How to Run a Discovery Call That Uncovers Real Buying Signals

Everyone in sales has likely made a discovery call at one time or another. The discovery call is a crucial component of the sales process. It allows reps to qualify a prospect and gather information that can be leveraged throughout the process to generate a win.

However, not all discovery calls are created equal. They used to be 60 minute long interrogations filled with monotonous questions and answers. Now, Sales Development reps must earn their right to inside information. Sales discovery calls are no longer a single line of questioning and no rep should enter a discovery call with basic questions that they can answer on their own. Instead, reps should be prepared with in-depth, complex questions, as well as relevant information about your own product.

The best reps don’t just use the discovery call to gather basic information, they accomplish three very important goals. First, they seek to establish personal relationship and a working partnership with their prospect. Next, they identify the prospect’s specific needs and what gaps their solution can fill. Lastly, they set themselves up for a successful sales process moving forward. You can do this too, but you must prepare properly. Here’s how:

Find Your Direction

Before you begin, you must ask yourself two important questions that will help direct your preparations. First, ask yourself where you are with the account, what information you have, and what you need to know. Then, ask what kind of buyer you have. The answers will determine what information you need, and how you will speak with them. For example, if your speaking with a sales manager, they will likely speak more to sales performance, rep quotas, and revenue attainment. A sales operations person will probably be more interested in automation, integrations, and IT.

You can even work with your marketing team to gain even more information on your buyers. Marketing usually maintains in-depth information on buyer personas and targeting to help them develop content, advertising, and make strategic decisions. Marketing can not only provide valuable information about a potential client, but also use vital information that sales has obtained.

Goal 1:  Establish a Personal Relationship

In a successful discovery call you must build a foundation for a friendly relationship between you and your prospects. You don’t want to be just another salesperson, you should be a valued resource that has the prospect’s best interest in mind. This creates an open channel of communication where the prospect is more likely to share internal issues or concerns, as well as honest feedback and helpful information.

Gather Context

Ensure you have a complete understanding of the company, their background, and products.  You should also review previous contact and conversations with them. To do this, listen to call recordings from cold calls or prior contacts, read call notes, spend time on the company website, and search recent news.

Develop Personal Data About Your Prospect

To create conversation and find shared interests with your prospect, you should gather some personal data about them. Google their name and check LinkedIn for locations, companies, or schools you are familiar with. You can also check their LinkedIn for shares of content you are interested in and for any shared contacts. Look to their job title and leverage your company’s buyer personas in order to understand what problems they are likely dealing with and how your solution can help. It will also be useful to pull information around how your product has helped clients in similar roles or companies.

Prepare Questions to Build Rapport

The discovery call is about actual discovery, so you should always have questions prepared. Personal questions start the call off light and can help fill time until others have joined the meeting. You can ask things like:

• How did you get into your current role or discipline?
• Are you a fan of (sports team native to city)?
• Anything exciting happening at (prospect’s company)?

Goal 2: Pinpoint Prospect and Company Problems

Your company likely already has some sort of persona targeting that contains the issues that each role in a target organization faces. Gather these, as well as information from the prospect themselves so you can demonstrate how your product will best solve their problems.

Gather Company Data

Do research on your prospect’s company to find their competitors (and what your company’s relationships with them), as well as the problems you have solved for firms in similar industries, with similar products, and of similar sizes. This will help you understand what your prospect is most likely facing so you can align your questioning around those needs. It will also help you speak directly to those issues if the need arises.

Prepare your Qualification Questions

This is one of the most important parts of the discovery call. Qualification determines if this opportunity is worth pursuing. It is imperative that you don’t continue with the sales process if you know that the account is not qualified. Doing so for the sake of increasing numbers and meeting a quota will backfire, because the Account Executive will demo a prospect they cannot sell, and will result in wasted time and bad pipeline.  

Every company has their own requirements for a qualified lead. You should only approve prospects that you feel will actually benefit from the use of your product. Call notes templates make it easy for you to have the right qualification questions in front of you on every call, and easily add them to the record after.

In addition to your basic product requirements, some of the best qualification questions to ask are:

Discover needs or challenges

• What led you to make a change now?
• How have you tried to solve the problem so far?
• Have decisions like this been made in the past?

Uncover purchasing authority

• Are there any issues that other stakeholders may be concerned with?
• What’s your purchasing process?

Uncover budget

• Do you already have a budget allocated?
• What are you ideally looking to invest?

Goal 3: Set Up the Next Steps in the Process

The discovery call is just the first of many important conversations within the sales process. It is your opportunity to gather critical data that can be extremely useful in the process moving forward. Therefore you must be prepared to establish a positive outcome.

Gather a package of “leave behind” content on topics that you plan to discuss on the call. These can be blog posts, ebooks, or videos on features or uses of your product. You can email them to the prospect after. This puts valuable information in the hands of your prospect, and keeps the referring back to your company’s content.

Lastly, if you’ve qualified the prospect, you want to maintain momentum and set the next meeting before the call ends. You should also have the right questions ready to build commitment. A few of the best examples are:

• In an ideal world when would you implement this solution?
• Would you like me to connect with anyone else at your company?

With the right preparation and questions, your discovery calls will not only provide you with better information, they will help set you up for success.

Ways to Make Sales Discovery Calls More Effective

Discovery calls are designed to uncover buyers’ pain points, uncover priorities, and understand their needs. They are your first chance to wow a buyer.

It all starts with building trust and rapport. If you can’t do that, your deal will be dead in the water. That’s why getting discovery calls right is so important. The moment a prospect answers the phone, you have to answer the critical questions: “Why you?” and “Why now?” (oftentimes in under 30 seconds). 

After all, that’s why they say, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.” 

The truth is that the discovery call is one of the most important aspects of sales, yet many reps are given a list of questions to ask, then left to their own devices. 

But don’t worry—we’ve got your back. In this post, we’ll cover 5 practical and actionable tips for better discovery calls today. 

Great discovery starts (but doesn’t end) here

Most of us think of discovery as one initial call where you learn everything you can about your prospect in 20 minutes, and then you have all the information you need to solve their problems. 

But for great sales reps, discovery only starts there.

That’s because they understand that the information they’re getting up-front can change throughout the process, especially as a prospect starts to understand more about their options and refines what they want.

Understanding your buyer, what they care about, and how you can help them get what they want will set you apart, regardless of whether you’re on a discovery call or not. 

Discovery isn’t just a skillset — it’s a mindset.

But how can you cultivate that mindset? Here are 5 proven tips we’ve learned over the years from talking with experts and testing methods with buyers. 

1) Don’t over-or under-prepare for your first discovery call.

Remember the story of Goldilocks and the three bears? The same principle applies here. There’s too much preparation for your first call, too little preparation, and then there’s juuuuust the right amount.

Here’s what you should know:

• What they do: the industry they work in and how their business functions
• Who they are: what their title is and a bit of personal information

And here’s what you shouldn’t know:

• Their challenges and why they want to solve them
• Who or what their blockers are
• The one thing that’s most important to them

Why shouldn’t you know these things before your first call? Quite simply, because assumptions are dangerous. They get in the way of a real conversation, and they can lead you to skip over important information. Start from a place of curiosity instead and try to find the answers to these points naturally.

2) Use questions that help you understand your prospect as deeply as possible.

There are three main types of questions on discovery calls:

I) Reflective listening questions.

Reflective listening questions typically either repeat words, or use phrases like “It sounds like…” and “It seems like…” to signify that you’re listening closely and would like your prospect to go into more detail about what they’re saying. You can also repeat back the last sentence or few words of what someone just said, if you can tell there’s more behind it. Like so:

“I’m having trouble with my SDR team.”

“Trouble with your SDR team?”

This is reflective listening 101, but if you’d like to learn more about it, we have a great resource on the technique that you can use to master it.

II) Questions about their vision of success.

It’s a safe bet that if your prospect is considering investing in your products or services, then they’re expecting some kind of success in return. Here’s a few questions you can use to figure out what they’re envisioning:

• “So you’re looking to invest in . What would success look like to you, imagining that you’ve implemented it already?”
• “How is that different from your current state?”
• “What’s prevented you from making this change at your company before?” 
• “What would the impact be on the company if you made this change? What would the impact be on you?”

III) Questions about the most important thing.

In every deal, there’s a most important person (whoever has the final say — sometimes this is the CEO, sometimes not), and they have something that they care about above all else. But it may not be your main product offering, and it could even be something as small as a minor feature that you haven’t mentioned yet! To start figuring this out, simply ask every person you meet:

What is the most important thing to you?

3) Don’t accept answers at face value.

Good discovery never ends, because it’s a mindset you carry throughout a deal. Ask follow-up and clarification questions throughout the deal cycle, and don’t worry about annoying your prospect or seeming like you’re not an expert. People like to feel understood, so they’ll appreciate that you took the time. (And the only surefire way to annoy them is to present a solution that doesn’t speak to the issues they’re trying to solve!)

In general, the easiest way to keep this up is to remember not to take answers at face value. Always assume there’s something more. But if specific clarifying questions aren’t coming to mind, these two phrases will never steer you wrong: 

1. “Hmm, that’s interesting. Tell me more about that.” 
2. “Hmm. And what else can you tell me about that?”

4) Focus on conversational patterns that drive results.

Take notes on phrases that you’re using throughout discovery conversations, and look for patterns that recur on deals that close. Knowing what works is valuable, because not only will it raise your win rate when you start using these winning patterns consistently, but it can raise the revenue of your whole company if you share those patterns with others.

Revenue.io can help with this if you don’t have time to take notes (or if you’d prefer a more scientific approach) by analyzing conversations in comparison to win rates.

5) Learn to coach yourself.

Want to make sure that you’re always getting better at discovery? Treat it as an ongoing practice and review your meetings regularly. 

When you’re participating in a conversation, it can be hard to learn and adapt in the moment. But when you’re listening to or watching a recording later, you can be an objective observer, and notice moments that went particularly well or answers you didn’t dive into that you’d like to clarify later.

1. If you’re getting tripped up by a particular objection or other part of the discovery process, try asking your peers how they handle them. Revenue.io offers call libraries that make this process particularly fast and easy, since you can search conversations by objections and outcomes.
2. This is more of a tip for managers, but look for people who have a coaching mindset in your hiring process. One way to do this is to ask potential reps to give a demo or presentation, then give them feedback and ask them to give the demo again. If they try to incorporate your feedback, that’s a good sign!

Looking for ways to scale discovery best practices across your whole team? 

Discovery is definitely a state of mind, but the tools and resources at your disposal can easily affect your mind. Revenue.io helps managers, AEs, and even SDRs by giving them exactly what they need to make discovery easy.

If you want to learn some powerful strategies to have better discovery calls, Revenue.io teamed up with Richard Harris for a new webinar Discovery Call Secrets for 10X More Qualified Meetings.