Client needs discovery in B2B sales: how to conduct it

Understanding the client’s needs is the foundation of every good cooperation. Regardless of the industry, it is this stage that decides whether your solutions will be considered valuable and will accurately respond to the needs of the person you are talking to. How do you conduct needs discovery so that the client not only trusts your company, but sees in it a partner they will allow to solve their problems?

Over the years of working with owners of technology and service companies, I have seen quite a few sales processes that fell apart not at price negotiations or contract signing, but much earlier. At a meeting where nobody asked the right questions. The company presented, the client listened, everyone was polite, and then silence fell.

Not because the offer was bad. Because nobody checked whether it solves any problem the client actually cares about.

What needs discovery is

Needs discovery is the stage of the sales processat which you learn what your client really needs: what goals they set for themselves, what problems they have and which results are the ones they care about.

It is worth realizing one thing. After well-conducted needs discovery, the client usually already knows whether they want to go further with you. Not after the offer, not after the price list presentation, but right here, in the conversation in which theoretically you are not selling anything yet.

Everything that happens later is only as good as the information gathered at this stage. The demo, the offer, the conversations about terms: each of them is based on what you managed to understand earlier.

The client’s perspective is the only right one

Clients are not interested in your solutions, only in the results you can help them achieve.

Sounds simple, but in practice it is the hardest change of habit in all of sales. We naturally look at the world through the lens of our own company, because it is the perspective closest to us. The problem is that potential clients are not interested in what we have and how, until we start talking about it in a way they understand and that concerns them.

You may be the greatest expert in your field. But if you talk about your solutions exclusively from your own perspective, and in professional terminology at that, it will sound like a foreign language to the client.

The sender is responsible for the communication being understood.

The questions you ask testify to the level of expertise of the company you represent. Especially if you ask ones that will be revealing for the client and shed new light on issues they have been thinking about. A good question can build authority faster than an hour-long presentation.

Very importantly: we do not ask questions in order to answer. We do not wait in the starting blocks to say our piece as soon as the client finishes. We ask them to really understand what they meant.

Remember. Needs discovery is not about your company, but about the client’s company. It should aim to reveal the core of the problems they are struggling with.

What needs discovery is not

It is not an opportunity to shower the client with product information. We are not talking here about features, parameters and functionalities. We should demonstrate value, and that is something completely different from talking about it.

It is not an interrogation either. A list of questions read one by one from a sheet gives the client a clear signal that they are being processed by a procedure, not understood by a human being.

And it is not a sales stage in the colloquial sense. You do not persuade, you do not convince, you do not try to close the cooperation. You diagnose.

The free ebook on needs discovery (PDF, in Polish) is available on the Polish version of this article.

Why most companies do not do it, even though they know they should

The question arises: since almost everyone knows that needs discovery is important, why do so many salespeople skip it anyway? Instead of guessing, we checked it against data.

In a TechMine study among B2B business owners and C-level people, 91% of respondents considered needs discovery important or very important. At the same time 55% admitted that they sometimes present an offer without discovering needs, and 66% do so even when they know the solution does not fit the client’s situation.

The strongest number, however, is a different one. Where needs discovery was not a formal requirement of the process, it was skipped in 100% of cases. Only 32% of companies have a fully standardized process.

This is not a gap in awareness. It is a gap in the process.

Before you walk into the meeting

Needs discovery does not begin the moment you ask the first question. Good questions do not come from intuition, but from knowing which problems you are looking for, in whom and why.

Know what problems you are looking for

You cannot discover needs well if you do not know precisely what value your company delivers. In practice, needs discovery consists in checking whether this client’s problems overlap with the problems your company knows how to solve. Without a written list of those problems you will be asking blindly.

List your solutions in detail and for each ask yourself two questions: what specific problem it addresses and what the result will be for the client once that problem is removed.

If you run a marketing agency and offer paid campaigns, note that the client’s problem is not a lack of advertising. The problem is a lack of exposure to potential clients, and more precisely that their salespeople have nobody to talk to. The result is not only a larger number of conversations, but also more new clients, or checking whether a new product line holds up in the market.

When such a list is ready, it becomes your map of questions.

It is also worth asking current clients directly, once: what does my company actually help you with? Even if you have been operating for years, the answers can surprise. It often turns out that our beliefs about the value we deliver are completely different from what clients value us for.

Qualification

Needs discovery makes sense only when you are talking to someone you can really help. That is why, even before scheduling a meeting, you should have a clear ideal customer profile and criteria by which you will recognize that a specific company fits it: industry, scale of operations, location, technologies used.

Equally important, and most often overlooked, are negative criteria. A company may fit the profile perfectly, but for example be subject to public procurement law and run tenders in which for some reason you do not want to take part. Despite the apparent fit, it should not end up on your list.

Why am I writing about this in a text on needs discovery? Because if you have qualified the clientwell, you walk into the meeting with the assumption that they should benefit from your solutions. And that completely changes your attitude. You are not courting, you are checking whether you are heading the same way.

Everything is a hypothesis

Going to a meeting, you only have hypotheses about the client’s reality. In sales, everything is a hypothesis until it comes out of the client’s mouth.

You need them to act systematically, but be ready to change your assumptions. In practice it looks like this: before the meeting you write down three to five hypotheses about what this client is probably facing, and after the meeting you check how many of them were confirmed. If they regularly are not confirmed, you have a problem with segmentation or with the value proposition, and it is better to find out now.

Mindset

The meeting begins before it actually starts. It begins in your head.

You go to the client not to sell something, but to find out what they are facing and whether what your company delivers can really help them. Clients pick up on this difference in the first minutes, even if they cannot name it.

If you walk in with the mindset that you have to sell this, you will interrupt and wait for an opportunity to slip in the offer. If you walk in with the mindset that you are checking whether you can help, you will listen.

Fifteen minutes of preparation changes the character of an hour-long conversation. Check what this company does and how it makes money, who the person you are talking to is, what hypotheses you have about their problems and what case study from similar situations you can bring up.

How to open the meeting

How we position ourselves and our company happens from the moment we see the client. The first two minutes set up everything else.

A partner relationship, not the position of a supplicant

Do not start the meeting from the perspective of a supplicant who is asking for something and badly wants it. What you are doing is an attempt to help solve the problems the client is struggling with. So they should care no less than you.

This attitude does not come from arrogance or negotiation techniques, but from good qualification.

Do not thank them for their time

It is a small thing, but it sets the hierarchy and communicates that you are here by their grace.

If you want to say something as an opener, rather say “great that we managed to find time for this meeting” or “nice that we can talk and check whether we are heading the same way”. The second sentence contains the assumption that the check works both ways and that not every conversation has to end in cooperation.

Later the mythical small talk may appear. Personally I am not fond of this element, but I always try to say something contextual about what I see: the client’s office, the circumstances in which we happened to meet. Attention given to what is here and now sounds authentic. A rehearsed line about the weather does not.

The sentence that changes the character of the meeting

Clients often expect, because that is what they have been accustomed to, that since they have given us a moment of their time, the story about our company and offer is about to begin. And here the client should be pleasantly surprised.

“Great that we can talk. If you allow, I will gladly tell you about our company and services. But so as not to say something that will not be interesting for you, let me ask what your company is facing. Only later will I refer to it, so as to talk exclusively about things that matter to you.”

This sentence does three things at once. It promises that you will talk about the company, so the client does not feel they are losing anything. It justifies the order in their interest. And it asks for consent, and when the client gives it, they commit themselves to talking about their situation.

Client needs discovery sample questions

The algorithm of asking questions

Needs discovery can be based on a structure that step by step allows you to understand the client’s situation. The sequence consists of four elements:

open question → deepening questions → paraphrase and summary → demonstration of value

You apply this algorithm in a loop, separately for each topic area. You exhaust one topic, close it with a paraphrase, demonstrate value and move on to the next.

Step 1: a general, directional, open question

An open question, because it cannot be answered yes or no. Directional, because it concerns an area in which your company can help. General, because it gives the client the freedom to choose what is most important to them.

“How do you deal today in the company with the problem in the context of which we met?”

Note the word “today”. You are asking about the current state, not about plans and dreams. The answer to such a question almost always contains problems, even if the client does not call them that.

A well-asked opening question can take care of the first twenty minutes of the conversation. Do not ask more than one at a time.

Step 2: deepening questions

When the client answers, you choose from among the issues raised the one that interests you most, and you dig. The simplest and most effective questions are:

• Can you tell me more? Can you expand on that?
• Why do you pay attention to this issue?
• These issues are understood differently in different companies. What do you mean by it?

The last one is exceptionally useful, because it disarms jargon and shows that you do not assume in advance that you know what the client is talking about.

It is worth extending this set with questions in specific directions. About scale: how often this happens, since when, how much it costs you. About consequences: what will happen if nothing changes for a year, have you already tried to solve it and what happened. About the result: what the ideal situation would look like, how you will know the problem has been solved. And about priority: what makes you deal with this right now.

Step 3: paraphrase and summary

When you have exhausted a given area, list the essence of the problems or results the client cares about.

“If I understood correctly, you are facing this problem and you care about this result. Is that right?”

If the client confirms, great, you know what you will be able to refer to in the demo. If they do not confirm, even better, because you have just avoided building the whole offer on a wrong assumption.

It is worth using paraphrases throughout needs discovery, not only at the end of a block. By repeating after the client what they said, you make them feel that you understand them. They begin to open up and talk more willingly about the issues key to starting cooperation.

Step 4: demonstration of value

After confirmation you can move on to the demonstration of value. It is best to tell a story, share your thoughts or refer to a case study.

Note the difference between demonstrating and telling. Telling sounds like this: “we have extensive experience in this area and a great team”. Demonstrating sounds like this: “interesting that you mention this, because we worked with a company in a very similar situation and it turned out then that the core of the problem lay somewhere completely different from what they initially assumed. I do not know whether it is similar with you, but it would be worth checking”.

The demonstration should be short. Two or three minutes, not twenty. Its purpose is to build credibility, not to present the solution.

And very importantly: do not give away your most valuable resource for free here. You can say that problems of this type are solved in a certain way, but you do not have to immediately sketch out exactly how you will solve this particular client’s problem. The ease with which you do this comes from many years of experience, and the client is talking to you precisely because they do not have that knowledge.

Every question must have a reason

There are situations in which someone attended a sales training, learned that the conversation is led by the one who asks questions, and started asking. And when the client asked “why exactly are you asking me what you are asking me?”, they could not give a sensible answer.

Before the meeting, review your questions and next to each write down what you want to learn and what you will do with that information. If you cannot write that for one of them, cross it out.

And if the client asks directly, have an answer ready: “I am asking because in companies of a similar scale this area usually looks one of three ways, and each means different challenges. I want to know which variant you have before I propose anything”.

Three topic groups

Within needs discovery you can move within three groups. In each you apply the algorithm described above. The order is not accidental: it goes from the most neutral to the most personal.

Group one: business goals

We start from the assumption that companies are guided by logic and if they are to spend money on something, it is good for it to have a reasonable justification.

You ask what this area looks like in the company today, who is responsible for it, what specifically is not working, what the scale of the problem is in time, money and risk, what they have already tried and why it was not enough, what will happen if they change nothing, and how they will know the problem has been solved.

Going further should always be the client’s initiative. It is much better to build interest by asking good questions and guiding the client so that they reach the conclusions themselves. Because after all you know what will probably be best for them, but you cannot simply propose it: it would arouse natural resistance.

Group two: terms of cooperation

These are questions about what the buying process will look like on the client’s side. This group tends to be treated as an afterthought, yet it can decide everything. You can diagnose the problem brilliantly and lose, because it turned out that the decision is made by someone who never took part in the conversations.

Ask what decisions about projects of this type usually look like at their company, who besides the person you are talking to should be involved, whether there is someone who can block it and what their main objection would be, what criteria will be taken into account, what budgeting and the time horizon look like.

It is worth asking these questions naturally, not like an auditor. You can preface them with a justification: “I will ask about something practical, so as not to take up your time later on things that would not pass formally with you anyway”.

This is also a good moment to talk about the things you do not do. A client who accepts this at an early stage and goes further with you cannot really expect something different later, when negotiating the contract.

Group three: ego questions

These are questions about the persona: what they think about and what they care about. What problems they face personally. These will usually be the issues with the greatest emotional charge.

People make decisions guided by emotions. They use logic and arguments to support those emotionally made decisions.

If we explore well the areas our persona cares about and connect them with the value proposition, we will trigger an emotional charge that will make the client want to work with us. Even when we have higher prices or objectively weaker elements of the offer than the competition.

Ask what this topic looks like from their perspective, not the company’s, what frustrates them most about it on a daily basis, how much of their time it eats up, what they would gain personally if it started working, and what they are held accountable for in this area.

Particularly valuable is the question of whether they have already had a similar project, how it went and what they would like to avoid this time. The answer often contains a ready list of sales objections, before they have even been voiced.

When the third group cannot be touched

It has to be said honestly that this will not always be possible. Nobody will admit in front of five colleagues that they fear for their position or that the previous project in this area was their failure.

Do not force the topic then, because a forced ego question in front of witnesses destroys trust instead of building it. Look for an opportunity for a one-on-one conversation; a short exchange on the way out can reveal things that were not said at the table.

And if you want to ask more safely, instead of “what frustrates you about this” ask “what does this usually look like from the perspective of the person responsible for it”. This allows an answer in the third person, and you will still hear the truth.

Moving on to the demo

When you have exhausted the three areas, apply a kind of small pitch: say why your company does what it does, how it does it and what the result is. Briefly. And then that, from what you have learned, it looks like you will probably be able to help.

Note the word “probably”. It is there on purpose. You are not closing the matter, not promising and not pushing.

“So the question is whether you would like to learn how we help remove these problems and ensure these results we have just talked about?”

We are counting here on the client’s initiative. If you have conducted needs discovery well, they will most likely ask about the next steps themselves before you manage to ask this question.

And if they show no initiative, that is valuable information too. It usually means one of three things: either the problem is not painful enough for them, or you have not built enough credibility, or you are talking to a person who has no agency. It is worth asking directly then what would have to happen for the topic to become a priority.

Without confirmed problems, do not present solutions

This is a principle that follows from everything above, but it is worth stating separately, because it is the one broken most often.

Giving a presentation just to show what our company does is shooting blindly. Only getting to know the problems gives permission to present the solution. Otherwise it will be just an attempt to push something on someone who may not need it at all.

There is one more practical reason. The second slide of a good presentation is a summary of the findings from discovery: “if I understood you correctly during our previous conversations, you care about…”. If needs discovery was shallow, this slide will be vague.

Clients do not have to understand precisely what your company does. But they must know that you understand what they care about.

How you will know you did it well

There is a simple test. After the meeting you can clearly list the problems and desired results from the client’s perspective, in their language.

Not in generalities like “they want to grow” or “they are looking for optimization”. Specifically: what bothers them, since when, how they deal with it today, what will happen if they change nothing, and what state they would consider a success. If after the meeting you cannot write this down in a few points, needs discovery has not fulfilled its function.

The second signal is even simpler. The client starts asking about the next steps themselves. You do not have to encourage them.

The most common mistakes in needs discovery

• Asking questions in order to answer. Waiting for the client to finish talking so you can finally say your piece.
• Questions without a reason. If you have no sensible answer to “why are you asking about this?”, do not ask it.
• Moving to the solution after the first problem heard. And the first problem reported is almost never the most important one.
• No paraphrasing. Assuming that what the client said and how you understood it are the same thing. They often are not.
• Stopping at the company level. Exploring business goals and skipping what the specific person cares about.
• Skipping the decision process. A brilliantly diagnosed problem and no knowledge of who makes the decision and whether there is a budget.
• An interrogation instead of a conversation. The structure should be in your head, not on a sheet in front of the client.
• Giving away know-how for free. Sketching out a ready solution for someone who has not bought anything yet.
• Starting from the position of a supplicant. Thanking them for their time sets the hierarchy for the rest of the process.
• No notes. In three weeks you remember the general impression, not the client’s specific phrasing. And that is precisely what is most valuable in the demo and in the offer.

Summary

If I had to wrap all this up in a few sentences, they would go like this.

The client’s perspective is the only right one. Not yours and not your company’s.

You ask questions to understand, not to answer. And each of them must have a reasonable justification.

Everything is a hypothesis until it comes out of the client’s mouth.

You will recognize good needs discovery by being able to list the client’s problems and results in their language, and by the client asking about the next step themselves.

Do not praise, do not persuade and do not sell. Lead a conversation based on problems and results from the client’s perspective, and the client will start to care more about buying from you than you do about selling them something.

You will then step out of your sales role and stop selling. You will start helping.

If you want to check what needs discovery looks like in your company today and what to change so that it works repeatably, book a free consultation.

Did this article interest you and do you want to learn more about needs discovery in the sales process? Listen to episode #3 of the podcast Droga Przedsiebiorcy (in Polish)