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Predictive Discovery and Qualification

April 9th, 2024

Predictive Discovery and Qualification

written by: Peter Kuhn


Hat tip to Adam Pritchard on keying me to the phrase "Predictive Discovery" and the inspiration for this post. I alway love our chats Adam!

Table of Contents

  • TL;DR: What Constitutes Success of a “great” discovery and qualification call? 

  • Discovery Defined 

  • Qualification Defined 

  • Baku POV + Suggested Approach 

  • Discovery + Qualification Meeting Architecture 

    • Intro and Rapport building (2-3 minutes) 

    • Agenda setting/ run of show (1 minute) 

    • Desired outcome of the call (1 minute) 

    • Predictive Discovery + Qualification, and discussion w/ active listening/ inquiry. (15- 20 min)  (can be paired with live product demo) 

    • Revisit the desired outcome of the call, decide on a next step ) (3-5 min)

    • Follow-up within 24 hours (ideally same day). 

  • Example Talk Tracks by stage of call to solicit conversation 

  • Pre-call/During-call/ Post-call Checklists 


TL;DR: What Constitutes Success of a “great” discovery and qualification call?: Great discovery and qualification helps you engage in good conversations that build your credibility with hypothesized targets, and advance conversations quickly to logical next steps with qualified targets. This process benefits by intentionally defining your ICP, intentionally choosing your talk tracks, and being clear about your desired outcomes. We teach a framework we call “predictive discovery” to quickly get you to the “meat” of your conversation, and align on their problems and how you solve them. It works best when: 

  1. You have done your research

  2. You can safely assume all your prospects share a similar problem 

  3. You can avoid “so, what are your priorities for next year” 

  4. You establish your expertise and credibility in their space

  5. You “play it back to them” as you narrate what you reckon their problems are. 

  6. You pre-determine your desired outcome 

Note: You need to listen and be prepared to shut up on cue (ideally the customer does more talking). Again - This is an Adam Pritchard line. The guy is a natural.

Discovery Defined: Gathering information directly from the prospect to inform how you position your service to meet their needs, pain, timeline, goals and how you manage to the next step in the decision making and buying process. Great discovery “meets the buyer where they are”, and builds credibility/ trust with the buyer. 

  • Confirm the company matches your hypothesized ICP, does the target company have a culture of being a pioneer, early adopter, late stage adopter? 

    • Firmographic signals about the business (revenue, location, headcount, category, public/private, etc)

    • Company culture is open to “try” new technology, and be a good design partner (this matters especially if you are in your first cohort of customers)

  • Confirm the role of the prospect, does that individual have the persona of being a pioneer, early adopter, late stage adopter?

    • Core Executive Support (who are these roles and titles)

    • Core User Support (what function/ title/ role)

    • Using outdated methodology (spreadsheets, old tech, etc...)

    • Individual is open to being a good design partner, will have insight. (this matters especially if you are in your first cohort of customers)

Qualification Defined: Assessing if the prospect is a good fit for your business. Is it realistic that we can sell to them? And should we sell to them? Reasons to disqualify: not a great fit for “right now” for our business, churn risk, low probability of success, does not meet the businesses current objectives. 

  • Validate ICP match for the target company, if yes proceed. If maybe, proceed with caution.  If no, thoughtfully disqualify, but ask for referrals 

  • Validate Role/ POV if yes, proceed. If no, but validated ICP company, find a new target persona to be introduced to and restart the above process. 

Baku POV + suggested approach:  Predictive Discovery works best when you can make some stated assumptions about the problems your prospect, or their firm, is likely experiencing, and how they may have tried to solve them to date. 

Ideally, you do this in the customer’s terminology/lingo. When executed well, this builds empathy, credibility, rapport, authenticity and creates an environment to position your product into their initiative. 

Here is our call architecture we build off to facilitate a predictive discovery conversation 

  1. Intro and Rapport building (2-3 minutes) 

  2. Agenda setting/ run of show (1 minute) 

  3. Desired outcome of the call (1 minute) 

  4. Predictive Discovery + Qualification, and discussion w/ active listening/ inquiry. (15- 20 min)  (can be paired with live product demo) 

  5. Revisit the desired outcome of the call, decide on a next step ) (3-5 min)

  6. Follow-up within 24 hours (ideally same day). 

Intro and Rapport Building: The first 2-3 minutes of the call, focus on small talk and rapport building. This is a fine line though. You don’t want to spend too much time here because people don’t like to waste time, but you also don't want to jump too quickly into the “sales pitch”, because it can be jarring and feel transactional. 


We like to play to the strengths of the founder/ seller. If you can be humorous without being goofy, do that. If you have a successful background that you can use to build credibility, call that out. If the prospect was a peer, reminiscing about old times. If a warm referral from someone you are close to, talk about that person. These first few minutes set the “tone” of the call, and can disarm the prospect to have an honest and open conversation. 

Intro and Rapport Building talk track: {Name}, so excited to be on the phone with you. I’ve been looking forward to this call all (week, morning, day)... I have that it is just going to be the two of us on the invite, but I wanted to confirm no one else is joining from your side? 

Intro and Rapport Building talk track: I am excited to talk to you about {company} today. We built this product because {example1, 2, 3) , eg: when I was in your shoes at (company name), this was the product I always wanted. My hope is I can share some of our enthusiasm with you, get some feedback, and see if it’s worth exploring a collaboration. 

Your Intro: {BAKU WORKSHOP OUTPUT} 


Do’s: Be positive, excited to be on the phone, be on time.

Don’ts: complain, admit you are tired/ busy, seem exasperated, be late. 

Agenda Setting/ Run of Show: The best calls have intentional agendas. You want to come prepared with an intentional agenda you want to take the prospect though, and visualize for them on a slide. Example: Intro/Goal, Demo + discussion, Outcomes next steps…  To transition from the rapport building/ intros, to agenda, here are some example talk tracks: 

Agenda Setting/ Run of Show talk track: “Do you mind if I take a step back and take you through the agenda I was thinking we’d talk about today?” (pull up your bullet point agenda). Does this make sense to you? Anything you would add to this? 

Agenda Setting/ Run of Show talk track: “My goal was we could use the next (insert time), for me to take you through a bit of why we founded {company}, and why we are building the way we are building, show you the product, dive into some of your day to day workflow experience, and decide if it makes sense to get deeper with you and your team. 

Agenda Setting/ Sun of Show talk track: “I want to position some things we are seeing in market with firms like yours and how they are managing around similar challenges using {company}. 

Do’s: Be excited, be ready to switch on a dime if you say something that resonates with them. 

Don’ts: Steamroll them if they want to add something else. 

Desired outcome stated: It is critical, before you transition from agenda, to demo/ predictive discovery and qualification, that you establish what your desired goal is to the prospect. 

Desired outcome example talk track: “I was hoping I could start at the finish line, my goal is to see if (your company name), would be a good fit to become a design partner for {company}. These first few quarters, we are focused on finding (describe the ICP you are looking to get close with), who are willing to come aboard to {company}, give us direct feedback on our processes, product, and approach, and lean in as we develop the comp dashboard we always wanted. 

Desired outcome example talk track: My ultimate goal at the end of this conversation is to see if (your company name) would be interested in pursuing a design partnership with {company}.. What that would look like at it’s most simple is (define what that is)....  To get us to a point where you could make a judgment call on yes/ no, here is the agenda I had in mind (show to them). My hope is that by the end of this (30 min, 45 min, 60 min), you are in a position where you can decide “yea, this would be great to bring to my peers/ boss, etc… or “no, we arent the right fit for this, here is why”... As an aside, our business right now is focused on warm referrals, so another great outcome would be “I have someone I’d love for you to talk to”? 

Predict a few “problems”, resulting in tactical empathy from the buyer. Example: 

Feature 1: When I was in (role), one thing that drove me nuts was (tell a real world story)

Feature 2: What I was working closely with (the stakeholders you have in common), one thing that always stood out to me as something they loved, but took for granted was… 

Feature 3: I always imagined, can’t there be a better way to…. 

Revisit the Desired outcome of the call: You want to leave at least 5 minutes at the end of the call to revisit your initial desired outcome, determine next steps, and schedule while on the call. People are busy, thing get rescheduled, or punted. If you don’t get a time scheduled live, your chance of getting ghosted goes way up. 

Revisit the Desired outcome of the call talk track: I so appreciate the time we had today, I really enjoyed the conversation. When we started, the goal was to see if we could see if {company} would be a good fit for (your company name), as a design partner. Does it make sense for us to pursue that as a next step? 

Some Simple Checklist Resources:

Pre-call check list: 

  • Who am I talking to? (name, tenure/ influence, title, function). 

  • What type of company am I talking to? (category, size, influence in market) 

  • Are they hypothetically a good target for us? (they can make, or influence decisions). 

During call check list: 

  • Build rapport and credibility, and be seen as an “expert” on the problem 

  • Discover new facts about the prospect and their company 

  • Teach the customer something new, and build trust with the customer  

  • Qualify that the conversation should progress to the next logical step 

  • Decide on the next logical step 

After call check list:  

  • Have a specific next step/ meeting to manage to (meet another team member, deeper demo, in-person meeting). 

  • Follow up quickly with supporting documentation, call recordings, clarified questions 

  • Solicit referral opportunities 

  • Connect on LinkedIn 

  • Get on a “texting” relationship.