Your Network Assessment is Costing You Deals

Your network assessment that you run with your prospects if you're selling MSP services is not a discovery call, and that is why you're getting ghosted. I was on a sales coaching call today with about 30 other people who are selling MSP services, and we're going through the sales process, right? And we're breaking down each step, we're looking at, you know, best practices and looking for opportunities to to make some improvement, and we get to somebody and and she's like, well, my process I'm basically running a network assessment, and then I I take those findings, I go into the proposal call and I try to close them. And then she lists off the problems that she has right now. And, you know, she's getting ghosted, her close rate isn't good, the people are starting this assessment and they're not finishing. And I said, well, here's the issue. Like, you've skipped the most fundamental part of a consultative sales process, which is discovery. Like true, proper discovery. Like you skipped that entire process if you start with the network assessment. And if you don't run a real discovery, like I don't care what the network assessment is. Yes, you'll trip over some deals periodically. Yes. But you're not going to have best in class close rates if that assessment is replacing your discovery. If that's what you're relying on when you walk in, I promise you you are going to run into the exact issues that she was facing. And the reason is really simple. When you lead with the assessment, you're presenting your prospect with problems. And you're you're highlighting the problems that they have in their network and in their security and in their tech, and yes, that's good. Like that's there's nothing wrong with that. Like sales is about solving problems, right? But what you never really did was take the time to figure out what the pain was. You've presented problems, not pain. And and there is a massive difference between problems and pain. Problems are facts. Pains are feelings. And they they motivate a buyer substantially differently. And if you're an IT seller, like understanding how those problems should be showing up as symptoms in their business, you know that, right? Like you look at those problems, you know the meaning of those problems. Like you know the relevance of every one of them. You know you know the pain that's associated with them or that's usually associated with them. They don't. And it's because you never sat down and you never asked them what they were experiencing, what symptoms they had, what pains they were feeling. So what your what you're walking in with is a report that says, oh my god, look at all those problems. Like that's like that you know the meaning of, and you know the symptoms behind, but they don't, because you never took the time to figure out what pains they were actually feeling. And this is something I always tell people. All roads lead to discovery. Every time I get asked, hey, I got this objection, how do I handle it? Or I keep getting ghosted, or, you know, they're the they keep telling me that they need to talk to a a different decision maker, or I didn't know about the buying process. Like every time I get these questions about what's happening at the end of the deal, the answer's usually the same. It's like it traces back to something that was missed in discovery. All roads lead to discovery. Every objection is usually something that you missed in discovery. If a decision maker pops up at the end of the process that you were completely unaware of that you didn't know about, it was missed in discovery. If it stalls out and you can't really figure out why, it's because there was some motivation or some process or some something that was likely missed in discovery. So when you lead with the assessment and you use that as your discovery, you're missing a massive part of the of the process. You like, do you understand what their current pains are? Do you understand how those pains are showing up as symptoms in the business? Like do you understand what their buying motivations are? Do you understand what their urgency is? Do you understand who all the decision makers are? Do you understand what the timing of this deal's going to look like, what the buying process is at that company? Like those are all things that a proper discovery addresses. Like if you sit down and you ask targeted, strategic questions that are designed to understand their current situation and how they see it, then you go get the a network assessment as the next step. And here's what happens when you do that. And like in that order is you do discovery, then you do the network assessment, is you now walk into that proposal and you're not just presenting a list of problems, right? You're saying, here are the problems that we found in the network assessment. Now remember those pains that we talked about, right? You told me that these things were showing up, the business impact of these things, these were the symptoms that you had. Well, those challenges, here's why those pains are showing up. Like here's the problem behind that. And yes, by the way, we can fix that. It's a completely different conversation because you took the time to run a proper discovery. You understand who the decision makers are. You understand what the process is. You understand if there is or isn't urgency. You understand what their price sensitivity is. You understand like what the situation is with their current provider. You know, like maybe they don't like their current provider, but maybe it's, you know, somebody at their business, like somebody on their team's cousin or something like that. There's there's like all these situations that pop up later on in the scenario. And when you go in with a good discovery and you've got the assessment, you've now got like the entire arsenal that you need to close the maximum number of deals. And when you walk in with an assessment, or just the assessment, you're you're leaving a bunch of those tools that you actually need behind. And you will close some deals. Like I'm not saying your close rate's going to be zero if you only do the network assessment, but it will not be what it could be if you ran proper discovery and you ran it very intentionally and you asked strategic questions. Like you're not going to get best in class close rates. And the part that a lot of people don't want to hear is you can't assume that having a problem means that they're going to pay to fix it. And that's one of the assumptions that people make in this process is that they assume if there's all these problems with their network and there's all these vulnerabilities and there's all these issues that they'll just go, oh my god, like those are a lot of problems we should pay to make them go away. But people don't make the they don't pay to make problems that aren't causing any pain go away. There's just not a lot of motivation to do that. If they don't understand the business impact, they are not going to be motivated to actually buy. I don't care what the network assessments told you when they sold you that tool. Like you're not going to have the context that you need when you unless you properly frame that network assessment with what you found in the discovery call because you won't have the context that you need to properly frame those problems and and how they are hurting them and what the impact is. So I hope that helps. This is a subject I get really passionate about because running a proper discovery is is the most powerful thing that you can do in your sales process. It is the most influential lever that you can pull to increase your close rates. And when I hear that people are being advised to completely skip it and instead lead with technical stuff and instead lead with problems and skip over the pains and the motivations and the buying process and everything else that comes from discovery, it makes me want to pull my hair out. So I hope this helps. Adios.