How to Run Better Sales Discovery Calls

Written by David Khim｜HubSpot

Reps often go into calls without a plan. They wing it. You can hear it when you listen to recorded calls. Even if they have a goal for the call, if they don’t go in with a plan to reach that goal, anything can happen.

The calls usually aren’t complete flops, but upon review, you hear that they forget to ask specific, sometimes basic, questions. Or they forget to book the follow up meeting. Or it’s an off day and they just blank out during a call and forget to mention the research they did on the prospect.

That’s why it’s better to go into every call with a plan of action.

While calls should be conversational, it helps to have a checklist of points you want to hit. You want a roadmap of the conversation before you start so you know when the conversation is going on a tangent and how to nudge it back on track.

The reps at HubSpot and Datanyze run their discovery calls with a roadmap and a corresponding set of questions that take the prospect through eight stages of conversation:

1. Introduction
2. Rapport building
3. Provide helpful resources
4. Get them to open up
5. Introduce positioning statements
6. Dig into pain points
7. Tell a relevant customer story
8. Set up next steps

Now, with all of those stages, it’s easy to forget what questions to ask or which positioning statement you want to use or the best way to tell a customer story.

To help with that HubSpot and Datanyze created a discovery call checklist to help you run more effective sales calls that qualify leads and improve your opportunity-to-close rate.

Get your discovery call checklist now.