Discovery call questions: 40 to choose from, what to listen for and how to run the call

This guide is for account executives, SDRs who run first meetings, and founders who sell. It gives you a question bank organized by the stage of the call, what to listen for in the answers, how to adapt questions to the buyer's role, and a worked example from a pest control company meeting a restaurant group. Two companion pages cover the rest: the BANT questions for budget, authority and timing, and the sales call planning template for preparing the call.

What a discovery call has to find out

You won't fill every row on one call. Note the gaps and make them the purpose of the next conversation.

A 30-minute discovery call agenda

If the call has been booked for 30 minutes, finish on time. Running over tells the buyer the next meeting will run over too.

The questions, by stage

Pick two or three from each card. The square brackets are for the specific process or problem you're discussing.

1. I'd planned to cover how you handle [area] today, what's working and what isn't, and whether a second conversation makes sense. Does that work, or is there something you'd add?
2. What made this worth 30 minutes of your week?
3. What would make this call useful for you?
4. Do we still have the full 30 minutes?

5. Walk me through how [process] works today, from start to finish.
6. Who's involved day to day, and who owns the result?
7. Which tools, suppliers or people do you rely on for it?
8. How has it changed in the last year?
9. What's working well that you'd want to keep?
10. How do you know whether it's going well? What do you look at?

11. Where does it break down?
12. What was the most recent case, and how was it handled?
13. How often does that happen?
14. What do you think causes it?
15. Who notices first, and who has to fix it?
16. Is this a priority for you, or for someone above you?

17. When it happens, how many staff hours does it take to sort out?
18. Does it ever reach customers? What happens then?
19. Has it put revenue, a contract or an inspection at risk?
20. If you had to put a rough number on it over a year, what would it be?
21. How does it affect what you're measured on this year?
22. Who else in the business feels it, and how?

23. If this were solved, what would be different six months from now?
24. How would you measure that it worked?
25. What would a good result be worth to you?
26. What must any solution do, and what would be nice to have?
27. What would make you say no, even to something that worked?

28. What have you tried already, and what happened?
29. What other options are you weighing, including leaving it as it is?
30. Why hasn't it been fixed before now?
31. If you changed nothing, how would you manage it?
32. What do you like about your current supplier?

33. How did you choose the last supplier or tool for this?
34. What would you need to see to recommend a change internally?
35. What could slow this down or stop it, even if you're keen?
36. What other projects need the same people this quarter?

37. Here's what I heard: [summary]. What did I miss or get wrong?
38. Based on that, is it worth looking at how we'd handle it?
39. Who else should be part of that conversation?
40. Can we put [day and time] in the calendar now?

For budget, signing authority and deadlines, use the BANT question bank rather than inventing your own; it has a scorecard for turning the answers into a decision.

What the answer tells you, and what to ask next

The first question opens the topic; the follow-up gets the useful answer. Plan these before the call.

When a buyer raises a concern, treat it as information, not an attack. The objection handling guide covers responses to the common ones.

Adapt the questions to the person

Business buying usually involves more people than the one on the call. Forrester's State of Business Buying 2024 found that, on average, 13 people are involved in a purchase decision and 89% of purchases involve two or more departments. Questions 6, 22 and 39 are how you find them.

How many questions to ask, and when

Gong analyzed 519,000 recorded discovery calls in 2017 and found that asking 11 to 14 questions correlated with the best outcomes. Top sellers spread their questions through the call, while average sellers front-loaded them at the start. It's one vendor's data and it shows correlation, not cause, but it matches experience: a question bank is for choosing from, not reading out. Ask one question at a time, let silences run, and follow the buyer's answer rather than your list.

Preparation decides which questions you need. If you already know from research that they opened two sites this year, you don't need to ask how the business has changed; ask what the new sites did to the process instead. At volume, that research is the slow part; Bebop researches each account and writes a playbook with who to talk to, what's happening at the company and the objections to expect.

Worked example: a pest control company meets a restaurant group

Illustrative example. The companies, people and figures are fictional, to show the method.

The seller: Cedar Pest Control (cedarpest.example), a commercial pest control firm. The buyer: the director of operations at Juniper Hospitality Group (juniperhg.example), which runs seven restaurants. The meeting came from an outbound email about a new location Juniper opened in the spring.

What the questions turned up:

The cost arithmetic, from her own numbers. One closure cost about $10,600 ($8,500 + $900 + $1,200). Juniper pays its current provider $95 a month per site, $7,980 a year for seven sites, plus about $1,500 a year in call-out fees. Cedar's service at $140 a month per site, call-outs included, costs $11,760 a year, so $2,280 more than today's $9,480 total. Avoiding one closure a year covers the difference more than four times over. Because she produced the figures, the business case for the CFO is hers, not a sales pitch.

The read back (question 37): "So: monthly visits, managers calling in between, two citations last year and one closed day that cost about $10,600. Success is no citations and same-day call-backs, the CFO signs above $10,000, and you'd need to give 60 days' notice. Did I miss anything?" She added that the new site's kitchen layout had been a problem from the start, which became the focus of the next meeting: a site survey at the new location, with the CFO invited to the review afterwards.

Discovery is done when you can write these

• How their process works today, in three sentences.
• One recent example of the problem, with a date.
• What it costs, in their numbers.
• How they'd measure success.
• What they'll do if they don't buy from you.
• Who else is involved, and the date of the next step.

If you can't write one of them, that's the opening question for the next call. Send the summary the same day; the sales call follow-up email templates have a format.

Mistakes to avoid

• Interrogating. Firing questions from a list feels like an audit. Follow their answers and spread your questions out.
• Pitching too early. The moment you describe your product, the buyer stops describing their problem. Save it for the read back or the next meeting.
• Accepting vague answers. "Now and then" and "it costs us" aren't data. Ask for the last example and a rough number.
• Leading questions. "Wouldn't it be great if...?" gets a polite yes and teaches you nothing.
• No next step. End every call with a date in the calendar, or an honest agreement that it isn't a fit.

Next step: prepare your next discovery call with the free sales call planning template, which saves your plan in the browser and prints cleanly.