What’s a Discovery Call?

Discovery calls are the first conversation a sales pro has with a prospective client. That call is the earliest chance to build rapport, figure out the prospect’s needs and start earning trust using open-ended questions.

Also, the process of discovery will serve as a process of qualification which reveals if each party is a great match for each other. In addition, qualifying questions decide the extent to which a sale is viable. Factors such as profitability, deal size, and the prospect’s likelihood of purchasing all are aspects determining viability. Deal qualification is a big priority because pursuing the sale demands significant resources as the prospect’s purchasing journey elongates.

Discovery calls simply go further than traditional sales calls by utilizing questions so you can learn the prospect’s pain points. Asking questions uncovers both the path to the sale and the viability of the opportunity to sale. The challenge is that time is short. Prospects won’t allocate a lot of time to this early stage.

So, the teams have to:

·      Form a Strategy for Questioning

·      Float Ideas

·      Check for Other Needs

Form a Questioning Strategy

Questioning strategies take shape before a call. The key includes only identifying those questions which can’t be answered using research. This early phase is the sales pro’s chance to exhaust every effort to understand the prospect through independent work. The questions that are asked during the limited span of a discovery call ought to be the ones offering insight that isn’t available through any additional means.

Those important discovery questions are more effective when they’re part of a sales funnel approach. Here, the initial questions start broad and become more concentrated with every successive question. While the questions are going to differ for each prospect, in almost every case it’s vital for the sales rep to figure out which stakeholders are involved as well as how the process of decision-making works.

Float Ideas

When a rep floats ideas, they obtain insight by learning how a customer reacts to an idea. Also, by floating ideas, a rep engages the prospect’s priming bias, the tendency to become more open to ideas with repeated exposure.

The advantage to floating ideas is they aren’t committal. That is, if an idea doesn’t resonate with a prospect, the sales rep can just move ahead with questioning. This point emphasizes the important truth that floating ideas isn’t the same as positioning a solution later on in the sales process. Reps only should position a solution later on in the purchasing journey when they gain a full understanding of a prospect’s needs.

Check for Other Needs

Discovery calls are valuable opportunities to check for other needs which weren’t reflected in any pre-call research or in lead capture data. In checking for other needs, the rep also is exploring methods of accessing the prospect’s white space. By doing so the prospect might learn of other products and services the sales pro offers which weren’t previously seen. While checking for other needs the sales pro starts forming an early idea of which abilities to emphasize later on when they position a solution.