Do you know what the most important conversation in sales is?
The discovery call.
It’s your path to making a genuine connection with prospects and finding out if your solution can help them achieve their business goals.
We asked some sales experts for their tips on sales discovery. Scroll 👇 for a step-by-step guide to impactful sales discovery calls.
A discovery call is the first conversation you have with a prospect who showed an interest in your product or service. The call aims to discover if the prospect has a problem your business can solve and decide if they are a good fit.
Before the call, you can assume they are but during the call, you need to let go of expectations and discover the truth.
The discovery process aims at getting to know your ideal customer and learning their pain points, priorities, and goals. It helps you decide if your solution is a good fit for the prospect.
Here’s how Jason Baskaran, former Sales Director at GetAccept, defines a discovery call in sales:
“Discovery is just that - about discovering. Listening, understanding, and figuring out where the prospect is in their journey.”
“How close are they to actually wanting to invest in your product/service? You need to find all of this out if you want to qualify out prospects, not waste anyone’s time, and close deals.”
A discovery call is focused on gathering information and understanding the prospect’s needs, while a sales call is focused on pitching a product or service and closing the sale.
There are other key differences:
Discovery calls are an essential part of the sales process and offer several benefits, such as:
A sales discovery call helps you understand your customer’s needs and pain points, allowing you to tailor your solutions to their requirements.
This leads to better customer satisfaction and higher chances of closing the sale.
A discovery call is an opportunity to build a relationship with the prospect. Listening attentively to their needs demonstrates that you value their business and are invested in their success.
By sharing your expertise and knowledge during the call, you can establish your credibility and position yourself as an authority in your field.
This will help you build trust with your prospects, making positive outcomes more likely.
A discovery call can help you identify potential upsell or cross-sell opportunities.
By understanding the prospect’s needs, you can offer additional products or services that may benefit them.
By understanding the prospect’s needs early in your sales process, you can avoid wasting time and resources pursuing leads who aren’t a good fit for your business.
Discovery calls can provide valuable insights into your sales strategy.
By analysing the results of your calls, you can identify areas for improvement, refining your approach to better serve your customers.
A discovery call usually takes 15 to 30 minutes. This should give you enough time to ask the right questions and uncover the pain points afflicting the prospect.
It’s important to remember that while the length of the call is important, the quality of the conversation is even more critical. Stay focused on the prospect’s needs and goals, and avoid going off-topic or monopolising the conversation.
Be respectful of your prospect’s time; if the call overruns, ask them if they’d like to reschedule the call and continue the conversation at a later time.
During the call, you can decide whether they need a product demo and, if so, which features are best to show them.
Here at Cognism, we’ve developed a simple 8-step sales discovery process to help you succeed in your calls.
Scroll 👇 to see the process in full.
As always in B2B sales, preparation makes perfect. Before you pick up the phone to make your discovery call, you must do your research!
Follow this pre-discovery call checklist:
You’ll need all this intel when the prospect answers your call!
Jonathon Ilett is Cognism’s VP of Global Sales. In his experience, research is absolutely critical to a good discovery phone call. Here’s why:
“You don’t want to waste time or appear unprepared by asking questions when the answers are readily available online.”
“Also, if you can show the prospect that you’ve taken the time to research their business thoroughly, that will go a long way to establishing trust.”
You only get one chance to make a first impression! And in SaaS sales, first impressions can make or break a sales discovery call.
Follow these tips to help you build a positive relationship with your prospect 👇
When your sales discovery call starts, the first thing you need to do is identify sales goals. These are:
How do you reveal these goals?
Ask the prospect questions that uncover this information. Their answers will be your basis for further sales discovery questions.
Keep the prospect’s goals in mind as the call progresses. How will your product help the prospect/their company achieve these goals?
Jonathon Ilett thinks it’s important to be precise at this stage of the discovery process. His advice is to:
“Focus on lead generation metrics and get percentages if possible. Establish quantity.”
“For example, you can ask a question like: ‘How much are you looking to increase your net new bookings?’ Then you can tie the prospect’s answers to the results that your product can deliver.”
The prospect has investigated your company because they have business challenges they want to overcome. For some, the pain they’re feeling may be hard to define. It’s the salesperson’s role during the discovery call to explain their pain!
The best way to do this is to ask open-ended questions about the prospect and their business. If you get the prospect talking more, they’ll soon realise their own pain points.
Open-ended sales discovery questions don’t require a simple “yes or “no” answer. Here are some examples of questions that will improve the discovery call:
Jonathon’s top call discovery tip at this stage is to:
“Identify 2-3 pain points that the prospect is experiencing. Check with them afterwards if you’ve understood correctly.”
“My advice is to focus on the prospect’s tech stack - chances are, there’s a gap there that your product can fill.”
Take the 2-3 pain points you’ve unearthed and connect them to your product’s features. This gives you a shortlist of features you can explain to your prospect.
Use the sales discovery phone call to show them how the features will produce benefits. Link the benefits to the goals you identified in Step 3. Tieing everything together in this way will help you build a strong business case.
Jonathon’s top tip on how to run the sales discovery at this stage:
“Don’t go through every one of your product’s features. The prospect is only interested in the parts that are relevant to them and their business.”
At this stage in your discovery call, you’ll likely encounter some objections.
Handling objections during the discovery process requires active listening, empathy, and a willingness to address the prospect’s concerns.
Here are some top tips 👇
At the end of each stage of your sales call discovery, repeat what you’ve learned back to the prospect. Ask them if what you’ve discovered is correct. It’s far from a pointless exercise…
Doing this means that they might divulge even more information that will help you!
And here’s what to do after the discovery call, according to Jonathon:
“When your sales discovery call comes to an end, recommend the next step but let the prospect decide.”
“It could be a follow-up email or going straight into booking a product demo. Always set exact timings for whatever the next step will be.”
If you and the prospect agreed on next steps, then make sure to diary them and follow them through exactly.
If you left the discovery call without any agreed actions, then make sure to follow up with your prospect.
Here are some tips on how to follow up effectively 👇
After the call, send a personalised email thanking the prospect for their time and summarising the key points of the conversation.
If you promised to provide additional information during the call, make sure to include it in your follow-up email.
This could be a case study, a demo video, or a white paper that’s relevant to the prospect.
In your follow-up email, set clear next steps and a timeline for the next call or meeting.
Follow up with the prospect a few days after the call to check in and see if they have any questions or concerns. Be persistent but not pushy. Respect the prospect’s time and decision-making process.
Use your follow-up email as an opportunity to keep the conversation going. Ask open-ended questions and offer the prospect some additional insights or resources.
Ask the following questions on your sales discovery calls 👇
It’s easy to make mistakes on a sales call. Here are the top things to avoid on yours 👇
Sales discovery calls are a vital initial stage of sales prospecting. According to Sales Benchmark Index, demos conducted without a sales discovery process are 73% less successful than demos conducted with.
Here are the key takeaways you need to remember 👇