Discovery Call Questions: 30 Questions Mapped to the Fields They Fill

Discovery call questions are what a rep asks on a first call to learn whether a prospect has a real problem, a way to pay, and a path to a decision. The thirty below are grouped by what they establish, each mapped to the field its answer fills, because an unanswered field is lost when a deal changes hands.

For where a lead becomes a deal in the first place, see what a CRM is and how it works. This list picks up right after that: the call happens, and now someone has to write down what was said.

What does a discovery call need to establish?

A discovery call has one job: decide whether to spend more of an account executive’s time on this buyer. To make that call, it needs to establish six things: a real problem, what solving it is worth, how a purchase actually gets approved, who is involved, when a decision is due, and what else the buyer is weighing. Miss any one of the six and the deal that looks qualified in week one stalls in week six for a reason nobody asked about.

The six map directly onto how frameworks such as BANT, CHAMP and MEDDIC are usually taught, just grouped by outcome instead of acronym. See our comparison of lead qualification frameworks if you want the fields these categories eventually become on the lead and the deal.

How do you structure a discovery call?

Ask in this order, and the call reads as a conversation instead of a form:

1. Problem first. Open with what isn’t working. A buyer who hears their own problem restated back to them keeps talking.
2. Impact second. Once the problem is named, ask what fixing it is worth. This is where most reps rush, and where most deals lose their size.
3. Process and people together. How a purchase gets approved and who’s involved are really one question asked two ways.
4. Timing near the end. A date means little until you know it’s tied to a real event, not a hopeful guess.
5. Alternatives last. By the time you ask what else they’re considering, you’ve usually earned an honest answer.

What are the 30 discovery call questions, grouped by what they establish?

Each question below ends with the record field its answer belongs on. Field names are illustrative (the exact label depends on how your CRM is set up), but the field type and which record it sits on rarely change.

Problem questions

1. What isn’t working today, in your own words? A long-text field on the lead or deal, kept close to the buyer’s own phrasing.
2. What have you already tried, and why didn’t it solve this? The same field, one sentence longer.
3. What does it cost to leave this unsolved for another quarter? Feeds the impact fields below once it has a number attached.
4. When did this become a priority, and what changed? A short note on the deal timeline, dated.
5. If nothing changes in six months, what happens? Closes out the problem field; this is the sentence a proposal will later quote back.

Impact questions

1. What would solving this be worth to the business this year? The deal’s estimated value field.
2. Which metric moves if this works, and where does it sit today? A custom field on the deal, or a note if there’s nowhere to put a number yet.
3. How many people or teams feel this problem? Informs deal size and the account’s field, if your team tracks seat count or scope.
4. Is there a budget line for this already, or would it be a new one? A picklist: approved, planned, no budget line yet.
5. What’s the cost of doing nothing, in dollars if you can put one on it? Supports the amount field; write the buyer’s own number, not your rounding of it.

Process questions

1. Walk me through how a purchase like this usually gets approved here. A long-text field on the deal, written as the buyer described it.
2. What has to happen between now and a signed contract? Becomes the stage plan; each step due at a stage belongs in that stage’s key fields.
3. Is there a formal RFP or vendor-comparison step? A checkbox or picklist; changes how the next few stages are staffed.
4. Does legal or procurement review contracts like this, and how long does it usually take? A note, and later a key field on the negotiation stage.
5. What would make this stall, based on past purchases? A note; read it back before every internal deal review.

People questions

1. Who else needs to agree before this moves forward? Additional stakeholders, added to the deal alongside the main contact.
2. Who signs the contract once everyone agrees? A note naming the signer among the deal’s stakeholders.
3. Who would use this day to day, and were they on this call? A note on the contact; a champion with no day-to-day user behind them is a weaker champion.
4. Has anyone here tried something like this before and been burned? A note; this is the objection you’ll meet again in the demo.
5. Who should I talk to next, and would you introduce me? The next contact to add, plus a task to make the introduction happen.

Timing questions

1. When do you need this live, and what’s driving that date? The deal’s close-date field, plus a note on what the date is tied to.
2. Is that date tied to a fiscal year, a renewal or an event? The same note; this is what separates a real date from a hopeful one.
3. What happens if you miss that date? A note; a weak answer here is a sign the date will move.
4. Where are you in your budget cycle right now? Informs the close-date field’s confidence, not the date itself.
5. Are you evaluating this alongside other vendors, on what timeline? A picklist plus a note, and the first input to the next section.

Alternatives questions

1. What else are you considering, including doing nothing? A competitor field or picklist on the deal.
2. What do you like about what you use today, if anything? A note; tells you what a switch has to preserve.
3. What would make you choose a competitor over us? A note, read again before every proposal.
4. Have you bought something like this before? How did that go? A note; a bad past experience is an objection you can address early instead of late.
5. What would a perfect outcome look like a year from now? Closes the call, and often becomes the first line of the proposal.

Where does each answer belong on the record?

Zoomed out, the thirty questions above sort into six fields or field groups. Use this as the check before you close the tab on any discovery call:

A deal with all six categories on a field, not just in a rep’s memory, is what “qualified” should mean before it moves to the next stage. See how stages should be defined if your pipeline doesn’t yet have a point where that check happens.

What happens to an answer that never becomes a field?

It gets asked again, usually by someone the buyer has already told once. That’s the actual cost of a great discovery call whose answers stayed in a rep’s head: not that the call was wasted, but that it has to happen again, later, with a buyer who is now less patient.

Example: a twelve-rep B2B SaaS team in Austin, Texas (illustrative, not a real company) runs discovery well. Their SDRs are trained on all thirty questions above and get strong answers on nearly every call. But the SDR’s notes live in a shared doc, not on the deal, because “the deal record is for the AE stuff.” When a deal is handed to an AE, only the fields on the record travel with it: company, contact, estimated value and a close date guessed from the SDR’s call. Everything else (the metric the VP cared about, the procurement step the buyer flagged, the competitor already in the building) has to be re-asked, and the AE’s version of that first call reads like a cold one. Deals qualified by a strong SDR team were closing at the same rate as deals from a weak lead source, and the team spent two months blaming lead quality before someone read a call recording next to the deal record and found the gap. The fix wasn’t a better call; it was a rule that no deal leaves discovery without its six fields filled, whoever fills them.

The same loss shows up at the next handoff too, from sales to the team that keeps the account. See what belongs on the record at handoff for the fields a new team needs and won’t get by asking the buyer to repeat themselves a third time.

What mistakes turn a discovery call into an interrogation?

• Asking all thirty. Nobody needs every question on every call. Pick the five or six that matter for this deal size and skip the rest until they’re relevant.
• Reading questions in order, out loud. A buyer can tell when they’re being run through a script. Ask in your own words, and let the buyer’s answer to one question skip you past two others.
• Writing summaries instead of quotes. “Customer has pain around reporting” tells the AE nothing the buyer would recognize as their own words. Write down the sentence, not your paraphrase of it.
• Leaving a field blank instead of marking it unknown. A blank field could mean “asked and no answer” or “never asked.” They need different follow-ups, and only one of them is a fast call back.
• Treating the call as done when the timer runs out. If timing and alternatives never came up, the call isn’t finished; it’s interrupted. Book the second fifteen minutes rather than guess.

How do you run discovery call questions in Senitix CRM?

In Senitix CRM, notes, calls and tasks log against the lead or deal on one shared timeline, so a discovery call’s raw answers have somewhere to live the moment the call ends, before anyone decides which ones deserve their own field. Every deal already carries an amount, a close date, a probability and an owner, which covers most of the impact and timing categories without any setup. Custom fields and a page layout you control turn the problem, process, people and alternatives categories into fields a manager can actually filter and report on, the same way the field-mapping table above lays them out. See the full list in the custom fields and objects section of the feature catalog.

Each pipeline stage can also carry guidance text and up to five key fields, so the two or three questions due before a deal leaves discovery are visible on the card itself, as a reminder the team agreed on rather than a rule the product enforces. To set this up for your own team, compare plans and start on Free.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a discovery call last?

Thirty minutes is enough for most first calls; forty-five suits a complex or high-value deal. What matters more than the clock is coverage: if timing and alternatives haven’t come up by minute twenty-five, book a short second call rather than rush the rest into the last five minutes.

Who should run the discovery call, an SDR or an AE?

Either can, as long as whoever runs it also owns writing the answers onto the record. Many teams split it: an SDR screens with the problem and impact questions, and the AE picks up process, people, timing and alternatives once the deal is qualified enough to earn their time.

What if a prospect won’t answer a question, such as budget?

Move on and mark the field “unknown” rather than guessing or skipping it silently. An explicit unknown tells the next person that the question was asked and the buyer wasn’t ready to answer, which is a different follow-up than a question nobody thought to ask.

How many of these 30 questions should you actually ask in one call?

Six to ten, chosen by deal size and how much the buyer volunteers unprompted. A small, fast-moving deal might only need the problem, impact and timing groups; a deal with a buying committee needs process and people covered before it leaves the first call.