Discovery comes after a first contact (a reply to outreach, a cold call that landed, an inbound request) and before any demo or proposal. Its purpose is to find out whether there is a problem worth solving, whether you are the right people to solve it, and what it would take for the buyer to act. The buyer should do most of the talking.
A good discovery call usually covers:
- the situation, limited to what you could not research beforehand;
- the problem, in the buyer’s words, with its consequences and its cost;
- what they have tried and why it did not work;
- how a decision would be made: who is involved, what criteria, what timeline, what budget process;
- a clear next step that both sides agree to, or an honest conclusion that there is no fit.
Methods such as SPIN and Sandler are, for the most part, ways of running this conversation, and frameworks such as BANT and MEDDIC define what you should know by the end of it.
The most common failure is pitching too early: hearing the first sign of a problem and switching to the product. The second most common is ending without a next step. Both are habits, and habits change with practice; see How do you practice cold calls?