It’s easy to overlook the importance of sales discovery calls. After all, during these conversations, the focus isn’t on converting leads. Instead, salespeople use these discovery discussions to build rapport and discover customer pain points. However, an effective discovery call strategy has more of an impact on your profits, revenue, and performance than you’d think.
Studies show that around 50% of the prospects any company connects with won’t actually be a good fit for whatever they’re selling. Discovery calls give your reps an opportunity to ensure they’re investing time and energy into the right leads. They also allow your teams to collect crucial insights that will help them to tailor their pitch to each customer later in the sales funnel.
Unfortunately, conducting effective discovery calls isn’t easy. It takes a lot of time and effort to gather research, ask the right questions, and build the foundations of a relationship with a customer. The good news is that the right technology can give your teams the edge they need.
The Benefits of Using Technology in Sales Discovery Calls
Salespeople need to qualify leads to ensure they’re connecting with the right clients. Plus, they need to go into the conversation with a certain amount of information and guidance, so they can build stronger relationships. Sales tools can help streamline and optimise various steps in the discovery call process, for example:
- Making prospecting more efficient: Effective sales prospecting requires a strategic approach to discovering prospects, defining whether they’d be a good customer or client, and collecting information so you can reach out with an initial conversation. Some tools can help sales professionals find contact details and gather information about their industry, history, budget, company size, and more.
- Improving lead quality: During a discovery call, sales reps need to ask specific questions to determine whether a lead fits their ideal customer profile. The right technology, such as AI-driven sales tools, can analyse a prospect’s profile and give reps the guidance they need to ask the right questions. Some tools can even generate personalised scripts tailored to the customer, to help with validating leads and building rapport.
- Enhancing rep performance: Sales tools can provide professionals with real-time data, guidance, and advice during a discovery call. They can provide insights into metrics linked to customer engagement level and sentiment, so reps can adapt the conversation in real-time. They can also make sales team members more efficient by automating tasks like research, scheduling future calls, and following up with prospects.
Covering a wide range of functions from analysis to automation, the right tools can give every sales rep the superpowers they need to excel in each discovery call.
Top 4 Tools for Sales Discovery Calls
Tools for sales discovery calls can come in a range of formats. Some are designed to help reps collect information and research during the prospecting stage, so they can focus their attention on the most relevant leads. Others use AI to provide reps with an intelligent assistant or coach, capable of guiding them through each stage of the discussion.
Here are some of the most powerful tools worth using during a discovery call, and what they can do for both your reps and your business.
1. 6Sense
Another intelligent software platform specifically designed for sales teams, 6Sense combines AI, automation, and market research to give sales reps an edge. The company’s “Revenue AI for Sales” toolkit includes a comprehensive B2B sales prospecting tool. This solution helps sellers to discover accounts primed for a sale, and to acquire contact information in seconds.
It also integrates with CRM and Sales Engagement Platform tools, and allows team members to engage prospects across a range of channels, including messenger apps. Features include:
- Real-time intelligence: The platform uses predictive AI technology, and industry-leading intent data to give sellers a behind-the-scenes view of each prospect. It can automatically assemble insights into profiles, to keep teams informed during calls.
- Contact details: Rather than spending hours searching for emails and phone numbers, reps can leverage the 6Sense database to sort through more than 400 million buyer profiles, 65 million company profiles, and 100 million email addresses.
- Outreach: From within the 6Sense platform, sellers can instantly connect with prospects on the channels they prefer. You can reach out through LinkedIn, via email, or through phone calls, and record data in the same unified space.
- Recommendations: With insights into buyer information, company hierarchy, and more, 6Sense can suggest talking points to help reps build rapport during discovery conversations. Teams can even sync the solution with their marketing automation tools for follow-ups.
Like many sales prospecting tools, 6Sense doesn’t share any pricing plans on its website. You’ll need to contact the team to request a demo and get a quote for your software.
2. Gong
Gong is a leading revenue intelligence platform with various features that can support companies during prospecting, sales discovery calls, and more. The platform can capture all interactions from numerous channels, including your email account, voice calls, and CRM.
It then uses AI to deliver insights and guidance to team members, so they can adapt, upskill, and achieve their goals during each call. Some of the best features of Gong for discovery calls include:
- Revenue predictions: Gong can use in-depth insights into customers and their history to identify which of your prospects will deliver the most revenue to your business. This makes it easier to determine which leads your reps should reach out to.
- Coaching: With AI-powered coaching, companies can provide every sales professional with a specialised assistant to help them navigate complex calls. Companies can even customise their own AI models for training and coaching purposes.
- Powerful insights: Since Gong has captured and analysed billions of sales interactions, it can provide insights into opportunities and strategies for boosting audience engagement. You can even use customised smart trackers to watch out for conversation trends.
- Gong Engage: The Gong Engage toolkit uses AI to help teams prioritise which deals to focus on, and automatically generates accurate call briefs and action items. You can even use the tool to create outreach emails and messages with generative AI.
- Gong Dialler: If you need to save your team members time on repetitive tasks, you can seamlessly auto-dial contacts from Gong, and still access the same AI-generated call outcomes, summaries, and action item highlights.
Gong doesn’t have a free trial, but each customer does get a personalised price based on their specific needs and goals.
3. Demoleap
Demoleap is an innovative sales software company, best known for their powerful AI-driven tools. The company offers businesses access to everything from real-time sales playbooks to intelligent assistants that can improve engagement and strengthen customer/brand relationships.
For discovery calls, “Mastermind for Discovery” is a comprehensive collection of sales tools, custom-built to help agents get the most out of their conversations. Reps can access:
- Playbook templates and sales assets: Mastermind gives sales reps a library of best-in-class playbook templates and assets, such as slide decks and URL links, to help them effectively promote their business, service, and product during customer calls.
- Pre-call preparation: The pre-call preparation screen includes all of the information reps need to know about their prospect, such as their contact information, pain points, and company. It even integrates with CRM systems, for in-depth customer profiles.
- Battle cards: Mastermind uses voice-triggered battle cards to instantly identify and deliver relevant questions and information to reps during a call. These tools can help agents rapidly field objections and build trust.
- Live speaker insights: The AI toolkit provides insights into live speaker metrics, so agents can see first-hand how customers are reacting to a call. Plus, teams can access transcripts of the call for review at a later stage.
- AI summary and follow-up: With generative AI, Mastermind creates a simple summary of each discovery call, complete with key points and action steps. It then generates a follow-up email to help reps nurture the relationship with each contact.
There’s even a free trial of Demoleap available (no credit card required), so teams can test out the functionality for themselves.
4. Avoma
Avoma is a company leveraging the latest in artificial intelligence to provide every sales professional with their own personal meeting assistant. It’s ideal for not just sales teams, but also for customer success leaders, and marketing managers too. With Avoma, team members can save time and effort before, during and after every sales discovery call.
You can use AI to create an agenda for a conversation, record crucial data from each discussion, and even get insights into which talking points to address. Avoma helps reps with:
- Recording, transcription and notes: With Avoma, reps can spend less time taking notes during discovery calls, and more time focusing on the conversation. The advanced recording and transcription tools come with topic detection, keyword tracking, and speaker identities.
- Deal intelligence: Avoma’s conversation and revenue intelligence tools draw insights from every conversation and interaction. There are even AI scorecards and auto scoring tools to help supervisors track the success of each sales rep.
- Coaching: AI coaching solutions can offer sales professionals an insight into which topics to discuss during a discovery call, and present relevant information for the discussion. Avoma’s scorecards also offer business leaders guidance on where teams need training.
- AI Forecasting: With AI forecasting tools, sales reps can rapidly identify which prospects are most likely to turn into valuable leads. This means teams spend less of their time pursuing conversations with the wrong potential customers.
Avoma also seamlessly integrates with the tools teams already use, such as Zoom and RingCentral. Plus, there’s a free demo available for beginners as well as a free “limited access” plan.
How to Ace Discovery Conversations with the Top Tools
All of the tools above will give your sales professionals a much-needed edge when it comes to mastering sales discovery calls. However, there are still some top tips your teams should keep in mind when using these tools:
- Do your research: Leverage the AI-powered research tools offered by the companies above to collect as much information about your prospects as possible before a call. The more reps know about a customer’s goals, pain points, and requirements, the easier it will be for them to determine which leads they should be focusing their attention on.
- Be solution-oriented: The key to success in a discovery call isn’t just defining that your customer has a problem. You also need to demonstrate that you have the ability to resolve that issue. Focus on finding out how you can help your prospects achieve their goals.
- Be patient: It takes time to build trust and rapport with prospects, even when you have generative AI tools and insights to guide you. Don’t encourage your teams to try and secure a sale during the call. Instead, get them to focus on listening to their customers, getting to know them, and building the foundations for trust.
- Ask the right questions: Questions are crucial in a discovery call. The more questions you ask, the more you can get to the heart of your customer’s issue. That’s why data shows that reps talk around 50% of the time during a discovery call.
- Be ready to adapt: Even though several sales tools provide scripts and conversation suggestions, these should be an addition to, and not replacement for, human intuition. As your prospects learn more about your prospects during a discovery call, make sure they feel comfortable going “off script”. Allow them to adapt their questions and the conversation to the needs of the prospect.
- Follow up: Always remember to follow up after a discovery call. Discuss the next steps before the call ends, and reach out to the prospect in a timely manner to confirm when you’ll be speaking to them next.
Optimising Discovery Calls with the Right Tools
An effective strategy for conducting discovery calls is crucial in the sales landscape. The better your discovery calls are, the more likely you are to target the right leads, pitch the correct solutions, and pave the way for long-lasting relationships with customers.
Use the tools above and the tips we’ve mentioned to optimise your discovery calls, and give your sales reps an edge in a competitive market.
