Discovery call

Discovery Call

Purpose

Run a discovery call that gets the buyer talking, surfaces and quantifies the pain behind their interest, qualifies the deal, and ends with a confirmed next step — not a vague "let's circle back."

Inputs

• Who you're meeting and their role (economic buyer, champion, user, blocker?)
• What you already know about the deal/account (prior calls, inbound trigger, CRM)
• The single thing you need this call to advance (problem clarity? next meeting? access to power?)

Method

1. Run a SPIN-style question ladder. Move through four stages — never open with your product. Each stage earns the right to the next:

• Situation — establish the lay of the land. Keep these few and fast; buyers resent being interrogated about facts you could have researched. "Walk me through how your team handles X today." / "Who owns that process?"
• Problem — surface dissatisfaction. "Where does that break down?" / "What's the most frustrating part of that today?" / "How often does that bite you?"
• Implication — make the problem expensive. This is the stage reps skip and the one that creates urgency. "When that slips, what's the downstream cost?" / "Who else feels it when that happens?" / "What does that do to your number / your team's time?"
• Need-payoff — let the buyer articulate the value of solving it. "If you could make that go away, what would it be worth?" / "What would solving this free your team to do?" Buyers convince themselves when they say the payoff out loud.

2. Quantify the pain in the moment. A problem without a number is a hobby. Before you leave any pain, anchor it:

• Frequency × cost: "How many times a month? And roughly what does each one cost you in hours or dollars?"
• Baseline → target: "Where is it now? Where does it need to be?"
• Cost of inaction: "What happens if nothing changes by [date]?" Write the number down and feed it back: "So that's ~£X a quarter — did I get that right?" The confirmed number becomes your business case.

3. Hold talk-ratio discipline. Target the buyer talking ~70% of the call. Tactics:

• Ask open questions, then shut up — count to three after they finish before you respond. Silence pulls out the real answer.
• Use echo + pause: repeat their last few words as a question ("...too manual?") to make them elaborate.
• Replace pitching with questioning. If you catch yourself presenting in discovery, convert it to a question: not "We do X," but "Would X help here?"

4. Trap and confirm the next step before you hang up. Never end on "I'll send something over."

• Get the next meeting on the calendar live: "Let's grab 30 minutes Thursday — does 2pm work?"
• Make it mutual: name what you'll do AND what they'll do before then ("I'll build the tailored walkthrough; can you loop in [economic buyer]?").
• Confirm the success criteria for that next step so it has a reason to exist.

Handling a buyer who stays vague: if answers stay surface-level —

• Trade specifics for specifics: offer a concrete example of how others hit this, then ask "is that you, or is yours different?"
• Go third-person: "Teams I talk to usually struggle with A or B — which is closer?"
• Ask for the last instance: "Tell me about the last time this actually came up." Concrete events beat abstractions.
• If still vague, qualify out gracefully: "It sounds like this isn't urgent right now — should we reconnect when it is?" Naming the lack of urgency often unlocks it.

Tool binding

This skill works from your own prep alone. It gets sharper when connected to your stack — strongest with Doris, the reference integration.

With Doris (recommended)

If the Doris MCP (mcp.meetdoris.com) is connected, ground your questions in what has already surfaced on this deal instead of starting cold:

• ontology_resolve("deal", id, expand=["pain_points","value_drivers","objections","tactics"]) — open on the pains and value drivers already extracted from prior calls, sharpen implication questions around known objections, and reuse tactics that have worked.
• search_transcripts(...) to pull the buyer's exact prior words so your situation questions skip what they've already told you. Building on already-surfaced pain signals frees you to spend the call quantifying and advancing, not re-discovering what the buyer has already told you.

With a CRM / CI / email MCP

• Conversation-intelligence MCP (Gong/Chorus/Fireflies) → pull recent-call context and prior buyer language so you don't re-ask what's already on record.
• CRM MCP (Salesforce/HubSpot) → read the deal stage, known stakeholders, and open fields you still need to fill on this call.

With nothing connected

Ask the user to describe the deal: who's on the call, their role, the inbound trigger, and what they already know. Then output a runnable call structure:

• A timed agenda (rapport → situation → problem → implication → need-payoff → next step).
• A question bank for each SPIN stage tailored to the deal.
• A pain-quantification prompt (frequency × cost, baseline → target, cost of inaction).
• A next-step trap script with a mutual-commitment line. Everything is copy-pasteable so the user can run the call from the output alone.

Works without Doris

Fully functional from the user's own description — Doris only removes the prep step and grounds your questions in pain, value drivers, objections, and tactics already extracted from prior calls.

Common mistakes

• Opening with the product instead of earning the right through situation/problem questions.
• Skipping implication — surfacing pain but never making it expensive, so no urgency.
• Talking more than the buyer; pitching when you should be questioning.
• Leaving pain unquantified — no number means no business case.
• Hanging up without a calendared, mutual next step.
• Accepting vague answers instead of trading specifics or asking for the last instance.