The Art of Sales Discovery Calls - How to Leave Your Prospect Happy and Excited

In my experience most sales people coast through discovery calls with little or no preparation and waste their potential as well as annoying the potential customer. You aren’t one of those sales people because they don’t even try to do a better job at them so wouldn’t think of reading an article like this… But these meetings aren’t easy to run well, and you often worry your prospect finds them confusing and of no real value (“can’t we just see a demo?”). So how do you make these Discovery meetings better so they make sense to your prospect and they get something out of it and even look forward to the next meeting (probably a demo)?

Let’s just take a quick step back and think about why we do Discovery. It’s really about understanding the business context to the sales cycle we hope to embark on. That business context can include qualifying information like the seriousness our prospect and if our initial contact knows how to buy a product or service. And it can include the kind of feature related aspects such as why they want to buy it (functionally) and what it will do for them. It’s also about breaking the ice and starting to build a relationship with that person or people we will be involved with through the sales cycle. So it’s about building trust. So what goes wrong?

It Starts with the BDRs

There is context to this. Each company will be different, but in most enterprise sales teams there will be a Business Development Representative (BDR) contacting initial leads and providing a high level qualification before it hits the sales executive. Filter out the students at University at the very least, and probably the one person consultants looking for free training that we redirect to a weekly/monthly webinar. What these BDRs say to that prospect in that first contact is crucial to our discovery meeting. They need to hit their own objective for this “pre-qualification” phase and not go beyond it. Every minute the prospect is talking to our company and not getting what they feel they want (often a “demo”) is making us feel harder and harder to do business with. And every expectation the BDR sets will set us up for success and failure for our Discovery meeting. I’ve heard some really frustrating statements in these first calls that makes our job a lot harder.

Expectation setting is the biggest challenge. As a pre-sales professional when I hear the BDR say something like “The sales team will do a full discovery call with you so that they can create a personalised demo so you can see exactly what it will be like for you to work with our solution” I wince. We have no idea what we will discover (functionally) or how much work we can put into the demo (commercially) - so anything that doesn’t meet this ideal state is going to leave our prospect feeling short-changed. It’s also falling into a basic trap where the sales team (following a discovery meeting) have a sales person do an introductory presentation and then the pre-sales person does a demo. This whole meeting should be a joined up presentation (or playback) to this prospective customer that includes a demo. Subtle difference - but really important because the preparation will be so much better. So how do we avoid this? Key phrases for the BDRs so they stay on message plus record the calls and provide coaching regularly.

Preparing for Discovery

So our BDR has set a call up for us and they have set an expectation that fits with our sales cycle. Something along the lines of “Our Sales team will have a 45 minute call to understand your situation more completely and so they can present the relevant parts of the solution back to you in a follow up meeting”. How do we as a sales team prepare for this Discovery meeting in a way that we get what we want but leaves that client feeling the time was well spent?

We do it like any other well run sales meeting. We define our objectives up front (and not too many of them), we define our roles (where multiple team members such as pre-sales are involved), we research the prospect, and we create an agenda that can be shared with the prospect. And where there is a team involved we have an internal pre-call to run through all of this (but you already do that I’m sure).

For research we are looking at the company and its market - looking up their company accounts if possible, certainly doing a Google News search. And get Chat GPT to generate a Business Model Canvas for them. All basic stuff most people will do. Include industry trends that are likely concerns for them - again Chat GPT or similar is good for these, especially as you can tweak the prompt based on the person you are meeting (e.g. “what keeps the CTO of company X up at night”). 

From the research we form a Point of View as to how we might help this customer - it means we go in armed with more than just random or off-the-shelf questions. We have reasons for asking specific questions, and the specificity of the questions shows we have done our homework. We are trying to bring some value to the meeting for this customer even though we don’t yet know the actual pains. This is one way we help them feel the meeting was of value. And help to build some excitement for the next meeting as we are already trying to partner and solve their problems before we have even met.

The agenda, roles and objectives are interlinked of course. You want to be clear on these and give each participant some time to call their own in the meeting and not interrupt / de-rail them. The internal pre-call is good for setting these boundaries and discussing specific objectives below the high level ones. With the prep done, how do you make sure you hit your objectives?

Running the Discovery Meeting

It’s now the sales executive who runs the discovery meeting and keeps people on track. A well run meeting will follow good practice around time keeping, inclusivity, checking the customer has time to ask their questions and other aspects that we won’t go into detail around in this article.

What I would say is, in my experience, a visual or two is hugely beneficial. Often this might be just the agenda - even better if the objectives are on their as well so we can all agree that its the purpose of the meeting with our prospective customer. That’s the minimum, but in shorter meetings it may well be enough.

I would also advocate adding some of the high level topics as questions to a slide as the next level of detail. The agenda might be something like this:

1. Introductions

2. Your Current Situation

3. Pain Points and Opportunities

4. Your Ideal Solution

5. Any Questions for Us?

6. Next Steps

2, 3 and 4 might be a single line/agenda point of course. But I might break out to these 3 or more to help guide the conversation and make sure I get to talk about all areas we want to cover. It’s also there to help keep our prospect from rambling or dumping too much all over the place! I mean, we want to hear as much as possible, but being able to go back to areas they have covered and re-cap is easier when it’s on an agenda.

One other reason for visuals is if we are doing discovery around a topic that is new to this prospect or open to different terminology. If we are going over a process for example, a diagram that shows our high level view of that process from start to finish helps level set the conversation and guide all of us across the topic.

The Golden Rules of Discovery

These tend to be pretty well understood by most sales professionals but lets pull out a few that will help make sure they feel the meeting was of value to them and that they are looking forward to the next one…

• Listen more than Talk - I really don’t want to teach you to suck eggs. But I find even experienced sales people sometimes seem to forget this one. Listen to the recording back if it was online and critique yourself. Use Gong or some other such system for an objective measure. Gong is great.

• It’s a conversation - This is one of the key ones. Make sure you are in a conversation and feels like that, then you are starting to build a partnering relationship. Nothing worse than posing a question, listening to the answer while you write it down and then saying thank you and asking another question that isn’t directly related. At the very least give some feedback to that answer and try and segue to the next question gracefully if you are at a dead end.

• Don’t sell - but do foreshadow. This is how you help build the excitement. Don’t get into any details about your product/service unless you are asked a specific question (“we want it to be able to do X - does it cover that?”). But when you get an answer to a question that you know you cover really well do refer to that and foreshadow what they will see (“good that you want to reduce the time it takes to do X as I can show you exactly that in the demo next week and its one of the reasons our customers renew to get that 25% time saving” or words to that effect - you know the kind of stuff).

The Keypoints

OK, we have covered quite a bit here - some was contextual so let me pull out those key points that are about having your customer leave the meeting feeling that it was worth their time and actively looking forward to the demo/playback when you next meet.

• Make sure your BDR sets the right message about why you are doing Discovery, i.e. the benefits to your prospective customer (not the benefits to you as a sales team).

  
  

• Your research has to generate a Point of View as to how you can help this customer with your product or service. Even better if it covers several aspects. You might use it in conversation or you might even present it at a high level to help the conversation flow. But it’s how you show you did your research and you are bringing (potential) value in this discovery meeting.

  
  

• Make sure the meeting sets the scene for the demo and gathers the key points you will use as illustrations (e.g. which specific pains and how you fix them). And foreshadow what they will see so they leave the discovery meeting enthused and feeling this is a sales team that care, understand and want to partner with us.

  
  

Having said all of that Discovery is as much an art as it is a science. We all miss something - usually an obvious question that we didn’t think of until the internal debrief. So son’t beat yourselves up too much but use it as a reason to get in touch before the demo and follow up the Discovery. Keep building those relationships!

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