Discovery Call Template

There’s the saying in B2B sales – “deals are won and lost in discovery.” 

In this discovery call template, I want to deep-dive into what makes a good discovery process. And explore how to conduct a good discovery call so you secure more deals.

This discovery call template will consolidate insights that I’ve picked up:

• By investing more than $50k into coaching programs
• My own personal experiences having done 50+ discovery calls
• And expert advice from top creators

  It covers everything you need to know, what to look out for, and how to secure more deals.

Let’s get started!

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Why Sales Discovery Is Important

Depending on your source of leads, you will have prospects reaching out to you from different places. For example:

• Outbound cold email responses
• LinkedIn inbound leads
• Partner referrals
• Event trade shows
• Website traffic

Problem is, you don’t know at which stage of the buying journey they are at, or what their specific needs and desires are.

So if you pitch directly to them, you won’t be able to address their specific pain points, or they might not be ready to buy just yet.

And you’ll end up wasting your time and energy.

That is where discovery comes in – to help you see whether a lead is:

1. Worth pitching to immediately
2. Not ready to buy yet, but should be nurtured over the long-term
3. Not suitable for your solutions to begin with

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Key Qualification Factors

We start by qualifying leads. For this, I’ve found it useful to vary the approach depending on whether the lead is an inbound or outbound opportunity. Here are some key differences between the two: 

Outbound Leads

• Don’t know about your company
• Unknown buying intent
• Pre-qualified in terms of company size, job titles etc…

Inbound Leads

• Already knows your company
• Expressed buying intent
• No pre-qualification

Depending on the nature of your solutions, this means that certain lead qualification criteria like “Authority” or “Budget” could be already addressed with outbound leads.

For inbound leads however, they may not fall within your “ICP” and as such, you won’t have visibility into whether any qualification factors are met until you speak to them.

Lead Qualifying Fundamentals

Fundamentally, lead qualification is about understanding:

1. Their current state – situation
2. Their desired state – goals; projects; critical event; success metrics
3. Their “gap” – problems; challenges; pain; critical event
4. Impact of the “gap” – impact; negative consequences; positive implications; payoff

Authority

Most lead qualifying frameworks highlight a need to identify whether the person you’re speaking with is the decision-maker or not.

In more complex buying cycles, the decision-making process might be more relevant in understanding the buying dynamics, which can involve:

• Multiple stakeholders across different teams
• Need to identify **internal champions** who will help drive the sale

Decision-Making Process

The decision-making process is about understanding:

1. What the decision-making process looks like
2. Who is involved in the decision-making process
3. How urgent of a priority is this decision
4. When are they looking to make a decision by

Budget

Budget is common to many lead qualification frameworks, and highlights the need to identify if the prospect can afford your solutions.

Certain frameworks FAINT and CHAMP look at whether they have the financial capability to afford the solution, and not simply the budget.

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Pre-Discovery Call Preparations

You’ve heard the expression:

“If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail”

Yeah, that’s super applicable to B2B sales.

Here are some things to remember when getting ready for your sales discovery call. 

Research

The biggest question that comes to mind here is – “what should I research about to help me be most prepared for the call?”

When preparing for the call, we want to find information that would enable us to ask better sales discovery questions around these 4 key factors:

• Prospect background
  • Role and title
  • Job scope
  • Recent activities

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• Company background
• • Company size
  • Company solutions
  • Recent news

Outside of that, it’s important to understand your own value proposition:

• Based on their role, what are the common pain points that you help to address?
•  Based on their job scope, what aspects of their daily responsibilities and activities do you need to know more about to determine if you can support their needs?
• Based on their company’s stage of growth or size, where do you add the most value?

The better you understand where your solution fits into the company’s problems, the easier the meeting will be.

Roleplay

Once you’ve done sufficient preparation, it’s time to role-play and practice the different scenarios that might come up during your call.

In a study, sales role-play exercises can lead to significant improvements in negotiation skills, a key aspect of sales. The study indicates 20-45% higher win rates for the sellers who practiced sales role-playing  vs those who didn’t.

Specifically, you’ll want to practice:

1. Your call flow
2. Your script around standard questions (around authority, decision-making, and budget)
3. Your additional questions around prospect needs based off your research
4. Any potential objections that might come up

• What’s your pricing?
• Can we see a demo?
• How are you different from others?

Mindset

When I first started taking sales calls, I had the impression that the only “good” outcome was a closed deal.

Now, I’ve realised that it’s more important to SERVE, than to SELL.

Our role is to help the person arrive at the right decision for them, regardless of whether they decide to choose your solutions or not.

In fact, being a trusted advisor helps increase your conversion rates!

Going into the call and realising that it’s okay if they’re not a good fit, opens you up to listen to their needs and understanding how you can truly help them.

I’ve personally found it helpful to take a few deep breaths and do a short “meditation” before each call to clear my mind and focus on adding value (instead of “hard-selling”).

After listening to their needs and understanding whether you’ll be able to help them or not, you can then arrive at various next steps (all of which are good):

• You can truly help them, and you explore a potential partnership (best-case scenario) 
•  You can help them, but it’s not the right time for them now, so you’ll keep in touch to stay top-of-mind and nurture them until they’re ready to buy
•  You can’t help them, and you introduce them to others who can, or share relevant resources which might be helpful for them

So long as you have a clear understanding of next steps, that’s a win! It doesn’t matter whether you’re able to close a deal from them or not (even if that’s preferable).

Going into calls with that mindset will put you in the right frame of mind to position yourself as a “trusted advisor”, and help you listen to their needs to identify your areas of value-add.

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Conducting A Good Discovery Call

Before I start my sales discovery call I like to review ideal outcomes of the meeting. So I’ll ask myself:

• What are the relevant milestones in a call that I need to check off?
• How will I know if I’ve done a good discovery call?
• How to handle objections (for next steps)?
• What are the ideal next steps from a discovery call?

Rapport-Building

I generally like to start off light and conversational.

You can also show that you’re done your research on them by highlighting their recent activities (from their LinkedIn profile) or their recent company news.

“Interesting post you shared recently on LinkedIn about Y! You’re active on LinkedIn too?”

Pre-Frame

I then set the frame and agenda of the call. I’ve found this to be an important step to align expectations and let the other party know what to expect from the call.

I saw that you booked in a call because you wanted to (learn more about our solutions)…

On this call is to ask you a couple of questions to better understand your business and what you’re hoping to achieve. 

At the end of the call, if I feel like there’s potential synergy, I’ll take some time to put together a (personalised 12-month growth plan) for you. Otherwise, I’ll connect you with others who can help, or leave you with resources you can look through on your own.

Does that sound okay?

Discovery

Once we’ve established a framework for the call, it’s time to dive into discovery mode. Remember, the purpose of discovery is to see if the prospect is qualified to move onto the next stages of the sales process.

The first step is to dig into what the prospect really needs.

There are 4 main categories of ‘need’ that should be addressed:

1. Their current state – situation
2. Their desired state – goals; projects; critical event; success metrics
3. Their “gap” – problems; challenges; pain; critical event
4. Impact of the “gap” – impact; negative consequences; positive implications; payoff

For inbound leads, I generally start by asking them about their “gap”:

• So what made you reach out to book a call with us?
• Can you share more about your biggest challenge right now? What’s not working?

Then, I would move on to ask about their “desired state.”

• I’d love to zoom out and begin with the end in mind here. So ultimately, what’s the goal?
• If we were having this conversation 12 months down the road, what would you have achieved personally and professionally to be happy with the progress?
• How would you measure success? What goals or metrics are you looking at?

Subsequently, I’ll ask more about their “current state.” The questions you ask here will differ based on your solutions:

Roughly how much revenue did you make over the last 12 months?

• How many customers do you currently have?
• Are you bootstrapped or have you raised funding?
• What are your core products or services?
• How does your offer stack look like?
• What are your profit margins?
• What’s your business model?
• What’s your main revenue driver?
• How do you currently acquire new customers?
• Who are your dream target customers?
• What does your sales and marketing team look like now?
• What big initiatives are you planning over the next 6-12 months?

For outbound leads, I typically start with their “desired state”:

• What are your main goals over the next 6-12 months?
• If we were having this conversation 12 months down the road, what would you have achieved personally and professionally to be happy with the progress?
• How would you measure success? What goals or metrics are you looking at?
• Then, I would understand more about their “gap”:
• Can you share more about your biggest challenge right now? What’s not working?
• How’s the progress on your goals? What’s working or not working?

Authority

Depending on their job title, I will confirm on the stakeholders involved in the process:

• Who else, besides yourself, will be involved in this decision?
• Will you be making the final sign-off, or who else do you need to get sign-off from?

Decision-Making Process

Gaining clarity into their decision-making process can help to answer the “Authority” part as well:

• Can you walk me through your decision-making process for an initiative like this?
• What is your timeline for making a decision on this?
• Sometimes people join these calls because they are in education mode and just want to learn about new methods.
• Sometimes people join because they have a big pipeline or revenue problem they needed to solve 6 months ago.
• Sometimes people join because they need to do something about their pipeline or revenue in the next 12 months, but it’s not urgent.
• Curious where you would put yourself on that scale?
• Asking so we can align on your timeline. If today was purely educational, that’s okay too.

Budget

For the budget, I generally see whether they have the financial capabilities to afford the solution, rather than the budget they have allocated for it. Depending on the size of the organisation you’re speaking to, this might differ.

For the former scenario, prior questions around their revenue and profit figures would give me a good sensing of where they stand.

For the latter scenario, you can ask about their specific budget:

• What’s the budget range that you have allocated for this initiative?
• Is the budget for this initiative available immediately, or is it tied to a future cycle?

Wrap-Up

After the discovery phase, I wrap up the conversation by confirming on their top priorities and “impact of the gap”.

• What’s the one thing you need to get right to achieve or exceed your 12 months goals?
• And you mentioned the main reason why that hasn’t been implemented yet is (due to the lack of internal expertise and resources)?
• What makes this the most important reason for you to get right?
• What other things in the business would be affected as a result of sorting this issue out?
• Is there anything else you think I should know or do you feel we’re on the same page with your situation?

 

Establishing Next Steps

Lastly, I would set clear next steps to end the discussion.

• Thanks for sharing more about your business and what you hope to achieve. I can see how committed you are to solving your problems and growing your business.
• Are you happy for me to share the next steps?
• Great. Based on what you shared, I believe we can help you achieve those goals. So what I’ll do is put together a personalised 12-month growth plan for you.
• I’ll chart out how we can help you (craft your go-to-market strategy to appeal to ideal prospects, build a consistent pipeline with outbound acquisition systems, and hit your revenue target of $1 million over the next 12 months).
• You’ll be able to use this information to drive revenue growth yourself, but I’ll add on our partnership options and how we can potentially work together to help you achieve your goals.
• Does that sound good?

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Post-Call Review

The ideal next step from a good discovery would be to book in a date and time for a demo / proposal presentation.

With that in mind, coupled with the ultimate end goal of closing a deal, you’d want to evaluate your performance in the respective phases of the call:

• Did you do enough pre-call prep to build rapport?
• Did you set the frame and agenda of the call?
• Did you cover the 4 main categories – needs; authority; decision-making process; budget?
• Did you ask the right questions to dig deeper into understanding their situation?
• Did you get enough information to put together a compelling proposal or demo?
• Did you confirm their top priorities and impact of inaction?
• Did you set clear next steps?
• Did you schedule a follow-up call?
• Did you follow up with an email to summarise what you spoke about, and the agenda for the next call?

Note down what you could have improved on, and try them in your next call.

There’s nothing more to this, but it is the most important step!

If you don’t review and implement, you will stay stagnant and not improve.

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Discovery Calls Make Or Break Your Business

What do your discovery calls look like? Do you have a discovery call template? I’d love to hear how you make the most of your sales opportunities.

Let’s connect on LinkedIn!