Show all features is not effective……
Such a great post from Max Luepertz on LinkedIn:
This post follows on from my discovery meeting structure post but instead starts to answer the question ‘why do we do discovery in the first place’?
There are lots of reasons to do discovery sessions:
- Building credibility
- Answering the feasibility, demonstration and business case questions
- Managing risk
One of the biggest benefits to pre-sales is discovery allows you to build a picture of what the demonstration goals should be. Max’s post does a great job of highlighting why any demonstration should avoid feature dumping, it leads to confusion.
Discovery should allow pre-sales to identify what product features are important to the client but also build specific narrative and story telling around those features. A recent example from my own use case has been:
- Client stated their existing AP automation tool doesn’t operate line item matching. Whenever the invoice value doesn’t match the receipt value the user has to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out why. Is it a part delivery, is the pricing wrong, have extra items been invoiced.
- During the demo I showed a line item exception based on unit pricing on invoice being different to unit price on order. The system automatically identified the problem and clearly showed the user what it was.
- I then framed the feature around the users pain in dealing with exceptions in their existing system.
- And spoke about the specific benefits to the user. Sometimes I may eve be able provide an indication of time saved or a financial ROI.
The demo is then much stronger, the customer understands how the feature relates to their existing process and the benefits are clear.
When done correctly discovery should have clear benefits to both the client and the consultant.