We have value to offer. We never know 100% of the value we have to offer to someone, but we can use certain techniques to learn, including the blue sky discovery call (BSDC). The way my mind works, this is my favorite and fastest way to get there.
A normal discovery call is specific
A normal discovery call leads to selling a certain thing. It’s a conversation that a sales person has with a potential customer to find out if it’s a fit — mostly if the potential customer is an actual prospect or a dud.
BSDC is unlimited brainstorming
Used by major creative forces, blue sky thinking and research are ways to check out what would be possible if everything was possible. It gives us an opportunity to glimpse the artificial limits we’re creating for our endeavors.
BSDC is not sales
Although it can lead to sales, the goals are…
- Learn the pain points of the other person (this is the big one)
- Answer questions
- Insert our own value into the conversation
We don’t close on this call. We don’t need to offer anything because we’re going to get off the phone, put our thoughts together, and then offer them something — maybe as a proposal in an email.
Maybe we don’t offer them anything…ever! The pressure is completely off because we don’t have to offer them something. We only offer them something if we can take away their pain.
The value is in being a pain killer. It is not a fun life to offer things to people who don’t need solutions. That’s how we get into low priced work without respect or impact.
When to use BSDC:
When we know our audience, but we don’t know our service. When we might be starting from scratch in our business (this can be right now for many of us) and we want to discover the needs of our favorite tribe. It might be when we get a client call and we just aren’t sure what they want from us, or when we have a client we believe has a large budget and wants concierge service.
BSDC is not a trick
This kind of call works really well, and it could be used as a trick, I guess. The way I use it is not as a trick, but rather to find the hidden value fast. Find out what someone really needs and make a bespoke solution.
- I don’t like the pressure of closing on a phone call.
- I come up with better solutions after I get off the phone.
- I might pitch solutions in a confusing way verbally before I get organized.
- The client might need to share my pitch with someone else after we talk, so I would rather offer them a shareable proposal.
- I cherish the opportunity to have a relationship-building call.
Canned services are good…kinda
We can offer one-size-fits-all services which can work well for scaling and it doesn’t take such a complicated creative process. If we try to create a new service from scratch, it will require prototyping and iteration that adds up to a lot of work.
Using BSDCs for the initial step can help us majorly in finding what our people actually want before shoving something in their faces.