7 Important Tips for your next Sales Discovery Call

The discovery call is the first call with a potential customer to move forward in the sales process. It is an opportunity to identify why the customer needs your product or service. The ultimate goal of the call is to establish your product and understand the customer’s pain points. And evaluate if they fit with each other.

“The questions you ask are more important than the things you could ever say in the first meeting with a customer.”

To run a discovery with a potential customer, conduct a perfect discovery call by following these guidelines:

1. Introduction and agenda

2. Learn about your prospect

3. Avoid assumptions

4. Personalize the pitch

5. Know the influencers

6. Quality over quantity

7. Address the next steps

Introduction and agenda

Start with a crisp introduction about yourself and your company. Keep it simple by outlining the agenda and goals of the call. Eventually, set the stage to provide high-level details about the product and start the conversation.

Learn about your prospect

Knowing the company and its people at a high level isn’t enough. Acquire deeper knowledge of understanding and analyzing their current pain-points. Also, look for direct and indirect usecases and competitors during the conversation. Then, drive the discovery call towards the point where the prospect opens up about their actual needs and goals.

Treat the discovery call more like a conversation and avoid it to make it seem like an interrogation.

Avoid assumptions

Asking relevant questions and finding their pain points is the key to avoid assumptions about the customer. Subsequently, find out if the customer has an assumption about your product. If so, it’s important to clarify them in the first place before proceeding to the next step.

Personalize the pitch

Preparing the deck is an art itself. Depending on the use cases and personas, personalize your demo to create traction with the customer. Also, map your product features with their problems (pain-points) to multiply the engagement and interaction.

Know the influencers

Before the discovery call, identify the people (through sites like LinkedIn) and their roles to tailor your conversation. By doing so, you can also construct your pitch to meet their specific goals. And more importantly, get to know how they may interact with your proposed solution (product).

Quality over quantity

Make sure to ask quality questions to create velocity in the discovery process. Avoid asking standardized questions, instead, analyze the customer and ask what matters to them most. The primary goal of the conversation should be to evaluate the customer and emphasize your product value.

Address the next steps

Save the last 5-minutes to summarize the key points and evaluate qualification. Based on the discussion, address the appropriate next steps at the end of the discovery call. If you play your cards right, the product demo will be the next destination for your prospects.

To improve the discovery process, it’s necessary to pay attention to the sales results. This will allow you to strategize and identify sales techniques that will work for you.

Image Credit: Photo by Soundtrap on Unsplash