Do discovery

Your job is to have as many discovery meetings and calls as your temperament and calendar can bear. The framing of these calls is, "I'm not trying to sell you anything, I’m doing discovery about your role and your business.”

Finding opportunities for discovery calls

People will not come to you. You have to go to the people.

This can be a bit of a cold-start problem: It helps to have a somewhat existing network of your ICP to seed your call list. But chances are you don’t have that network, so you need to think about every way to get someone in your ICP to talk to you.

Some of the founders we talked to started by using LinkedIn to filter for, say, VPs of RevOps in their network.

“It was a lot of hustle to get into doors, leveraging everyone in our network: their first degree connections on LinkedIn, their second degree connections on LinkedIn, to really try and find people who might be interested in talking to us about this problem,” says Riya Grover, co-founder of Sequence.

While others didn’t wait to see if someone was in their network.

“I cold emailed people that I knew would need this kind of product,” says Amanda Zhu, co-founder of Recall.ai. “I knew they needed this kind of product because I had a background in this [developer] space. With cold emails, we had about a 35% interest response rate.”

The first KPI of your young company’s life should be the number of discovery calls you successfully book, followed closely by the conversion rate of outreach and booking. How many? Some answers we heard:

Each ICP is different. If you’re product-minded, treat it as a puzzle.

“How can you fill your agenda from nine a.m. to six p.m.?” says Enzo Avigo, co-founder of June. “Where are the people? Are they working behind the laptop like me all day long? If so, where are they hanging out? Is it on social media? Is it on YouTube? Is it on LinkedIn? Is it in their mailbox? Is it in shared Slack? What do they do outside of work? What communities do they belong to?”

Prepping for early discovery calls

This is an open-ended call. You have no goal or “conversion.” You are there to learn. We cover how to run a sales call here.

The person is giving you their most precious resource; you need to respect it. Research their company, their space, and all the public information you can. Suggestion: Create an AI agent or skill that will take a name or LinkedIn profile input and create a dossier for you. Clarify does this out of the box.

"I actually had a script, like for the first maybe 50 discovery calls that I did,” says Amanda.

Even the most seasoned founders have a script or hit list before entering into a discovery call. Here’s a sample our CEO, Patrick Thompson used:

You’ll see the questions clarify the ICP’s role, pain points, current solutions, and the best marketing channels, and end with a request for more introductions to build the discovery call list.

Record the call and have your favorite tool store the transcript to help with pattern matching.

A note on chasing logos

“Chasing logos” generally refers to landing well-known, often large companies, often at the expense of other sales efforts.

The thinking goes that hitching your young startup to the right rocketship can grant you revenue stability and growth as your logo grows, too.

“If you have one or two iconic companies within your portfolio that are going to grow super fast, just drop everything else and grow with them. They literally can give you 10, 20, 50% of your revenue,” says Enzo.

The right logo is an unlock that accelerates your growth. But do so thoughtfully.

“If you don't satisfy them, they're just going to churn, and then you're basically taking out a high-interest loan from the future,” says Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom. “Because next year you're going to have to explain why you lost your big customer and why revenue went down that month, and all this sort of stuff that shouldn't happen to a fast-growing, super successful startup is now happening to you.”

The big logos only matter if you can serve more like them. Impressive companies expect you to adapt to them, which may mean altering your roadmap and vision. Don’t be afraid to accept these big logos on your terms.

“Be honest and upfront and say, ‘Hey, I know you're offering us a phenomenal amount of cash here. I want to be clear on it. We have an ICP and a vision, and you're a bit outside of it. You seem a stretch, but it seems like you want it. So hopefully we can make it work for you. We're not trying to build a product for businesses like you,’" says Des.

The top of the market expects you to conform to them. The bottom of the market will conform to work with you.

Choose wisely.

Do not demo

Even if you have a prototype or demo, keep it to yourself. When you start with a proposed solution, you can “lead the witness” and miss out on the raw feedback and insight you need at this stage.

“There's a strong temptation to start writing code and have some sort of prototype or MVP before you even show up. And you should not do that,” says Marty Kausas, co-founder of Pylon. “Instead, try to go sell this thing and get some sort of promise, some intent to purchase, before you actually build anything. That was really a tough thing for me to do, and I think most engineers struggle with that same thing.”

"Your discovery call isn't about you trying to show them everything, which is honestly just too much to take in for a lot of people, but it's just for you to understand them deeply enough so that you understand if they're qualified for the next step, which is a demo,” says Amanda.

As you accumulate more of these calls, a funny thing will start to happen:

• You’ll start accurately predicting the responses from the call.
• You’ll find yourself less challenged or anxious.
• Your “hit rate” of talking to the correct person will increase.
• The holy grail: You will have so much context and knowledge about your customer that you can begin advising them.
• Your product will begin to align with what you’re hearing on these calls.

At this point, you’re ready to sell.