Mastering Discovery

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

What is a Discovery Call?

Why Most Founders Struggle with Discovery

In the previous article in this series, we covered the three pillars of sales performance: mindset, behavior, and skill. With mindset being the most important. Below are the common mindset issues that hold founders back while doing discovery.

1. Their Product-First Mindset

Founders start companies to build things, not to sell them. And many carry the belief that a great product will sell itself. That if you build something genuinely better than what exists, customers will find it, recognize its value, and buy it. 

This is almost never true in B2B SaaS. Most of B2B SaaS is sold, not bought. And that has never been more true as the barrier to entry continues to drop and the market floods with good products. GTM strategy and sales execution are what separate winners from everyone else. The best product without great selling loses to an average product with great selling, consistently.

The Product-First Mindset is dangerous in discovery because it heavily colors how founders run calls. If you believe the product is what closes deals, then your demo becomes by far the most important part of your sales process. And discovery becomes an obstacle between you and it. So founders rush through discovery, spending most of it asking feature-related or qualifications questions.

They skip vision, dreaming, pain, and excitement entirely because those things feel soft and unrelated to whether the prospect will buy. Instead they ask about integrations, user counts, and the prospect’s timeline. Then they wonder why prospects ghost them after the demo.

The subtler problem is that founders assume prospects share their Product-First Mindset. This isn’t just founders projecting their own product obsession onto prospects. It’s that most founders simply don’t understand how buying decisions are actually made. So they race to the demo because they genuinely believe that they’ll lose the prospect if they don’t. The opposite is true.

Because people buy emotionally and justify logically afterward. Discovery is where that emotional foundation gets built through vision, understanding their world deeply, and making them feel genuinely heard. The demo is where you prove you can deliver on, and tie your solution directly to, what you discovered. Founders who understand this stop seeing discovery as a blocker and start seeing it as the most crucial part of winning the deal.

For more, read: Emotional Selling: Thinking vs Feeling States.

2. They Make It About Themselves, Not the Prospect

The pattern I see on almost every founder’s early discovery calls: the prospect is talking while the founder is mentally three steps ahead mapping what they just heard to a feature, preparing their response, waiting for their turn to speak. They’re not in the prospect’s world, they’re in their own.

This is why their talk ratios are often inverted with the founders doing the vast majority of the talking. It should be the prospect speaking 70% of the time. Usually it’s the opposite. What are they discovering? 

This self-focus drives the instinct to pitch the moment an opportunity presents itself. A prospect mentions a pain point and the founder pounces. The problem is that pitching ends discovery. The second you shift from asking to telling, you’ve taken the conversation out of the prospect’s world and put it firmly back in yours. And this is almost certainly done before the founder has the full picture.

The fix is deceptively simple and genuinely hard to execute. Every question you ask, every response you give, should be oriented around one thing: understanding their world more deeply. Not demonstrating your competency or knowledge or connecting it to your great product. Just understanding their world. The prospect should always leave a discovery call feeling like the entire conversation was about them.

Discovery Call Goals

Rapport Building 

Establish trust and connection so prospects feel comfortable sharing their real challenges openly. In sales, people don’t buy from companies. They buy from people they trust. That trust starts with rapport. Without rapport, prospects stay guarded and only share surface-level information.

For more, read: Rapport Building in Sales.

Gather Information and Understand Their Situation

Understand their vision, current situation, needs, goals, and pain points. Ensure that you uncover the root causes of their challenges. Gather specific details so that you can tailor your next steps after the Discovery Call (Demo or “pitch”). Generic presentations lose deals. Tailored ones that directly address their pain points win them.

Cultivate Excitement and Curiosity 

Generate genuine interest in how your solution could help them achieve their goals. Help them envision the positive impact your product could have on them and their organization.

Qualify/Disqualify

Determine whether the prospect meets your Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) criteria based on the framework you’ve established (see next section for more on this). Understand if there’s mutual fit and if they have the ability to purchase. You need to know if the deal is worth pursuing.

Schedule Next Steps 

Secure a scheduled follow-up meeting while momentum and interest are high. The easiest time to set next steps is while you’re on a call with them. In SaaS, the next step after a Discovery Call is typically a Demo. However, it could be a technical call, stakeholder meeting, or proposal discussion depending on your sales process.

Qualification Frameworks

There are many different qualification frameworks, each with their own strengths depending on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to. What makes them good or bad is how well they fit your product, buyer, and sales process.

Perhaps the most well known qualification framework is BANT:

• Budget: does your prospect have budget?
• Authority: does your prospect have the decision-making power to make the purchase?
• Need: does your prospect have a need for your product?
• Timeline: is there an urgent need and a defined timeline for purchasing?

BANT is straightforward and intuitive. If you’re new to qualification frameworks, this one is really helpful for understanding some of the key things that you need to be considering. 

However, BANT isn’t great for complex, longer sales cycles where there are many other factors to consider. These include: multiple stakeholders, technical requirements, decision process and criteria, and organizational change management. A more comprehensive framework for this type of sale is MEDDIC or MEDDPICC.  

The other limitation that BANT, and other qualification frameworks, have is that they don’t work well if you’re selling a disruptive or emerging product. This is the case for most of the Founders that I coach and advise. With disruptive or emerging products, prospects often aren’t even aware of your product or that their problem even exists. Which means that they typically don’t have a planned budget and there’s little urgency. 

This was exactly the case at my last startup, where we were selling mentorship software to large Enterprises. When I joined, the Sales Team was using BANT. However, if we were strictly following it, almost all of our prospects would have been disqualified under Budget and/or Timeline. 

BANT wasn’t suitable for our use and so the team ended up under-qualifying prospects. Conversely, with the wrong framework, you could end up over-qualifying prospects by being too restrictive on criteria that aren’t relevant or don’t make sense. 

I solved our goldilocks problem by replacing BANT with a set of criteria for Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) that was unique to our product and buyers. I recommend that Founders take inspiration from existing frameworks and do the same. Here are some of the qualifying criteria that we used:

• Company/Organization Size > 500 employees
  • We had decided to only focus on serving Enterprise customers.

• Number of Users > 50
  • Our lower tier plan included 50 users.

• Timeline < 6 months
  • Timeline for either purchasing or launching their mentorship program.

• Budget > $XX,XXX or displays strong ability to secure this amount
  • Qualification was usually on their ability to secure budget rather than actually already having an approval.

Discovery Call Playbook

Download the Discovery Call Playbook template for your calls.

Common Discovery Call Mistakes

1. Too Many Seller-Centric Questions

Many discovery calls fail because they prioritize seller qualification needs over genuine prospect exploration. Questions should help prospects articulate and understand their own challenges, not just extract information. 

You do need to ask these types of questions eventually because qualification matters. But when they dominate discovery, or come before you’ve understood the prospect’s world, you’re extracting information instead of building understanding. Prospects resist seller-centric questions because they feel interrogated rather than understood.

Examples of Seller-Centric Questions:

• “What’s your timeline?”
  • Serves seller’s pipeline management
• “Do you have budget?”
  • Serves seller’s qualification needs
• “Who approves purchases?”
  • Serves seller’s process efficiency

Examples of Prospect-Centric Questions:

• “What would success look like for you?”
  • Serves prospect’s vision clarification
• “What challenges are you facing?”
  • Serves prospect’s problem articulation
• “What excites you about solving this?”
  • Serves prospect’s motivation exploration

2. The “Book a Demo” CTA Problem

Many SaaS companies have a “Book a Demo” button on their website but then run a discovery call instead. 

This creates a trust deficit before you’ve said a word. The prospect shows up expecting a demo. Instead, you start asking questions about their situation, their challenges, their timeline. From their perspective, this feels like a bait-and-switch. 

This mismatch undermines the entire discovery dynamic. The prospect becomes impatient, guarded, wondering when you’ll get to the thing they actually came for. It’s nearly impossible to build rapport with someone who already feels misled.

And it’s not just bad for the prospect, it’s bad for the founder. Many founders resist splitting discovery and demo into two separate calls because they can feel the misalignment coming. They anticipate the prospect being antsy and annoyed and it becomes self-fulfilling. The CTA is sabotaging the process before the call even starts.

The fix is simple: change your CTA to “Book a Call.” Keep “discovery call” as internal terminology. This is a quick, high-leverage change you can make immediately and it should happen before you worry about anything else on this list. The best discovery techniques won’t save a call that started with broken expectations.

3. Treating Discovery Like a One-Time Event

A common mistake in B2B SaaS is treating the Discovery Call as the start and end of the Discovery Process. Discovery is something that needs to be done continuously throughout the sales process until the deal is closed. Discovery is a journey, not a destination.

Even after your initial Discovery Call, you’ll continue gathering puzzle pieces through:

• Follow-up conversations with your point of contact (POC)
• Meetings with new decision-makers and stakeholders
• Technical discussions during the evaluation phases
• Proposal reviews and objection handling

Each interaction reveals new information that refines your understanding and sales approach.

For more tactical guidance on Discovery Calls and later-stage discovery, see: 10 Tips for Discovery in Sales Calls.