Alex Gasson, CEO of Delta-v, recently hosted a webinar on how to run great discovery calls. In this session, he covered the full discovery call process, the steps to follow before, during and after a call, as well as how to structure the conversation.
What is a discovery meeting?
A discovery meeting as an introductory conversation to understand a potential client’s needs, challenges, and goals before a product or service is sold.
As a salesperson, what you want to do at this stage of the process is figure out very quickly whether there’s an opportunity to make you money. If there’s no such opportunity, kick it out of your sales process as soon as you can.
Theory: Buyer’s journey + sales process
It’s important because you need to align your approach with the buyer’s journey, rather than trying to fit the buyer’s journey into your sales process.
When you’re at the discovery stage, you need to consider what the buyer is doing. Buyers are generally in a state of dissatisfaction:
- Passive: They know they have a problem but aren’t doing anything about it. They might believe there is no good solution to the problem that they have.
- Active: They are actively searching for a solution.
Within these states, buyers may either be looking to fix something that’s broken (problem-solving) or exploring ways to achieve better results in the future (future-seeking).
After this stage, they move into the analysis stage, where they assess and evaluate how to address the problem.
“I think particularly if you are generating opportunities from outbound, you’re often going to be catching people where they are passively dissatisfied, so they’re not actively looking for a solution yet.
“And what that means for you as a seller is that there’s a much higher onus on you in execution in order to really unlock the pain and the opportunity for you to make a sale.
“This is where discovery is particularly important. In a world where somebody is in an active buying journey and has come inbound to you, there’s less work for you as a seller to get a prospect across the line because they are actively looking for a solution to the problem.”
Purpose of discovery calls
Sales is a process, and if you put garbage into your process, you get garbage outcomes. You’ll spend time on low-probability deals and won’t close many.
Discovery and qualification are key points of the initial prospect call. Your goals are:
- Determine if there’s an opportunity to make a sale.
- Gather as close to perfect information as possible to steer the buyer toward your solution.
“Something that I’ve observed is that the best salespeople are absolutely ruthless about the opportunities that they put into their sales pipeline.
“When they’re doing discovery, they quickly assess whether they have an opportunity to do business.
“If there’s a low probability of closing a deal, they get that opportunity out of their sales pipeline and focus on a smaller number of high-quality opportunities with a high probability of closing, rather than spending time on deals that are never going to close because the base criteria for a deal being closed are not there.”
Qualification frameworks
Use a qualification framework as part of discovery. Common examples include BANT, MEDIC, SPICE, and ANUM. Choose a framework that fits your business and sales motion.
As an example, the ANUM framework breaks this down as:
- Authority: Know who your buyer is and ensure you’re speaking to the right person.
- Needs/problems: Identify the problems your solution can solve.
- Urgency: Understand the timeline for addressing the problem.
- Money/budget: Confirm whether they have the budget or the ability to find the funds to solve the problem.
“What you need to be doing, and this is really the job of sales leadership in the company, is taking a qualification framework and translating that into specific questions that are relevant to your market, your buyer, and your solution, and then having a set of questions that they ask each and every time.”
Discovery meeting process
“When I say process, I mean all the things that require no talent or skill to get right but probably get you 50% of the way to running really successful sales processes.”
3 Key steps to follow:
- Preparation and research
- Running the discovery call
- Follow-on actions
Preparation: one-pager
Have a one-pager discovery document with standard questions to ask on every call. This is something sales leadership or sales enablement should provide.
Pre-call research
Calibrate your research to your ICP, prioritising the information relevant to your solution, target audience, and what you need to know before speaking with them.
Here’s a list of things to look at:
- Company website: Familiarise yourself with the company by reviewing its website in detail.
- Career pages: Look at a company’s career page and its open roles. You can often glean a lot about what’s going on in an organisation from what they’re posting in their job ads, particularly looking at jobs that are an irrelevant part of the organisation that you are selling into.
- Annual reports: If you’re selling to a listed company that has to produce annual reports, there’s a lot of gold in annual reports. It’s worth digging into the annual report and looking for specific initiatives that are going on in the business that are relevant to the solution that you’re selling into that company.
- News & press releases: Run searches and look at Google News to understand if any trigger events are going to potentially make your solution more relevant to a business at a particular point in time. This could be things like M&A, funding, or leadership changes.
- LinkedIn: You’re probably meeting with one or more people, so check LinkedIn to review everyone you’ll meet, map the buying committee, and identify decision-makers.
Some research can be automated with AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini Deep Research, especially for large enterprises. For smaller businesses, manual research is often better.
The goal is to tailor your standard discovery questions to each account to uncover pain points, opportunities, and critical information.
Discovery call structure & process
“If you structure a call right, it has a material impact on how well a call goes and the information that you you get out of a, that you get out of a prospect.”
Set an agenda at the start (take control)
The first thing on any discovery call is setting an agenda; this is where you take control.
After setting your agenda, begin initial discovery: figure out if there’s an opportunity to do business and gather information to steer the sales process effectively.
Initial discovery (get information)
Authority
Understand who you are talking to, what they are responsible for, and what they look after. You need to understand who you are talking to before getting into the rest of the conversation.
Needs (easy) = current situation
From there, start talking about needs or challenges. Begin with the easy stuff: the status quo in their business and current situation.
Needs (hard = pain points to be solved)
After that, move to harder questions that dig into the pain points that need to be solved.
Urgency
You’ll then discuss the urgency of solving these problems.
Present (share information)
At this point, you may start presenting some information, depending on your sales motion: either giving a demo of your solution or walking them through a slide deck.
Part of this stage is talking about pricing.
Pricing does not necessarily have to be specific; it could be ballpark, indicative numbers for complex sales cycles or specific pricing for commoditised solutions.
Talking pricing early enables prospects to qualify out and say “no” if you are too expensive for them. That is a good outcome.
Deeper discovery (get more information)
Once information has been shared, deeper discovery should cover money and budgets, the decision-making process, urgency, critical events, and competition. Understand the consequences if they don’t do anything.
Agree and book next steps
The last step before leaving the call is to agree and book the next steps to maintain process control. Never leave the call without scheduling at least a fifteen-minute check-in. This ensures you know exactly where you are in the process.
“Do not say you’re going to send an email and confirm times over email. You should always understand what your clear next step is after discovery.”
If they attend, great; if they cancel, you know they’re not interested. This is critical for maintaining control and keeping your pipeline clean.
Making notes and reviewing your meeting
Always record your calls and review them afterwards. AI notetakers are also useful for this.
Things you want to understand:
- Roles of the people you spoke to and their part in the buying process (economic buyer, decision maker, champion)
- Current situation and specific pain points
- Urgency and critical events forcing them to buy something
- Timeline for action
- Decision-making process and evaluation criteria
- Who else do they need to involve in the process that you haven’t met yet
- Money – are they willing to pay?
- Competition and competing alternatives
- Track any missing information for subsequent calls.
Store everything in your CRM, either as notes attached to the opportunity or in structured fields set up by your sales operations team.
Send a follow-up email
Send a follow-up email summarising the discussion, highlighting what isn’t working for the prospect, what they’re looking for, how you can help, and the agreed next steps.
Alex Gasson
Alex Gasson is the CEO and founder of Delta-v. We provide outsourced sales development teams to Enterprise Software and FinTech companies. Prior to founding Delta-v Alex founded and successfully exited a tech recruitment business, following which he had two successful stints as a revenue leader in high growth B2B tech startups. His approach is grounded in deep theoretical understanding of Go-to-Market best practices, combined with over 15 years of hands on experience setting up and running high performance B2B sales organisations. Alex’s writing focuses on expert sales advice focussed on B2B sales development and Go-to-Market activities.
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