Discovery calls: twelve questions that change the outcome

A discovery call has one job: establish whether and how you can help. Not to sell, not to demo, not to book the next meeting. To establish.

Three questions about the situation

Start by understanding how things work today — without judging and without leading the witness.

• How does this process work for you today, step by step? You are asking for description, not evaluation. People describe willingly and admit problems reluctantly.
• What made you take this call now? The answer reveals the trigger event. The absence of one is itself important information.
• What have you tried before? You learn what has already been rejected and why, which saves you proposing something they discarded two years ago.

Three questions about scale

Without a number there is no business case. Someone inside that company will have to defend this spend to someone else.

• How much time does this take each week, roughly? Even an estimate gives you an anchor.
• What happens when it goes wrong? The consequence is usually more concrete than the problem.
• If nothing changed for a year — then what? An innocent-sounding question that is often the only one that reveals whether the pain is real.

Three questions about the decision

This section often gets skipped out of politeness, which is an expensive mistake. You will return to it anyway — three months later, when it emerges you were talking to the wrong person.

• Who besides yourself will be involved in this decision? The phrase 'besides yourself' assumes the person matters and makes it easy to admit they do not decide alone.
• How did you make a similar decision recently? Past behaviour describes the process better than statements about the future.
• What will you compare vendors on? You learn the criteria before you become one of the things being compared.

Three questions to close on

The final three determine whether the conversation was useful.

• What would have to be true for you to say yes? The buyer describes the path to close in their own words.
• What worries you most about a solution like this? An invitation to object. Silence here is a bad sign.
• What is a sensible next step, and by when? A date the buyer proposes binds far more than one you propose.

Twelve questions sounds like an interrogation, but it fits inside forty minutes — provided the buyer is talking for most of it. If you are talking, this is not discovery, it is a pitch.

The practical problem with the answers

There is a logistical issue: twelve answers is a lot of material, and taking notes during the call degrades the call. It is genuinely hard to listen closely and write at the same time.

So most reps take partial notes and reconstruct the rest afterwards — losing precisely the nuance the questions were designed to surface. This is where automatic call summarisation changes more than it first appears to.