How do you incorporate customer feedback and insights from discovery into the sales process?

Customer feedback and insights from discovery serves as the foundation for the business case that will support your deal.

Ultimately, the business case is "the story that is being told when you are not in the room" - this means whatever story your prospective customer has crafted based on your conversations, articulated product value proposition, and data/details to support their needs is the narrative they're using to build a case to buy internally. Your job is to leverage what you were able to uncover from your discovery to help your prospective customer tell that story in the best way possible without you being there.

The main aspects you'll want to uncover to help them craft that story is:

• Why Do Anything? what is the cause for change?

• Why Now? what is the urgency for them to do it now vs. in the future?

• Why Your Solution? compared to every possible solution, why is your solution uniquely the best?

Without a business case, you do not have a deal. However, with a strong business case narrative built from deep discovery, you can expedite your sales process and strengthen your deal, so take those insight you learned from discovery and co-create with your prospect their business case narrative in their own words.

Great question - I find incorporating customer feedback and the insights you learn from discovery discussions into your sales process is key to driving future engagement and increasing your deal win rates. Here’s how I approach it:

1. Structured Documentation – Ensure your sellers are capturing customer/prospect insights in a standardized way (e.g., using Gong, Salesforce, or methodology templates) to track customer/prospect pain points, priorities, and desired outcomes.

2. Tailor Your Value Propositions – Then you can use these discovery insights to refine messaging, aligning your solutions directly with the customer’s needs and challenges. This makes sales conversations more relevant and compelling to hte people you are connecting with.

3. Leverage Competitive & Industry Insights – I find it key to review feedback across accounts and opportunities to identify trends, customer objections, and gaps in your positioning. It is vital that these insights get fed back to your product, product marketing and sales teams for future adjustments.

4. Training & Enablement – Enablement is key to the success of any sales process - from new hires to continuous learning. To help engrain this into your organization, equip sellers with playbooks and frameworks that incorporate real customer insights, enabling your sales team to adapt selling strategies based on real life experiences rather than relying on generic pitches.

5. Feedback to Product & Marketing – As mentioned above, work to ensure these customer insights flow back into the organization, influencing roadmap decisions, content strategy, and your competitive positioning.