# Discovery Call Process — Standard Operating Procedure > Source: https://b2bprocess.com/discovery-call-process > Last updated: 2026-07-11. Adapt owners, tools, and thresholds to your organization. ## 1. Purpose A discovery call is the first substantive sales conversation with a prospect, run to a repeatable structure rather than an open-ended chat: it establishes the business problem driving the inquiry, who else is affected by and involved in solving it, what a successful outcome looks like in the prospect's own terms, and whether the opportunity is worth the seller's and the company's further time. The discovery call process is the standard the rep follows to run that conversation consistently — a question framework, a qualification checkpoint, and a documented output — rather than the call itself. ## 2. Scope & prerequisites Applies to any B2B sales motion with a live conversation before a proposal — inbound demo requests, outbound-sourced meetings, and channel-sourced opportunities alike. Prerequisites: an agreed qualification framework (MEDDICC, BANT, or equivalent) the org has actually adopted, a call recording/conversation-intelligence tool for coaching, and management buy-in to let reps disqualify — a discovery process only works if 'this isn't a fit' is an acceptable, even rewarded, outcome. ## 3. Roles & responsibilities | Role | Responsibility | | --- | --- | | Account Executive | Runs the call, applies the qualification framework, and owns the go/no-go decision. | | SDR / BDR | Sources and books the meeting; passes context and hypothesis so the AE doesn't start cold. | | Sales Manager | Coaches call quality, reviews qualification consistency, and backs reps who disqualify correctly. | | Sales Enablement | Owns the discovery framework, call guide, and training; maintains the call-scoring rubric. | | Revenue Operations | Builds the CRM fields and reporting that make qualification data usable downstream in forecasting. | ## 4. Procedure ### Step 1: Research the account and prepare a hypothesis **Owner:** Account Executive / SDR Before the call, review the account's firmographics, the inbound context (form fill, content downloaded, trigger event), and the prospect's role. Form a working hypothesis about the likely problem and who else should be in the room — discovery is faster when the rep asks informed questions instead of starting from zero. - [ ] Review CRM history, marketing engagement, and any prior touches - [ ] Check the company's public signals: recent funding, hiring, tech stack, news - [ ] Draft 3–5 hypothesis-testing questions specific to the account ### Step 2: Open with agenda and permission **Owner:** Account Executive State the purpose of the call, propose a rough agenda and time-box, and confirm the prospect's own goal for the meeting before diving in. This sets a collaborative tone and gives the rep permission to ask pointed questions later without it feeling like an interrogation. ### Step 3: Uncover the business problem **Owner:** Account Executive Ask open questions to surface the problem in the prospect's own words before naming any product capability: what triggered the search, what happens if nothing changes, how the problem is measured today. Resist the urge to pitch a solution to the first pain mentioned — dig until the problem is specific and quantifiable, not a category label. - [ ] Ask about the trigger event: why now, not six months ago or from now - [ ] Quantify the cost of the status quo in the prospect's terms (time, money, risk) - [ ] Distinguish the stated problem from the underlying one with follow-up 'why' questions ### Step 4: Map stakeholders and the buying process **Owner:** Account Executive Identify who else is involved — economic buyer, technical evaluator, end users, procurement, security — and how this specific organization typically makes a purchase decision like this one. A single-threaded discovery call with no visibility into the buying committee is a leading indicator of a stalled deal later. - [ ] Ask who else would need to be involved to move forward - [ ] Ask how the last comparable purchase decision was made at this company - [ ] Identify the economic buyer even if they aren't on the call yet ### Step 5: Establish success criteria and decision timeline **Owner:** Account Executive Get the prospect to define, in measurable terms, what a successful outcome and a successful vendor look like, and what timeline is driving the decision (or whether one exists at all). Vague criteria and no timeline are not neutral information — they are qualification signals. ### Step 6: Probe budget and competitive context **Owner:** Account Executive Establish whether budget exists or can be created, and what alternatives — including doing nothing, building in-house, or a named competitor — are under consideration. This is usually the most sensitive part of the call; frame it around the prospect's own planning process rather than as an interrogation of ability to pay. ### Step 7: Apply the qualification framework and make a go/no-go call **Owner:** Account Executive Score the opportunity against the org's qualification framework (MEDDICC, BANT, or equivalent) using what was actually learned, not assumed. If the fit is weak, disqualify or recycle to nurture rather than advancing a deal that will consume pipeline capacity and distort the forecast. ### Step 8: Recap, agree next steps, and log the call **Owner:** Account Executive Play back the problem, stakeholders, and success criteria in the prospect's language to confirm mutual understanding, propose a specific next step (demo, technical deep-dive, stakeholder meeting) with a date, and send a written recap within 24 hours. Log structured notes in the CRM — free-text call notes that nobody reads defeat the purpose of a repeatable process. - [ ] Confirm the next meeting on the calendar before ending the call - [ ] Send a recap email restating pain, criteria, and next step - [ ] Log qualification fields and call disposition in the CRM ### Step 9: Coach and calibrate on call recordings **Owner:** Sales Manager / Enablement Review a sample of recorded discovery calls regularly against the framework — talk-to-listen ratio, question quality, whether disqualification criteria were actually applied — and give reps specific, call-linked feedback rather than generic advice. ## 5. Metrics to monitor | Metric | Definition | Formula | Target | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Discovery-to-next-stage conversion rate | Share of discovery calls that advance to the next pipeline stage. | Opportunities advanced ÷ discovery calls held | typical target: 40–60% | | Talk-to-listen ratio | Proportion of the call spent with the rep talking versus the prospect. | Rep talk time ÷ total call time | typical target: below 40–45% | | Disqualification rate | Share of discovery calls that end in an explicit no-fit decision rather than silent drift. | Calls disqualified ÷ total discovery calls | typical target: 15–30%, not zero | | Show rate | Share of booked discovery calls the prospect actually attends. | Calls held ÷ calls booked | typical target: 70–80% | | Qualification field completeness | Share of discovery calls with the required qualification fields filled in the CRM. | Opportunities with complete MEDDICC/BANT fields ÷ total opportunities post-discovery | typical target: above 90% | | Time to first discovery call | Days from lead creation or meeting request to the discovery call taking place. | Call date − lead/request date | typical target: under 2 business days for inbound | ## 6. Known failure modes | Failure | Symptom | Corrective action | | --- | --- | --- | | Discovery collapses into demo | Reps show the product in the first 10 minutes; every demo looks the same regardless of prospect. | Enforce a discovery-first call structure with a hard rule: no screen share until pain and criteria are established. | | Single-threaded discovery | Deal stalls after the first call because the person on it can't buy and doesn't influence who can. | Explicitly map the buying committee during discovery and require a plan to multithread before advancing the stage. | | Happy ears qualification | Every call gets scored as qualified regardless of what was actually said; pipeline is full of deals that never close. | Manager-reviewed call scoring against the framework, with disqualification treated as a good outcome, not a failure to sell. | | No written recap | Prospect and rep remember the call differently a week later; next steps quietly evaporate. | Mandatory recap email within 24 hours restating pain, criteria, and the agreed next step with a date. | | Generic question script read verbatim | Calls feel scripted and interrogative; prospects disengage and give shallow answers. | Train reps on the framework as a mental model, not a script, and coach on follow-up 'why' questions. | | Vague or absent timeline accepted at face value | Forecast is full of deals with no real decision date that slip quarter after quarter. | Treat 'no timeline' as a qualification gap to close before advancing the deal, not a detail to fill in later. | --- This SOP is maintained as part of the B2B process encyclopedia at https://b2bprocess.com. 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