Read the room, they say! But what next, said nobody!

So when I was in training, every mentor or manager told me "Read the room in your discovery calls!". I understood. But nobody really told me what to do next, and how to hold the 'room', is something nobody mentioned.

Context: Imagine there's a prospect, an inbound one at that. They are pretty excited when they join the call, the energy from you as well is high. The intros happen, the problem identification happen and then you dive into "solving" those problems.

Now here, their expressions change. The voice tonality flattens. The energy of the room drops. You wonder something somewhere has gone wrong, and they have sensed that. Right?

In one of my recent discoveries, the prospect lost the energy halfway through when we were working out to solve their use case. I became nervous for a second. It was a promising call, more promising deal. With both my prospects going bland for over 20 minutes, I freaked a little. Here's what DID NOT WORK for me:

• Pause and ask "Any questions or thoughts, so far?" : This didn't get them warmed up again!
• Ask "So far so good?" Nah.
• Say "I hope we are on track so far?" : Nah.
• "Do you need anything from me at this point?" : NAH!

What WORKED:

• I stopped screen share, I asked for a quick minute. I shared my screen again with a case study - their website. Exact same industry, similar problems. Now i had the name in my mind from the SDR notes. Since it was the same industry, they were aware of this company. Their ears popped open again.

• We started exploring their problems more like - "How do you address this ditto problem right now? - Well they did almost the same thing. Not saying that's a wrong way of doing things, but that can be bettered by..." then I proposed solutions or workarounds that involved my product as well. They were patient enough to listen what they were doing wrong.

• Paint the picture. I spoke more in "Imagine we take this route, and this is how we solve the problem..." And I spoke very less in "This is how we solve the problem". Nah!

• I also asked questions more of "Where do you see a hiccup so far?" OR "Where do you see you might face a problem setting this up / operating this?"

In a few minutes, the energy and curiosity was back in! They started asking questions again. The discovery ended in a demo call - it's still work in progress! :)