An effective sales discovery call uncovers your prospect’s pain points and motivations.

Run a good discovery call and you'll:

• Build rapport with a potential customer
• Take the first step in creating a lasting relationship
• and get information for improving future interactions with the target account

Structure your discovery call into three parts to ask the right questions at the right time.

I’m Krysten Conner, Sales Strategist at UserGems. I recently shared this framework on the 30 Minutes to President’s Club podcast. It's helped me close more deals, and it can help you improve your win rate too. Read on to find out how you can use it to improve your own sales process and boost your win rate.

3-step framework to structuring a great discovery call

The framework I use for structuring discovery calls is inspired by Charles Muhlbauer.

Over the years, I’ve customized it to match my ICP and business needs. You should do the same. Your framework should fit your specific customer profile and sales process.

Use these steps as a starting point, then adapt them to your ICP and sales process. Here are the three steps I use:

Step 1: Start with a menu of pain

The menu of pain is a multiple-choice question presenting the top three pain points target buyers say they experience the most.

By asking leads to choose their biggest challenge, you have a chance to:

• Get to the root of the prospect’s problem faster. Open-ended questions require too much effort from prospects. In contrast, giving them a starting point makes it easier for them to answer the question.
• Establish credibility. By listening to you talk about struggles their peers are experiencing, prospects realize you really do understand the problem they’re having, encouraging them to open up.
• Start the conversation naturally. The menu of pain makes it easy for prospects to talk about their actual problem.

For example, if you’re on a call with a sales manager, you could share that most others sales managers you talk to have three main concerns: generating pipeline, meeting sales quotas, or slow lead qualification process. Then, ask them what their biggest challenge is.

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2 factors to consider for your menu of pain

Making sure the menu is relevant to the prospect is essential. Because the roadblocks that a sales manager faces are always different from the ones stakeholders like the VP of Marketing deal with.

This is why it’s important you research the following two points as part of your pre-call research:

• The persona you’re speaking with

Go through your ideal customer profile (ICP) for the persona you’re speaking with. Then prepare a menu of pain relevant to their buyer’s journey.

By using UserGems’ Meeting Assistant, you can also get daily, automated email updates packed with vital details about the prospects you have calls scheduled with. This includes social media information like their LinkedIn profiles, titles, and company website — reducing the amount of manual research you have to do.

• Their prospect’s power line level

Based on your prospect’s role, you can determine whether they hold a position that is above the power line or below it — a concept that Skip Miller introduced in his book, Selling Above and Below the Line.

Remember that people above the line, such as Director- and VP-level position holders, care about things like grabbing market share. People below the line, like sales managers, care about tactical details: rep performance and shorter sales cycles.

Understanding both these factors is essential for preparing qualifying questions that are the most relevant to the person you speak with on your B2B sales discovery call.

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Step 2: Dig into the pain with open-ended questions

After you get the prospect to elaborate on their struggles with your menu of pain, dig into the ‘why’ behind the issue they’re facing.

Most sales reps make a mistake here: they pitch immediately when prospects admit to a problem. However, doing so reveals insufficient information about:

• Why the problem exists in the first place
• What current solution they have in place to solve the problem
• And, how widely the pain is felt within their organization

Dig into their struggles and you'll learn what's driving their needs.

Find at least 3-4 reasons behind their struggles. This gives you what you need to run a relevant demo and move the deal forward.

Don't pitch yet. Ask open-ended 'why' questions to understand their pain.

Step 3: Close with a set of transparency-encouraging prompts

By the end of the call, you should have learned the prospect’s biggest challenge and exactly why they’re dealing with it.

To close the call, present another set of multiple-choice questions about why they're taking this meeting. Some of the most common reasons include prospects who want to:

• Learn about new tools but who aren’t ready to buy them.
• Urgently solve a specific problem (ideally, the same one that you discussed on the call).
• Address a specific issue, but not right away because it’s not one of their top priorities.

Then ask your potential customer where they see themselves on this scale.

If a prospect gives an unclear answer, ask them another set of multiple-choice questions to prompt them to be transparent with you about their motivation for taking your call. This tells you whether the lead belongs in your pipeline.

The right questions to ask at this point, however, will depend on who you’re speaking with.

With an above-the-line person such as a VP, for example, aim to get another phone call on the calendar. Ask them how interested they are. Try: 'I want to learn more about this problem. Let's schedule another call.' This gets them to ask for more information.

When speaking with a manager, take another shot at being transparent. For example, say ‘hey, you and I know we aren’t the decision-makers. So if you feel this pain only mildly, this likely will stall. Where do you suggest we go from here?’

Taking this approach to close your discovery process encourages people to be open about where they expect the call to go.

This approach also helps you:

• Disqualify leads that likely will remain unconverted
• Correctly forecast whether a sales opportunity would close
• And, prioritize leads with an urgent need to close more deals.

Put this framework to work

To summarize, start your call with a choice question highlighting the three main struggles that prospects’ share with you.

When your lead picks a problem or corrects you about their actual struggle, dig deeper with ‘why’ questions. Finally, close your call with another round of choice questions — aimed at encouraging the prospect to narrate the next step.

This 3-step framework focuses on understanding the prospect's struggle, why it exists, and what they're doing about it.

Use what you learn to run better follow-ups and close the deal.

Use UserGems’ Meeting Assistant to automate your pre-call research. Companies like Greenhouse, Mimecast, and Medallia also use it to track their alumni customers’ job changes for finding the warmest path into every account.

Try UserGems to hit your revenue goals.

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