation, you're armed with their words.

Speaker 1

Now, the fourth thing that you do is at the end of your process, what you do is you kind of summarize it and recap it. Okay. So, you know, Ray, here's, what I heard was you got challenges with this. This is important because of this. These are the issues that you're dealing with. This is what you'd like to see.

Speaker 1

This is what good looks like. This is who's involved in the discussion. You go back and you recap that you get confirmation of it, get on the same page, create that alignment. And the benefit of that kind of recap, that summary is it operates also like a closed like a trial closed, because you're going back and saying, here are the pains, here's the current state, here's the future state, here's, you know, the level of urgency.

Speaker 1

These are all things that we agree on, right. And so your your tie in those things up in the discovery phase. This is where a lot of especially owner led sales processes kind of break down. Because when you have a technical seller, somebody who knows the tech, somebody who knows the it's somebody who can answer all of these questions, somebody who looks at all these questions and says, Ray, why won't you an answer?

Speaker 1

I don't even ask. And he's like, I know the answer to all these things. I know why they're having these issues. I know that current provider. I know they suck because I know, you know, Jim Bob down the street and, you know, is a one man tech show. I, I know all of this stuff. And what I tend to see is technical sellers tend to ask technical questions and then be try to solve the problems as they're going through discovery, like, oh yeah, we're having issues with, you know, outages.

Speaker 1

Oh, well, are you doing this, this, this oh. How many licenses of this do you have? Oh, we can save you some money here. And they start prescribing before the diagnosis is complete. And it's really important discovery is for diagnosing not just the technical problems. It's for diagnosing what their current issues are and what their motivations are to buy and what they're buying process is going to be.

Speaker 1

And it is crucial that you understand those, that it's more crucial than the technical stuff, because technical stuff is the easy stuff to find out. You can run a flip and scan and get most of that information. And discovery is for finding problems, not for solving problems. It's for asking questions. We're pulling information. We're not pushing information. It's setting us up for the proposal.

Speaker 1

So we invest the time in discovery to do discovery, to conduct discovery. We get all the information we need. We package it together, we get strategic, we present it effectively, and then we have the information from discovery to draw on later in the closing process. So we're not closing and selling in the discovery process. When you do it this way, closing gets anticlimactic, right?

Speaker 1

Like this is what I mean because you've asked all of these questions, you get to a point in your presentation and you say, is there any reason not to move forward? And when there's some resistance, when there's some questions, you can typically draw on what you've already asked. And if you get stuff routinely that you find, you're like, hey, I didn't ask this.

Speaker 1

Well, maybe it's time to go adjust the process, right? Go make iterations to your discovery. I'm constantly tweaking, not wholesale changes, but constantly tweaking to make sure. Wow, I've heard this 2 or 3 times. Let me just go ahead and bake that question in early in the process. So I hope this has been helpful implemented. I promise you you will get more deals.

Speaker 1

Now if you want some access to playbooks, to templates and scripts and things that we use in the sales process, check out Mssp Sales toolbox.com. You can get free access to our toolbox. We have a bunch of stuff in there already. We're dropping new stuff in there that we work with clients on, so if we create some templates for clients, will oftentimes drop it in the toolbox.

Speaker 1

You have lifetime access to that absolutely free. Just drop in your email again MSP Sales toolbox.com. Please subscribe to the channel if this has been helpful. And I look forward to see you in the next video. Adios.