A discovery call has five jobs: learn the situation, find the problem, put a number on what it costs, find out who decides, and learn when. This page is a bank of twenty questions, four for each job, with a note on what to listen for in each answer. If you only have ten minutes, there's a three-question version at the end.

It's a reference, not a script. Pick the questions that fit and skip the rest; nobody needs all twenty in one call. The examples use Delta Ridge Irrigation, a Fresno company that sells yearly sprinkler maintenance contracts to homeowners' associations, and the person it's talking to is Keisha, an HOA manager with eleven communities. The founder-focused version of this topic is in founder discovery call questions, and a plan for the call's 20 minutes is in a sales call agenda template.

How to use the bank

Write your top five before the call and let the conversation choose the rest. Ask one question at a time, then wait. After each answer, repeat the key phrase back and ask "what do you mean by that?" once. Write down their words, not yours, because those exact phrases go into your proposal. A discovery call that ends with you talking for more than a third of the time was a pitch.

Situation questions: how it works today

  • "Walk me through how this works today, from the moment someone asks to the moment it's done." Listen for the steps that involve a person doing something by hand.
  • "Who handles it now, and how much of their week does it take?" Listen for a number of hours. It becomes a cost later.
  • "What have you tried already?" Listen for a past vendor, a failed tool or "nothing yet." Each tells you a different thing about their readiness.
  • "What made you take this call?" Listen for a trigger: a complaint, a renewal, a new boss, a bad week. The trigger is the real reason to buy now.

Keisha might say: "A resident calls about a broken head, I email the vendor, and then I chase them." That's a three-step chase, and she is the chaser.

Problem questions: what is actually wrong

  • "What's the most frustrating part of that?" Listen for emotion. Frustration points to the problem they'll pay to fix.
  • "When did it last go wrong? What happened?" Listen for a specific story with a date, which is more reliable than a general complaint.
  • "What did you try that didn't work?" Listen for why it failed, because you'll need to avoid the same reason.
  • "If nothing changed for a year, what would that look like?" Listen for stakes. Silence here often means the problem isn't painful enough to act on.

Cost questions: turning the problem into a number

This is the group most owners skip, because asking about money feels pushy. It isn't, if you ask about their costs, not your price. Their answers let you do the arithmetic out loud.

  • "How often does that happen in a month?" Get a count.
  • "What does one of those cost you in dollars, hours or lost customers?" Get a unit cost.
  • "What's a typical customer or job worth to you?" Get the value at stake.
  • "What have you spent so far trying to fix it?" Get the sunk cost, which also shows how much they've already committed.

Example. Keisha says broken heads happen about six times a month across her communities, and each unrepaired one wastes roughly $90 of water over a week, before the vendor shows up. Six times $90 is $540 a month, or $6,480 a year, plus her time chasing. Delta Ridge's contract is $4,200 a year. The conversation about price now starts from her number, not from Delta Ridge's.

Decision questions: who decides and how

  • "Who else will weigh in on this?" Listen for a board, a spouse or a partner who isn't on the call.
  • "What would you need to see to say yes?" Listen for a concrete proof: a reference, a trial, a written scope.
  • "Have you bought something like this before? How did that go?" Listen for how they judge vendors and what went wrong last time.
  • "How do you usually decide what to spend on something like this?" Listen for a process: a board vote, a threshold, three quotes.

If the decision involves people who aren't present, make the next step a call with all of them. A proposal passed along without you rarely survives. More on qualifying before the call even happens is in three questions to qualify a lead.

Timing questions: when and why then

  • "Is there a date this has to be solved by? What happens on that date?" Listen for a real deadline, such as a renewal, an inspection or a season.
  • "What else is competing for your attention right now?" Listen for the thing that will beat you.
  • "If we agreed this week, when could you start?" Listen for hesitation, which usually means there's an unspoken blocker.
  • "What would make this wait until next quarter?" Ask it plainly. The answer is the objection you haven't heard yet.

Questions that backfire

Three kinds of question cost you information. Leading questions: "You'd agree that response time matters, right?" The answer is always yes and tells you nothing. Yes-or-no questions about money: "Is price a concern?" invites a defensive "yes" and ends the topic. And stacked questions: "How many properties do you have, who maintains them and what do you pay?" The buyer answers the last one only. Replace each with an open question that starts with what, how or walk me through, and ask one at a time. If you catch yourself asking the same question in a different form, you were probably not listening to the first answer.

The three-question version for a ten-minute call

When you have ten minutes, ask three: one for the story, one for the number, one for the decision.

  1. "Walk me through how this works today." (Story. About 3 minutes.)
  2. "What does it cost you when it goes wrong?" (Number. About 4 minutes, including the arithmetic.)
  3. "Who decides, and by when?" (Decision and timing. About 3 minutes, ending with a next step.)

Those three give you a problem, a cost and a path to a yes. If they can't answer the second, the problem may not be big enough, and that's useful to know in ten minutes instead of three weeks. The conversation before the questions matters too; how to build rapport with a prospect covers the first minutes. And what to avoid doing once you have the answers is in the demo that loses the deal.

If you aren't sure who to be talking to in the first place, startup, who to talk to first starts earlier. The best questions in the world need someone on the other end of a call. Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial, card required. See how the AI workers fill your calendar with calls to use these on.