Call prep and discovery questions

Each block is three minutes and each one feeds the next. Do them out of order and you will write a hypothesis that has nothing to do with what changed at their company.

Block 4 is the one everybody drops, and it is the one that makes the other four honest. Writing down what would prove you wrong before the call is the only reliable protection against spending twenty minutes collecting evidence for a conclusion you already reached in b2.

The hour-long prep is not more thorough, it is differently shaped, and the shape is what hurts you:

• It has no stopping point. Company research expands to fill whatever time you give it, and the last forty minutes add facts you will never say out loud.
• It builds commitment. The more time you spend constructing a picture of their business, the more expensive it becomes to have that picture corrected by the person who actually works there. Long prep quietly makes you harder to teach.
• It crowds out the writing. Reading is passive and comfortable; writing a claim you might be wrong about is neither. Given sixty minutes, most reps read for fifty-five and write nothing.
• The timer converts research into decisions. Three minutes on the room forces you to name who signs rather than compile an org chart.

The one legitimate exception: a first call with a named account you have never touched, where fifteen minutes genuinely leaves block 1 empty. Then spend the extra time in block 1 only, and keep blocks 3 and 4 at three minutes each. They are the blocks that make the call different.

Three questions, memorised, asked in whatever order the conversation allows. Everything else in the bank is standby material for when a thread runs out.

• Anchor 1 - the situation, in their words. "Five weeks into the Jurong site, what is actually taking longer than you expected?" It is specific, it is dated, it is answerable, and it does not name your product.
• Anchor 2 - the cost, in their units. "When a decision from a site meeting does not land, what does that cost you in practice - a day, a week, a re-run?" Their number, not yours.
• Anchor 3 - the path. "If you decided this was worth fixing this quarter, who else would have to be in that conversation?" This is the one that surfaces Priya Raman and Jonas Weber before they surface themselves in month three.

Then the discipline that makes all three work: after any answer that contains a real detail, your next question comes from that answer, not from the document. A thread is worth four planned questions, because it is the only part of the call your competitor did not also ask.

Call in 2 days: Mira Chen, VP Ops, Northwind Logistics (3PL, SG,
~900 staff). Trigger: Jurong DC lease signed 5 weeks ago, 3
warehouse-ops reqs open. I sell AI meeting intelligence for ops teams.

Give me THREE clearly separated sections, in this order:

SECTION 1 - BRIEF (max 150 words)
  Dated facts only, each with a source link. No adjectives, no
  speculation. Mark anything you inferred as INFERRED.

SECTION 2 - QUESTION BANK (max 12)
  Open questions in her vocabulary, grouped: situation, cost, path.
  No questions that name my product or category.

SECTION 3 - DISPROOF
  My hypothesis is: "the new DC ramp is losing decisions between
  site meetings and HQ." List three things she could say that
  would make that hypothesis wrong, and the question that would
  surface each one.

Do not merge the sections. Do not write a script or an opening line.

Write me a discovery call script for a VP of Operations at a
logistics company, with a strong opening, discovery questions,
and how to handle it when she asks about pricing.

A script is a document you read. A brief is a document you absorb and then close. The bad prompt is popular because a script removes the fear of silence, and removing the fear of silence is exactly how a rep ends up talking for 60% of a discovery call.

It is the most-taught discovery question in B2B and it has stopped working, for three separate reasons that all arrive in the same second:

• It outsources your homework. You had a trigger, a job posting, and an earnings call available. Asking a stranger to summarise her own problems tells her you read none of it.
• She has answered it forty times. The response is a rehearsed, category-shaped non-answer: "visibility, alignment, doing more with less." You cannot act on any of those words.
• It is too big to answer honestly. Real pain is specific and slightly embarrassing. Nobody hands that to a stranger in the first ninety seconds.

The same family of questions: "what are your biggest challenges", "walk me through your current process", "what does success look like for you". Each one asks the buyer to do the structuring work that you were supposed to do in prep. Replace all of them with a claim she can correct: "Five weeks in, my guess is decisions from the site meetings are not making it back to HQ intact. Is that real, or is your problem somewhere else entirely?"

The proof point stays in your pocket rather than in the plan: Pacific Freight's Tuas ramp took action items closed within a week from 41% to 88% in one quarter. One customer, one number, one period. It is an answer to a question she asks, not an item on your agenda, and Daniel Ortiz is a real person you can offer as a reference in b6 if the comparison earns it.

Three things reps prepare that reliably make the call worse:

• A script. The moment there is a script, you are reading rather than listening, and everyone can hear it. The prep pack is written so you can close it before you dial.
• A pitch. A twenty-minute first call has room for roughly ninety seconds of you. Preparing five minutes of positioning guarantees you will spend it, because prepared material behaves like a sunk cost.
• A demo nobody asked for. Demoing into an unnamed problem teaches the buyer that you did not have one. If she asks to see it, show the one screen that touches the pain she just named, and stop.

Also on the list: competitor teardowns, a slide deck for a twenty-minute call, and pre-written objection handles. b6 is where objections get their own session, and pre-loading them tonight will only make you hear objections she has not raised.

You are not calling Priya or Jonas this week. You prepare them anyway, because anchor 3 will surface them and you want to recognise the names when Mira says them.

• Priya Raman, CFO. One line on what she will care about: what this replaces, and whether the number survives a quarter. Never your champion, and able to end the deal in one sentence. Full treatment in b7.
• Jonas Weber, IT manager. One line: integration, access, and recording policy. He is the wrong seat to cold email, as b2 established, and the right seat to have an answer ready for. Recording consent comes up in b5, and it will come up through him.
• Whoever Mira names that you did not expect. This is the most valuable output of the call. Write the name and the exact words she used about them, because that phrasing is your map of the politics.

One line each. If your stakeholder prep is longer than that, you are building an org chart instead of preparing for a conversation.

The trust line from b1 says three things must stay unmistakably human: the read, the promise, the price. Discovery is where the read gets tested, and it fails in a way nobody warns you about. A hypothesis you refuse to abandon is not a read. It is a pitch wearing a question mark, and buyers detect it in about two exchanges, usually at the moment you respond to a correction by restating the claim more slowly.

• Say the claim out loud, early, and label it as a guess. "My guess is X, and I would rather be corrected in the first five minutes than the last."
• Score yourself after every call. Right, partly right, or wrong. Wrong is the most valuable outcome available on a first call, because you now know something true that your competitor is still guessing at.
• Watch for the tell in yourself. If you find yourself explaining why her correction is compatible with your hypothesis, you have stopped discovering.
• This is why the record matters. Gartner predicts that by 2030, 75% of B2B buyers will prefer sales experiences that prioritise human interaction over AI. The part a machine cannot do for you is changing your mind in front of someone. Everything up to that moment can be automated. That moment cannot.

b5 covers what you capture while this is happening, including consent before any recording starts, and how a transcript differs from understanding.