Customer discovery is one of the most foundational steps for Solutions Consultants. Without it, you don’t know what a potential customer’s issues, goals, and needs are — making it impossible to develop a solution that brings them value.

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Explore the most common mistakes SCs make in the discovery stage — and the skills to refine in order to boost performance.

Avoid These 5 Common Discovery Mistakes

1. Inconsistency

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The inconsistencies in customer discovery aren’t just between disciplines. Every SC and salesperson does it differently. 

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If an organization is going to align its customer-facing disciplines to the most critical goals of its customers, consistency in the discovery approach is paramount to that alignment. Without consistency, everyone sees the same markets and customers differently. The ripple-effect rears its ugly head in your organization’s inability to get consensus on strategic priorities, which then cascades down to the execution plans and priorities across product, marketing, sales, and customer success.

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2. Too Much Focus on Customer Problems

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When it’s all said and done, your products have to solve customer problems, but problems are only half of the equation. Customers love to talk about their problems, but how do you know you’re uncovering the real problems?

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The short answer is: you don’t — if the discussion goes no further than problems. That’s why customer business outcomes are such a critical part of any discovery conversation.

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If you don’t understand what your customers are ultimately trying to accomplish, you can’t possibly know if the problems they’re feeding you are the problems that most affect their desired outcomes. It’s too easy to convince yourself that the problems you’re uncovering are valuable only to find out later they were only a mirage.

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3. Not Asking WHY Enough

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When discovery conversations revolve around customer problems, the natural course of conversation leads directly to current or potential solutions. Without question, this is the biggest flaw of problem-based discovery because there’s no context around those problems. They don’t pass the “so what” test as in, “Why do you even care about that problem?”

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Here are the most common WHY questions that never get asked:

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• WHY is that a problem? WHY do you care about that problem?
• WHY does that problem exist?
• WHY is it critical to invest time, money, people-solving that problem? For you? For your organization?

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Without answers to these questions, you run the risk of completely missing the mark with your solution.

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4. Discovery Through the Lens of Your Product

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The hardest part of customer discovery for every organization is doing it as if your products didn’t exist. When everyone sees the customer through the lens of your products, discovery becomes distorted.

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Here’s the problem. When you’re having discovery conversations through the lens of your products, you’re subconsciously “leading the witness” to responses that are desirable to you.

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The bottom line is you’re not uncovering what’s most important to the customer and you run the risk of completely missing the mark for value.

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5. Not Engaging With All of the Right People

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This is a big issue in B2B, because a “customer” isn’t just the user, or the executive, or the manager. It’s all of the above, and if your discovery doesn’t cover all the bases, you’ll end up with an incomplete picture of what’s most important to your target customers and why.

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SCs and salespeople usually aim for the C-suite when it comes to discovery and qualification, but that can prove difficult when your initial point of contact is a project-level person that’s been tasked with leading the evaluation. In many cases, those project leads don’t really have a good handle on the business needs — and can block sales from gaining access to those that do.

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Skills for Effective Discovery

Curiosity & Patience

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Both curiosity and patience are critical traits for doing highly effective customer discovery. Curiosity comes down to asking the what and why questions, but keeping the conversation relaxed and conversational:

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• What are you ultimately trying to do?
• Why is that important to you and your company?
• What’s stopping you or making it difficult to achieve this goal?
• What happens if you don’t make any operational changes?
• In a perfect world, what would you change? Why?

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Patience is all about resisting the temptation to have a product discussion before you have clear answers to all the what and why questions.

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Here’s the thing about curiosity; and once again, it doesn’t matter if you’re building, marketing, selling, onboarding, or nurturing: It’s critical to know how your prospects and customers think so you can make a conscious decision to align (or not) with their thought process.

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Facilitation

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Facilitation skills are about keeping the discussion on point. Customers and prospects can quickly go down the rabbit hole on a product discussion prematurely. Your job as a facilitator is to keep the discussion at a business level until you have a complete picture with answers to all the questions above.

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If you get into a product discussion without answers to those questions, you’ll struggle to get the outcome you want, and the conversation will go in circles because you still don’t know what you’re aiming for.

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Are You Missing the Big Why?

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In simple terms, the big why is a top-priority strategic initiative that is either customer specific or common across a large majority of organizations in your target markets. It’s the ultimate reason customers are willing to invest time, money, and people buying, adopting, and using your products.

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As a rule, these strategic priorities may not be directly related to your product, but your product still delivers outcomes that have a direct impact.

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For example, let’s say your products help customers deliver a superior experience to their customers. The big why in any given market may be that your target customers are facing stiff competition from non-traditional sources and need to do a number of things to differentiate and remain relevant. A superior customer experience is just one of those things. 

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Nevertheless, it’s good to get the whole picture so you know exactly where your value is in the pecking order of the customer’s priorities.

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‍About John Mansour

​​John Mansour is the Founder & President of Product Management University. John founded the company in 2001 after a 15-year career as a sales engineer, product marketing manager and product manager. John held titles of manager, director and vice president in startups, mid-market and tier-1 global organizations.

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