Discovery calls are a sales team’s most powerful confidence builders. When handled well, they give sales reps with insights to steer the deal – and customers the urgency and confidence to proceed.
Think of a discovery call as the key that unlocks the door to deeper relationships. It gives you a chance to explore the nuances of your prospect’s needs and goals, assess if there is a mutual fit, and understand how you can help them.
In this article, we break down discovery, with a 5-step discovery plan, best practices to follow, and a discovery call template to anchor your efforts and lay the groundwork for winning deals.
Let’s dive in.
What Is a Discovery Call?
A discovery call is the critical “getting to know you” phase of the sales journey. It’s about understanding the customer, where they are, where they want to be, what they need to get there, and how you can help.
In other words, it’s how you’ll uncover key details like your prospect's pain points, current operations, goals, and decision-making process.
Though discovery can occur at multiple points along the buyer’s journey, it typically follows the first outreach conversation, after you have piqued the prospect’s interest in your solution.
To make the process smoother and more effective, most sales teams use a combination of:
- Discovery Call Templates to ensure the conversation flows naturally.
- Sales Discovery Question Banks to dive deep into what truly matters to the client.
- Sales Coaching resources to help sales reps get progressively better at handling discovery calls
Why a Structured Discovery Call Matters
A structured discovery – or one that follows a discovery call template – works because it creates a framework for meaningful and productive conversations. Here’s why it’s so important:
- Uncovers the Right Insights: A structured approach ensures you ask the right questions to reveal your prospect’s pain points, goals, and priorities.
- Ensures Consistency and Saves Time: By keeping the conversation focused and intentional, you streamline the process for both sides, making it efficient without sacrificing depth.
With a clearly established structure, you as a sales rep can confidently navigate every call, knowing that you’re covering all the essentials.
- Supports Better Lead Qualification: A discovery call is as much about finding who’s not right for you – as it is about who is. With a systematic approach, you can assess each prospect's potential objectively, without the risk of bias or blind spots.
- Sets a Strong Foundation and Builds Credibility: A structured call lays the groundwork for your future interactions. An organized and thoughtful approach signals professionalism and preparedness, fostering trust and respect from the outset.
A 5-Step Approach to Conducting Your Discovery Call
Step 1: Prospect Research
Since discovery calls are typically one-to-one and involve fewer stakeholders than downstream calls, start with a focus on understanding the background, profile, and role of the person you’ll be speaking to. Research their individual LinkedIn activity. Look for clues about their role, promotions, responsibilities, and potential challenges.
Next, learn more about the or industry, any recent market developments, organizational or business changes. Evaluate how the prospect aligns with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)—in terms of e industry, size, and pain points you’re best equipped to address.
Step 2: Preparation for the Discovery Call
The next step is reviewing your client discovery template and reflecting on similar calls you’ve conducted—what strategies worked? What questions resonated? Use this insight to refine your approach.
Next, carefully select and organize your questions. You could also send your prospect a few questions by email beforehand. If they’re too busy, at least prospects will have a better idea of what you’ll cover together on the call.
You also need to prepare to answer the prospects’ questions. Here are some of the top questions you should be prepared to answer:
- How do you compare to X/competitor?
- What kinds of customers are successful – and not successful – with you?
- How long does it take to implement and what is the onboarding timeline and process?
- How do you handle security and compliance?
- How much does your offering cost? How does your pricing model work?
- Do you offer discounts or scaled pricing? How does that work?
- What additional services do you offer?
Step 3: Running the Discovery Call
Take control of the call with a clear agenda. For example, you could say: “Here’s what I’d like to cover today. Is there anything you’d like to add or prioritize?”
This is a good way to give the prospect a chance to bring up their priorities. Also, mention how long the meeting will take. A typical discovery call takes 30-40 minutes, though a niche prospect or a large SaaS discovery call could take up to an hour.
Next, take some time to build rapport. Reference something unique about them, their role, or theur business to break the ice.
Now comes the most important part of the call – the actual discovery. Curiosity and patience are your best tools at this stage. Sales studies show that 11-14 is the ideal number of questions to ask in a discovery call. Just as important as the questions is the time and space you give prospects to think and answer.
The best discovery calls have a speaking-to-listening ratio in the 46:54 range.
At the end of key discussions, use short summaries to paraphrase and confirm your understanding. For instance, you could say, “It sounds like X is a key challenge. Is my understanding correct?”
Lastly, establish credibility without dominating the discussion or jumping to pitch your solution. Share the story of a similar customer or use case, but keep the focus on the problem and solution – not your offering.
For example: “A similar company we worked with faced a similar challenge. They approached it by doing X. Does that sound like something that would work for you?”
Step 4: Decide on Next Steps
A successful discovery is one that ends with consensus and clarity.
Summarize the problem and the approach to the solution: “From what we’ve discussed, your main priorities are X and Y. Does that sound accurate?”
Then, propose the next logical step – a follow-up meeting, a demo, or sharing additional resources.
Be specific about timelines and deliverables from both ends.
Step 5: Follow-Up
After the call, capitalize on the momentum, send a follow-up email – with a summary of the discussion, any resources or materials promised, and a recap of the next steps. End your email with an open-ended question to drive further engagement, such as: “Does this align with your expectations so far?” or “Is there anything else you’d like us to explore before moving forward?”
Pro-tip: Add a touch of personalization that adds value beyond the call. For instance, include an article or blog post that might be of interest to them.
Lastly, document the call summary and follow-up details in your CRM, and share relevant insights with your team or sales leaders, as needed.
A Curated List of Discovery Call Questions
To help you maximize the value of every discovery call, here’s a curated list of questions designed to uncover pain points, clarify goals, and create actionable next steps.
- Prospect and Team
- What do your typical day-to-day responsibilities look like?
- How is your team structured and what are the key roles?
- What is your team’s current workflow like?
- What hurdles is your team currently facing?
- Needs & Problem
- What specific business challenge or goal are you trying to address?
- How are you currently managing this issue?
- How have you attempted to handle this problem before? What worked and what didn’t?
- What’s the reason this problem is important now?
- What do you stand to lose if you don’t take any action or keep the process the same?
- What outcomes or improvements would you like to see in the next 6-12 months?
- Incumbent Solution/Competitor Standing
- What’s working well with your current solution, and where is it falling short?
- Which other solutions are you considering? How far along are you in evaluating your options?
- Decision-Making Process & Timelines
- What steps do you follow to make a decision and proceed?
- What factors influence your decision(e.g., cost, time, ease of implementation)?
- Who else is involved in the decision-making process?
- Who are the key stakeholders, influencers, and gatekeepers?
- What’s your timeline for decision-making and action?
- Budget
- How do you typically secure the budget for initiatives like this?
- Have you already set aside a budget for this project?
- Who oversees and approves the budget allocation?
- Understanding Roadblocks and Moving Forward
- Are there any concerns holding you back?
- Are there any aspects of our offering you’d like more clarity on?
- What are your thoughts on the next steps moving forward?
An Easy-to-Use Discovery Call Template with Examples and Scripts
4 Common Mistakes to Avoid on a Discovery Call
While discovery calls are often associated with hope and potential, they are also an opportunity to make mistakes that can set the wrong tone. Here are four key mistakes to avoid if you want to get the most out of them:
1. Not Customizing the Conversation Based on the Persona
Discovery calls are more likely to take place one-on-one. This means that you have to customize the conversation to the individual. Tailor your conversation based on the prospect’s profile, role, industry, and potential challenges.
For instance, a conversation with a startup founder-CEO will differ from one with a VP at a SaaS company.
Scenario 1: Conversation with a founder-CEO
“With a small team, I can imagine you have a lot on your plate. We’ve seen how tracking the sales pipeline and its health seems to be a common challenge for startups. Could you share how you’re currently managing it?"
Scenario 2: VP at a SaaS Company
" I see your team has grown from 30 to 100 in just six months. As a VP, I’m guessing sales coaching must be a priority for you. How are you currently supporting your sales reps?”
2. Pitching Too Early or Too Often
One of the biggest mistakes in a discovery call is jumping into a sales pitch too soon. The other is speaking about your solution too often.
The discovery call template referenced above will help you restrain yourself from going into pitching mode.
As for ensuring a prospect-focused conversation, practice your active listening skills with every call.
Aim for an average of 3.2 speaker switches per minute. This ensures that you don’t launch into long monologues about your product or its features, and instead, give prospects enough time and opportunity to weigh in.
3. Looking or Seeming Distracted
Appearing distracted – even if you aren’t so – during a discovery call can signal a lack of interest at best– and professionalism, in the worst case.
Make sure you’re present, focused, and free of distractions.
This can be hard to do if you’re focused on taking notes or capturing call insights. A conversation intelligence tool can take this load off your back by automatically capturing key details in real-time.
This way, you can stay attentive to the conversation without the niggling worries of missing out on capturing an insight or customer need or anecdote.
4. Overpromising
The goal of the discovery call is to understand and qualify the prospect – not to close the deal.
It’s tempting to position your offering as the solution to all your prospect’s problems – but the overpromising can backfire.
Be honest about what your solution can – and cannot do.
Ground expectations through real customer stories, while being open about the challenges, timelines, and limitations.
Remember: the goal of this meeting is to capture insights that will help in the next meeting. Make sure that you don’t rush or overwhelm the prospect at this stage. It’s restraint and realistic expectations at the start that will build trust and set the stage for a more positive relationship moving forward.
How the Right Technology Can Help Get the Most out of Discovery Calls
Conducting effective discovery calls comes down to three things – awareness, efficiency, and improvement. The best way to make these a part of your sales process is to:
1. Automate Next Steps
Discovery doesn’t end when the call does. Timing and context can make all the difference in how the deal proceeds.
The typical next steps after a discovery call include summarizing the call, identifying next steps, sending a follow-up email, updating your CRM, and often, looping in sales leaders or product teams.
However, tgiven the daily sales hustle, these repetitive, time-consuming tasks can seem like a waste of energy and time.
Use technology to automate these steps, such as CRM sync to update meeting notes, generate context-packed personalized follow-up emails, and share them with your sales leaders.
2. Analyze Your Calls
Every discovery call is a learning opportunity to develop better awareness of
a) how you engage the prospect, your active listening abilities, and your areas of improvement
b) what your customers’ needs are, what resonates best with them, and what gives them confidence to proceed
Revenue intelligence tools like MeetRecord come with inbuilt conversation intelligence capabilities that give you insights into your speaking to listening ratio, customer monomlogue durations, customer sentiment, etc.
In addition, their revenue intelligence capabilities help you surface key customer and market insights in addition to alerting you of the health of each deal as it moves through your pipeline.
The right tool will capture these insights and help you apply them to future calls.
Review your calls regularly to get insights on your performance and set personal benchmarks for improvement.
3. Create Exemplary Discovery Calls
The right revenue intelligence tool comes with integrated sales coaching capabilities that can help you build a library of standout discovery calls.
Created from actual recorded calls, these calls can demonstrate best practices in action – like question flow, active listening, paraphrasing, etc. – to help sales teams continuously improve – without having to rely on one-on-ones with sales leaders.
MeetRecord’s customers like Fintoc have improved their Discovery to Demo conversion rates rates with MeetRecord’s AI Coaching.
MeetRecord made noticeable improvement in conversion rates from discovery to closing. The targeted coaching, along with insights, helped our sales team to engage more effectively with prospects, addressing their needs and concerns efficiently and closing deals at a higher rate.
Franco Della Maggiora
Founder, Fintoc
MeetRecord can do the same for you too.
To see how it can help you understand how you fare on discovery calls and improve your sales process and performance, sign up for a live demo with our experts.
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