Discovery Call Tips

Author

Mike Gallardo
September 15, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Best Sales Newsletter

My 3 best (and easiest) tips for making your discovery calls better.

Song of the week: Mary Jane’s Last Dance by Tom Petty
Click the image to play it.

Hey sales friends,

In this week’s newsletter I’m breaking down my 3 best tips for making your discovery calls better.

I’ve been reviewing a lot of calls (as of late) and am seeing a lot of the same mistakes, that if improved, would lead to much better conversations and results.

So let’s dive in!

Not Interrogating

When you’ve been asking questions for 6 to 8 minutes it can start to feel like an interrogation.

So let your buyer know how many questions are left.

Hey Jill,

I appreciate you answering all of my questions so far. It’s been helpful learning more about your business, and I look forward to sharing how we can help.

If it’s alright with you I’d like to ask 3 more questions about X and from there we can jump into how we’ve supported similar customers as well as taking a peek of our platform so you can see how everything looks and feels.

How does that sound?

Priorities and Challenges

One of the worst things you can do is start with questions like:

“How many sales people do you currently have?”

Buyer’s are coming to you in order to solve their priorities and challenges.

So always start there for the best experience.

Hey Jill,

Appreciate you jumping on today’s call.

Curious, what specifically is going on in your business that led you to check out a platform like ours?

If you have specific priorities or challenges you’re looking to solve that’d be a great place to start.

Spreading Out Discovery

One of the biggest mistakes I see AEs make is ripping through all their discovery questions at the start of the call.

A much better approach is to think through how you can spread out your questions, so your discovery’s not an event and more like a process.

Slow and steady wins the race.

For example, while showing your slides:

Hey Jill,

Here’s how we typically help our customers.

As you can see one of the ways is through integrations.

Curious, do you use X, Y or Z today?

Or when you’re doing a teaser demo:

Hey Jill,

Here’s how you would run reporting and analytics for your sales team.

Curious, what are you using today to get data like this and what are the top 3 metrics you’re currently measuring for your AEs?

That’s it!

Do those 3 things and watch your discovery conversations improve dramatically.

Wishing you all the best this Q3!

- Mike G

👉 P.S. Have a question I haven’t covered yet? Reply to this email and let me know what it is!

Happy to include it and my answer on a future newsletter.

When you’re ready…

Over 250 pages of frameworks, tactics, strategy and tips to help you source more pipeline, close more deals and earn the income you deserve.

These are the exact sales systems I’ve used at three of the fastest growing startups of all time: Zenefits, Flexport and Deel.