How to prepare for and run a discovery call
How to prepare for and run a discovery call
Get what you need and make the best use of everyone's time
In today’s crowded market you only get one chance to make a good impression on a prospect, so you need to make it count. This makes your initial conversation with your prospect (aka your discovery call) the most important moment in your sales process.
The key to a successful discovery call is mutual discovery. You learn about your prospect, your prospect learns about you and each of you is able to decide whether to invest further time and resources in the other.
While this sounds simple in theory, it can be hard to achieve in practice especially within the constraints of a 30-45 minute call. As a seller, the onus is on you to ensure the meeting makes the best use of everyone’s time because you have more experience running discovery calls.
The keys to making the best use of everyone’s time are preparing before the call, staying on track during the call and following up after the call. This post covers each of those in detail:
How to prepare for a discovery call
How to run a discovery call
How to follow up after a discovery call
Common mistakes to avoid
How to prepare for a discovery call
Use a sales framework to organize the information you need to gather. While there are a lot of proven sales frameworks in the market, I like using the SPICED sales framework because it works for both sellers and buyers. As a seller it helps me diagnose the likelihood of a deal progressing but I can also comfortably put my SPICED summary in front of my prospect to recap what I’ve heard and show that I’ve understood, which helps me build credibility and trust.
Start discovery over email as soon as you’ve booked the meeting. Time is the enemy of all deals, so you want to maintain the positive momentum from booking the meeting and take advantage of being top of mind with your prospect. It also sets the tone that you are excited to help and can be counted on to be responsive throughout the process. Your approach needs to vary slightly based on whether the prospect came inbound to you or you went outbound to them:
If they came inbound, thank them for reaching out, recap the information they shared in filling out your lead form or and ask them if there’s any additional context they can share on what prompted them to reach out. Then respond with an agenda for the call and ask what else is top of mind that they’d like to cover.
If you booked the meeting through outbound outreach, propose an agenda for the call and ask what else is top of mind that they’d like to cover.
Prepare an agenda for the call. A typical agenda for a 30 minute initial discovery call breaks down as follows:
Kick off (2 mins)
Recap of conversation to date (3 mins)
Common challenges in {use case} (10 mins)
Solution overview (10 mins)
Next steps (5 mins)
If you have 45 minutes, make the 3rd and 4th items 15 minutes each and leave the remaining 5 minutes as a buffer.
Research your prospect. While research is important, it’s easy to get carried away trying to learn everything under the sun about your prospect. Instead, focus on finding the following:
A one sentence description of what the company does. You can usually just use the headline from their homepage. Add these to your recap slide (see below). It will save valuable time on the call as your prospect won’t have to explain what they do.
Firmographic data points that match your ideal company profile. e.g. # of employees, # of relevant users, current tech stack etc. Add these to your recap slide (see below). They will also save time on the call as you can validate them rather than having to ask a bunch of questions.
Externally visible evidence of them having the problem you solve. There are many ways to do this: The tech stack + # of relevant users gives you a good idea of workflow pains, the breadth of creatives and relevance of landing pages gives you insight into customer acquisition pains, 3rd party panel data gives you insight into competitive pains. The goals is to find something that you can bring up on the call to demonstrate credibility and accelerate the conversation.
Is your prospect an early or late adopter? It’s important to figure this out because it informs your approach. An early adopter will be more forthcoming with information and ideas and more prone to wondering off-topic, whereas a later adopter will need more guidance and have more objections that you’ll need to make sure you surface. I have a longer guide on how to identify early adopters, including specific signals to look for.
How long have they been in their role? A prospect who is new in their role will likely have issues with the setup they inherited from their predecessor, a desire to replace it with a setup that worked for them in a previous role and concerns over what a migration would involve. By contrast a prospect who has been in their role for a long time will likely just want to tweak their current setup and have concerns about how you integrate into it. Knowing this helps you be more efficient on the call.
Prepare a recap slide. The goal of this slide is to recap the information you’ve gathered to date. I’ve seen teams call it “What we’ve heard”, “What we’ve learned so far about {client}” or "Recap of our conversation to date”. I like to lay it out in table as shown below and leave empty bullet points by design to signal that this is a working document.
Prepare a common challenges in {use case} slide.
The goal of this slide is to frame the conversation around the use case and specific challenges that you solve so that your prospect can quickly relate to and start talking about the challenge(s) that resonate most with them.
To accomplish this you want to use simple, concise language and visual aids so that you don’t overwhelm your prospect with too much information. Here’s an wireframe outline:
Prepare a list of discovery questions. Asking the right questions during the call is the key to gathering information efficiently, and when combined with context and active listening, build credibility and trust.
Use closed-ended questions to validate your situation research e.g. “Did I get that right?”
Use open-ended questions to get your prospect talking about key challenges, desired impact, critical events and other decision makers e.g. “Which of these problems resonates most with you?”, “Can you tell me more about how you solve it today?”, “What initiatives are you working on to fix it?”, “Who else is impacted by this?”.
Add context to demonstrate credibility.
When you add context to a question it demonstrates your expertise in having solved the problem for other customers.
For example, instead of asking “How are you measuring success?”, you could say “Most of the sales leaders I talk to are looking for a solution like this to move lead to meeting conversion from 25% to 45%. How does that compare to what you are aiming for?”.
With a single question you have guided your buyer towards the metric that your product moves, demonstrating your expertise in the problem area and framed what success looks like for similar customers, demonstrating you have solved the problem for similar customers.
For a deeper dive on adding context to discovery questions, see here.
Prepare questions to proactively surface objections. It’s better to get objections surfaced as early as possible. Some What challenges do you think we would run into moving forward? Can you see
Prepare a range of pricing. Most clients ask about pricing on the first call, especially if your pricing is not displayed on your website. Prepare a range of pricing based on similar sized customers and keep it handy in case the question comes up. For more this topic see my post on what do when buyers ask you about pricing on the first call.
Prepare your solution overview slides. These are the slides that crisply and concisely describe your solution and the impact it delivers.
Use a maximum of one slide for each of the problems listed on your common challenges slide. If you can describe your solution to all 3 of problems in a single slide, even better.
Be super-specific about how you solve the problem and the impact you deliver. Do not use any jargon or hyperbole. To get this right you need to understand your buyer’s existing workflow and anticipate the questions they will be asking themselves about how you fit into it.
For more on understanding your buyer’s existing workflow and getting super-specific, see my post on how to avoid the horizontal platform trap.