What is a Discovery Call?
If you’re new to entrepreneurship, you may be wondering…what is a discovery call? Understanding what it is and how to conduct one is a crucial skill to possess as a business owner. That's because your primary way of booking clients as a service entrepreneur will be through a sales discovery call. When most people decide to become entrepreneurs, they’re probably not very familiar with sales and how to conduct good discovery calls that actually result in booking clients. I get that it can be totally outside of your comfort zone!
I guess one of the benefits I had before becoming an entrepreneur was actually spending seven years working in corporate sales first. So I was pretty familiar with the whole sales discovery call flow works before becoming an entrepreneur.
When compared to my corporate sales days, one of the benefits of doing discovery calls as an entrepreneur is that prospects actually WANT to talk to you. They’re reaching out to you and scheduling the calls to work with you on their own! In my corporate sales days, I had to cold call for hours and hours, getting hung up on and everything by people who definitely did NOT want to speak to me.
So if you start to get scared about handling your discovery calls, remember that doing it as an entrepreneur with people who actually want to speak to you is WAY better than cold calling for hours!
So what is a discovery call? It’s simple a call to uncover the problems that your potential client is dealing with that’s causing them to come to you for help. The goal of the call is to make sure the service package that you offer is truly the right solution for them. So during a sales discovery call, you’ll be asking a series of questions in two stages to diagnose the potential client’s problem. And at the end of the call, if they’re a good fit for your services, you’ll discuss your services package with them in the final stage at the end of the call. Pretty simple!
Now you may be thinking, “Ok…so now I know what is a discovery call, but what’s the point of it? Why can’t people just pay me on my website?” Well…the benefit of doing discovery calls is that when you're trying to sell your services at a premium rate, $3,000+, $5,000+, etc., it’s best to speak to the potential client to make sure it's a good fit for them to work with you and to truly sell the value of your services. It's much easier to sell the value of premium-priced services through discovery calls, than on a website.
Here are the three stages of a successful sales discovery call:
Stage 1: Set the direction for the conversation at the beginning of the sales discovery call.
When many people think about what is a discovery call, they think they have to dive right into all the details of their service package right from the start, but that’s the absolute wrong thing to do!
But first, you must set the direction for the conversation at the beginning of the call. If you don’t do this, as the business owner, your potential client could possibly hijack control of the call away from you and drag you all over the place, not allowing you to get an understanding of their challenges/desires first.
You want to open up the call saying something like, “Hey, this is a call for us to chat to see if it's a good fit for us to work together. My goal is to learn what to learn more about your business and what you do and what your goals are. And then if it's a good fit, I'll explain my solution and how I can help you at the end. If not, I'll let you know it’s not a good fit for us to work together, and I'll refer you to other resources that could help you out.”
Stage 2: Dive into your questions to uncover the prospect’s challenges, frustrations, & desires.
This is the meat of what is a discovery call. When you get ready to ask your prospect questions to uncover their challenges, frustrations, and desires, make sure you’re prepared to listen more than you talk. Oftentimes, we may try to put words in people's mouths, answering questions for them, or maybe we cut people off, not letting them finish their thoughts, but you have to be careful not to do that, so you can truly understand HOW your solution will be helpful for them. To do this, you want to ask open ended questions on your discovery calls and give people the time to talk about whatever it is that they are dealing with.
The first area to dive into is questions that uncover the problems/frustrations that prospect is dealing with. Problem questions should hit two layers — the first layer is just uncovering what’s the main problem/frustration that's causing them to reach out to you in the first place. And the next layer is to understand how that problem/frustration is affecting them, like are they stuck in a career that they hate and making less money? Are they making less money in their businesses? Are they always feeling like they're just going to be out of shape and low energy forever?
From there, you want dive into the questions to uncover their desires. So then this is where you get into, what are their goals are, like where do they aspire to be in the future, in regards to the area they’re struggling with?
All of their answers to these questions is pretty much giving you ammunition to justify why your solution will be worth it for them. For people to hand over a significant amount of money for something for something that costs thousands of dollars, they have to really feel like it's actually worth the money and that it’s actually going to help them.
So this is why you want them talking about their challenges, desires, and goals during a sales discovery call in their own words.
Stage 3: Propose your solution at the end of the sales discovery call.
So you should not be going into all the details of your package at the beginning of the call. That’s a mistake that a lot of people make when they're new to sales and they didn't understand that they were supposed to ask certain questions to gather information from the prospect first.
You need to have all the information to even know that your solution is a good fit first before talking about your solution. So at the end of the call, once you know it can help the prospect, that's when you want to be like, “Okay, I'm confident I can really help you and this is the solution I have.”
From there, you’ll explain each of the stages in your solution and talk about how each stage relates to a problem or challenge that they told you they were dealing with. This is the most powerful way to talk about the solution, so the prospect really understands how each piece is relevant to their unique situation.
And lastly, you’ll give them the opportunity to pay you to secure their spot to work with you at the end of the call!
Now you know exactly what is a discovery call and you know the three stages of a successful one! Remember, that you’ll become more and more confident with discovery calls, as you do more of them. So don’t give up if the first few don’t go as planned. You’ll get better at it with practice.
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