“Discovery is about the prospect. The goal of discovery is to understand the pain point of the prospect.”

- Mor Assouline

You know how they say that there’s a great story behind every successful person. Well, there’s also a great discovery behind every successful demo.

Mor Assouline, founder of FDTC, and Neha Gupta, Sales Manager at Wingman by Clari, recently explored what makes or breaks a disco call. 

Without much further ado, here’s what makes up a good disco call according to the duo. 

Knock knock, housekeeping!

Ideally, every disco or disco demo call should have three housekeeping rules:

Objective – Set the expectations right from the get go for the prospect and for yourself. Have a clear idea of why everybody is on the call and what you hope to achieve by the end of it. 

Timecheck – It’s only fair to be mindful of your prospect's time. Make sure to check if they have to run earlier than expected for another meeting. You can then improvise your pitch a bit if needed.

Agenda – A disco call obviously requires you to ask the prospect a number of questions, which may or may not seem interrogative. But setting an agenda for the meeting lets the prospect know what you are looking to get out of the call. It also gives you permission to dig a little deeper into the prospect’s pain points. 

Mind your mindset

Yes, you want to close that deal and take one more step towards hitting quota for the quarter. But going on a call with just a closing mindset isn’t really going to get you too far. 

Your goal should be to help the prospect, not just sell them your product. Without such a mindset, your discovery may not be as in depth as it ideally should be.

“How you think affects how you sell. If your goal on the call is just to close, and to make the sale, you're approaching it completely wrong. The discovery won't be deep, it will be very shallow.”

Start your disco call with these questions

Mor says he can’t set up a successful demo without asking these three things early on in the discovery call:

• What is the problem?
• How big is the problem?
• When does the prospect want to solve the problem?

Then as you move further in the conversation, you can focus on questions like:

• What does the success criteria for a product look like for the prospect?
• Who is the end user of the product?

Avoid these pitfalls

We’ve talked about how you should start a disco call, what your mindset should be and all the important questions that make a successful discovery. Now let's see what you shouldn’t do during a disco call: 

• Shallow questioning: If you’re just asking one question at a time and then moving on to the next without digging deeper, you’re not doing yourself any favors. 
• Not reading between the lines: You obviously ask about the pain points of the prospect, but are you really trying to get to the root of the problem? What you need to ideally do is go beyond the surface level and understand what’s the cause of the pain point. 

• Sounding interrogative: This is pretty self explanatory. Just putting up question after question is probably not how you’ll get the prospect to open up. 
• Sticking to a templated version of a disco call: Yes, templates are great, but not really when it comes to sales. You don’t want to sound like cookie cutter templated sales people in front of prospects. So do your research and modify your pitch according to the prospect and their pain point. 

There, that’s a quick recap of a great conversation between Mor and Neha. We, of course, would recommend you to go and check out the full recording: The Secret to Mic-Drop Demos (Vol 2) Happy selling!