How to Manage a Discovery Call: Pre-call Research Checklist ✅

In this three-part series, I’m going to walk through some of the fundamentals of managing a discovery call. This first post focuses on how to prepare for a discovery call with pre-call research. Part two will focus on how to ask discovery and probing questions to have a conversation based on business value vs. features/functions. Lastly, part three will talk managing next steps.

Disclaimer: this post is generally geared towards newer sales reps. Keep an eye out for future posts for more seasoned sellers.‍

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How to Manage a Discovery Call:

Part 1:  3 things you should add to your pre-call research checklist

Part 2:  How to ask discovery and probing questions

Part 3:  Align on next steps and scheduling (coming soon)‍

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The top rep just brought in another $50k deal. 

You might be thinking, “How does she do that? She can’t be getting that lucky with leads.”

You would be right. 

Instead, she has a dialed-in sales process that is being followed to help guide the buyer through the customer journey.

That journey starts with a discovery call.

A discovery call is the first touchpoint you have with your prospect after they’ve expressed interest in your product or service. 

It is an important part of the customer journey because it is the first step to help you qualify if the customer is a good fit for your product or service and vice versa - if your product is a good fit for a potential customer - and sets expectations for what the prospect can expect throughout the sales process.

So, how do you manage a discovery call like a pro? Let’s jump in.

Part 1: 3 things you should add to your pre-call research checklist

The discovery call starts before you even get on the phone with a prospect. Three must haves for your pre-call research checklist should include information on the prospect’s company, industry, and their persona:

1. Company: How does the company make money and how will your product/service help increase revenue generating activities and/or reduce expenditures?
2. Industry: What industry-specific considerations should you qualify for during the discovery call? Do you have any existing customers in this industry already?
3. Persona: The prospect’s role in the company: who are they, what do they do, what keeps them up at night?

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Company: 

How does the company make money and how will your product/service help increase revenue and/or reduce expenditures?

This sounds obvious, but you’d be shocked at how many reps do not know what their prospects do and how they make money. 

No excuse for this!

How can you solve their pain if you don’t know their business drivers? 

Spoiler: you can’t. 

Is the meeting with a publicly traded company? Use their 10k. There is a trove of information that is strategic to a business in their annual investor filing.

For example, if Apple was my prospect, I would do a quick Google search, “Apple 10k” and find their annual reports dating back to 1994.

Heading over to “Part 1A: Risk Factors”, ask yourself: do I have a product or service that can help them alleviate any of these risk factors? 

For example, if I had AI software to help forecast demand and manage inventory levels, after a doing a quick scan of Apple’s 10k, you can find:

“The success of new product and service introductions depends on a number of factors including...the effective management of purchase commitments and inventory levels in line with anticipated product demand, the availability of products in appropriate quantities and at expected costs to meet anticipated demand.”

The report goes on to say:

“The Company is exposed to the risk of write-downs on the value of its inventory and other assets, in addition to purchase commitment cancellation risk.”

I would use the information I find in the report as underlying themes to focus on with the prospect and as a helpful baseline to structure my discovery questions.

Not a publicly traded company? 

Try LinkedIn to see if you know anyone there that can be an ally. Additionally, conduct a few Google searches in the “news” tab: 

• “{prospect name}”
• “{prospect name} fundraising”
• “{prospect name} partnership”
• “{prospect name} announcement”
  

Some areas to consider focusing on for your research:

• Did they raise any money recently? Why did they raise the financing and what is the company’s vision for go-forward?
• Has the prospect announced any strategic partnerships? What does this say about where the company is investing their time and resources?
• Has there been any M&A activity? Were they acquired or did they acquire another company?

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Industry: 

What industry-specific considerations should you qualify for during the discovery call? Do you have any existing customers in this industry already? 

For example, if your prospect is in a highly regulated industry, such as banking or healthcare, be ready to talk about your organization’s security posture:

• What certifications (SOC2 Type 2, GDPR compliance, CCPA) does your company have?
• How do you collect, store, and handle data? 
• Qualify if the prospect has any hard data security requirements such as hosting on-premise vs. the cloud.

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Customers in highly regulated industries over-index on social proof to validate you have the governance set up to support them. You should be asking yourself:

• Do we have a customer already in the same industry? If so, why did that company buy our product and service? 
• What pain are we solving for them? 
• How much did they buy and what was the contract term?
  

When used correctly, customer stories are one of the most effective ways to sell. 

• Positive impact: You are selling to an enterprise healthcare company and you tell a customer story about another enterprise (preferably healthcare) customer. 
• Neutral or negative impact: You are selling to an enterprise healthcare company and you tell a customer story about a Series A technology startup
  

See the difference?

If this is your first customer in that segment, you should be placing an even greater emphasis on qualifying the lead and identifying how strong a champion you have in the deal:

• Has your prospect purchased similar technology before? 
• If so, what was the process they went through the last time they made a technology purchase? 
• Is this a company wide initiative or just something your prospect decided they wanted to try to solve on their own? 
  

Lastly, pay attention to industry specific terminology. This will add to your credibility with the prospect.

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Persona: 

The prospect’s role in the company: who are they, what do they do, what keeps them up at night?

Marketing operations, Sales operations, IT operations, product management, information security – there are many different groups in a business, and most of them have different motivating factors. 

To build value with your prospect, do not pitch your product in a generic way, but instead, try to understand what their role is and what they care about. For example:

• Product Managers: they care a great deal about value drivers related to user engagement, growth, and improving the end user experience of the product they own. 
• Sales Operations: they care about making the lives of a salesperson easier and reducing operational friction to bring in more revenue.
  

Align your value proposition to broad themes that the persona cares about to drive higher deal value. This includes using language in their lexicon and using customer stories so the prospect knows you have walked a mile in his or her shoes. 

Persona research is critical to build more credibility with your buyer. In more complex sales processes you’ll likely have calls later in the sales process with personas that have conflicting motivations.

For example, a product manager wanting to move fast to implement your solution to solve a problem and infosec wanting to slow things down to ensure they have every governance process checked off their list. Building a strong champion is a helpful approach to support you through this type of situation.

In this post, we covered how to prepare for your discovery call with pre-call research.

I’ve used these approaches throughout my career in enterprise sales. I hope they bring you some guidance as you’re preparing for your next call.

In part 2 of the series, we’ll walk through how to ask discovery and probing questions to help you advance the deal forward and drive a conversation centered around value vs. features.

Happy Selling.

- Dave 

Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer @Aircover