You will be able to prepare for discovery with a short list of likely problems to test rather than a presentation.
It is the night before a discovery meeting. You open a fresh document to prepare and, almost without deciding to, you start writing what you will say about yourself: how long you have been doing this, the clients you have helped, the three things that make you different. By eleven you have a tidy little presentation. You have not written a single thing about the person you are meeting.
That is the most common way to prepare, and it sets up the meeting you saw in lesson 1.1, Why the first two minutes decide the whole meeting, where you fill the silence with your product because the product is all you brought. This lesson swaps the presentation for something more useful: a short list of guesses about the buyer, and the questions that will tell you whether each guess is right.
Start with what you can find out without asking. Give it ten to fifteen minutes. Less and you will waste the buyer's time on facts you could have looked up. Much more and you start to believe you already know their situation, which is worse.
Look at four things. Their role: what someone in that job is usually measured on and worried about. Company news: a new outlet, a new hire, a change of owner, a funding round, a bad review that went around. Recent posts, on LinkedIn or the company's Instagram, for what they chose to talk about in public. And anything they sent you, which people forget to reread. The reply to your first message, the form they filled in, the question they asked when you booked the call.
Take Priya, a freelance bookkeeper. She is meeting Joel, who owns two cafes in Tiong Bahru. In twelve minutes she learns that the second cafe opened eight months ago, that Joel posts most weekends from behind the counter, and that his booking message said, "my accountant says my records are a headache." That last line is worth more than everything else she found.
A hypothesis in discovery is a guess about a problem the buyer might have, written so the meeting can prove it wrong. You base it on buyers like this one that you or your colleagues have met before, plus what your research turned up.
Two or three is enough. More than that and you stop listening, because you are busy ticking boxes. Each one should name a specific problem and a reason you suspect it.
Priya writes three. First, records from the two outlets are kept differently, because the second cafe was set up in a hurry and owners rarely go back to fix that. Second, Joel does the books himself late at night, because he is on the counter at weekends and small owners usually are. Third, the accountant's complaint means year-end costs more than it should, because messy records take longer to close.
Notice what these are not. None of them mentions Priya's services. They are about Joel's week, and each one could be completely wrong.
The danger with a hypothesis is that you treat it as a fact. You walk in, say "so I imagine the two outlets keep their records differently," and Joel agrees to be polite. You have learned nothing, and you are now building on a guess.
Write questions that let the buyer tell you without being steered. For the first hypothesis, Priya might ask, "How do the two cafes handle their records at the moment?" and then, "When you put the two together at month end, what does that involve?" If the answers show both outlets on the same system and month end taking an hour, the hypothesis is dead, and that is a good result. Better to drop a guess in the first ten minutes than to pitch a fix for a problem Joel does not have.
For each hypothesis, plan two questions: one open question about how things work today, and one follow-up that would show whether the problem is real and how much it hurts. Module 2 goes much further into building those layers.
You will probably want some evidence ready. A before-and-after from a similar client, a sample monthly report, a short note on how you handled a business with two outlets. That is sensible preparation.
The mistake is planning to show it. If your plan says "slide 4: case study," you will find a way to get to slide 4 whether Joel needs it or not. Keep the proof in a folder you can open if the conversation calls for it, for instance if Joel asks, "Have you worked with anyone running two shops?" Then it answers his question instead of interrupting it.
A good preparation page fits on one side. At the top, the four or five facts from your research. Under that, your two or three hypotheses, each with the reason you suspect it. Under each, the two questions that would test it. At the bottom, a note of the proof you have ready and the one thing the buyer told you before the meeting, so you remember to come back to it.
Priya's page takes her twenty-five minutes in total, research included. It is shorter than the presentation she used to write, and it gives her something to listen for.
Pick the next discovery meeting in your calendar, or the buyer you most want to meet, and spend your fifteen minutes of research on them before you start the activity below.
For your next meeting, write three hypotheses about the buyer's likely problems and two questions to test each one.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).