Score whether your sales method is being used

A sales method that nobody follows is decoration. This summer I designed a discovery method for a UK B2B SaaS business, and alongside it a way to measure whether the team was using it.

The method

The method runs a 45-minute discovery meeting in four stages:

1. Probe: the prospect does most of the talking, and the seller offers no solutions.
2. Confirm: the seller summarises back and asks for a clear yes or no.
3. Match: a demo tied only to the problems the prospect confirmed.
4. Close: the seller asks for the business, and any discount is traded for something in return.

The discovery agenda puts three questions at the centre: what the problem costs the prospect today, who signs and by when.

The scorecard

The assessment reads the last 30 days of recorded sales meetings and filters out internal calls. It scores each meeting out of 10 against a fixed rubric and estimates how much of the call the prospect spent talking. Adoption is reported for the team and for each seller, including sellers with no qualifying meetings, because an empty row says something too.

The baseline

The first run scored the team at 5.5 out of 10 across five assessed meetings. Training on the method was scheduled for the following month, with the scorecard rerun afterwards to track adoption.

Running it in your own team

Write a ten-point rubric for the discovery method you already teach. Score a month of recorded calls against it, including the sellers who recorded none, and share the team score at your next sales meeting.

Related: when growth stalls and nobody trusts the pipeline, or read the case studies.