# Discovery Call Checklist Seven sections, from the ten minutes before the call to the hour after it. Free from Backdrop: https://www.getbackdrop.ai/tools/discovery-call-checklist --- ## 1. Before the call: 10 minutes, not 40 Enough to sound informed and to have one specific opening question. Past ten minutes you are procrastinating. - [ ] **Read the last two things the company published.** Earnings call, product launch, funding announcement, or a job posting. A job posting is the most honest of the four. - [ ] **Read the prospect's own last three posts or comments.** You are looking for what they complain about, not their job title. - [ ] **Check who else from their company is on the invite.** A second name changes the call. Look them up before you find out live. - [ ] **Write down the one hypothesis you are testing.** "I think they are hiring three sales engineers because AEs cannot answer technical questions live." - [ ] **Write your first question and your fallback question.** The fallback is for when they open with "so, tell me about you". ## 2. The first five minutes: set the frame You are buying permission to ask hard questions later. Skip this and every question after it feels like an interrogation. - [ ] **State the agenda and the time.** Two sentences. Then ask what they want to get out of it. - [ ] **Ask what prompted them to take the call.** The answer to this is the deal. Write it down verbatim, not paraphrased. - [ ] **Get permission to ask questions before you present.** Explicit permission. It is what you point back to at minute 22. - [ ] **Confirm how much time you actually have.** Their calendar, not yours. > "Before I show you anything, I would rather understand what is actually going > on, so I do not waste 20 minutes on the wrong half of the product. Is it all > right if I ask questions for the first stretch?" ## 3. Current state: how it works today - [ ] **How does this get done today, step by step?** Make them walk it. Interrupt only to ask who does each step. - [ ] **Who touches it, and how many of them are there?** - [ ] **What tools are already in place for this?** Including the spreadsheet. Especially the spreadsheet. - [ ] **When did this process last change, and why?** A recent change means someone already has budget and attention on it. ## 4. Pain and impact: four questions, in order Each one builds on the last answer. Asked out of order they all land flat. - [ ] **1. What are the biggest challenges with how that works now?** You will get a surface answer. That is expected. It is the foundation for the next question, not the prize. - [ ] **2. What is going on in the business that makes that a priority now?** This gets past the symptom to the driver. Prospects often laugh here. That means you hit something real. - [ ] **3. Which metric is suffering most because of it?** Expressed pain becomes quantified pain. Without a number you have no business case and no urgency. - [ ] **4. What is driving you to solve it now rather than next year?** Only lands after the first three. This is where timeline, budget, and real commitment show up. - [ ] **Ask what happens if nothing changes.** The cost of the status quo is the number you will quote back in the follow-up. ## 5. Decision, money, and process - [ ] **Who else has to agree before this can happen?** Not "who is the decision maker". Nobody answers that one honestly. - [ ] **What has to be true for you to say yes?** Their decision criteria, in their words. - [ ] **Where does budget for this normally come from?** - [ ] **What did the last purchase like this look like internally?** The most efficient qualification question there is. Paper process, timeline, and blockers in one answer. - [ ] **What else are you looking at, including doing nothing?** Doing nothing is the competitor that wins most often. ## 6. The last five minutes: land a next step - [ ] **Play back what you heard, in their words.** Three sentences. Ask them to correct you. They will, and the correction is gold. - [ ] **Name the next step, with a date and the people on it.** Not "sometime next week". A day, a time, and who else joins. - [ ] **Ask what would stop that meeting from happening.** - [ ] **Get one thing you did not have before the call.** An intro, a document, a metric, or an access request. > "So what I heard is [pain], which is costing you [number], and the reason it > matters this quarter is [driver]. What did I get wrong?" ## 7. Within an hour of hanging up - [ ] **Send the follow-up while the call is still fresh.** What you heard, what it costs, the agreed next step, in that order. - [ ] **Log the verbatim quotes, not your summary of them.** - [ ] **Score the deal on every qualification element you now know.** And write down which ones you still do not. - [ ] **Name the one question you should have asked and did not.** This is the whole coaching loop. It takes 30 seconds. --- # Worked example: Wexford Logistics, VP Data Platform, 34 minutes Every company, person, and number below is invented. Notice how much of the right-hand column is a direct quote. | Checkpoint | What was actually said | | --- | --- | | Hypothesis going in | They posted two data reliability engineer roles in six weeks. Guess: something broke publicly and nobody owns detection. | | What prompted the call | "Our CFO opened a revenue dashboard in the board meeting and the number was nine hours stale. I have been asked to make sure that cannot happen again." | | Current state | 1,400 tables in Snowflake. dbt tests on about 120 of them. Alerts go to a Slack channel with 40 people in it and no owner. Last process change was in January, when they added the channel. | | Pain, question 1 | "We find out about broken data from whoever opens the dashboard first." | | Pain, question 2 | "The board asked for a weekly revenue view. That is the first time anyone outside the company sees these numbers, so being wrong is now visible." | | Pain, question 3, the metric | Mean time to detection. Currently around nine hours, measured informally. Nobody reports it. The CFO now asks about it monthly. | | Pain, question 4, why now | "The board pack goes out on the 5th. If it is wrong twice, this becomes a headcount conversation instead of a tooling one." | | Cost of doing nothing | Two analyst days per incident, roughly two incidents a month, plus board risk they would not put a number on. | | Who else agrees | Her, the Head of Analytics (owns the BI contract, may resist), and the CFO signs anything over $50k. | | Decision criteria, verbatim | "It has to cover raw tables, not just the modelled ones, and it cannot need my team to write more tests." | | Last purchase like this | Bought their BI suite in 2024. Took eleven weeks, security review was the long pole, procurement needs a SOC 2 report up front. | | Alternatives | The BI vendor's bundled module, and "hiring two more people and writing more dbt tests". | | Next step agreed | Technical session Thursday 3pm with her and one platform engineer. She is inviting the Head of Analytics herself. | | What we got that we did not have | The nine-hour detection number, and the name of the Head of Analytics. | | Question I should have asked | Whether the CFO has actually seen a detection-time number, or is just asking for one. | --- Free sales templates and AI prompts: https://www.getbackdrop.ai/tools