sales-discovery-questions

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: sales-discovery-questions
description: Builds a sequenced sales discovery question set - pain, root cause, impact, urgency - for a specific deal or persona, sized to the call length, with follow-up ladders, branch triggers, and a do-not-ask list. Covers B2B (SDR qualification through multi-stakeholder AE discovery) and high-ticket B2C consultations. Use whenever the user mentions discovery call prep, qualification questions, SPIN or pain-funnel questions, a first-meeting agenda, or "what should I ask this prospect", even without the word discovery. Do NOT use for rebuttals (mbfinotti/sales-skills@sales-objection-handling), the cold-call opening (mbfinotti/sales-skills@cold-call-opener), or grading a finished call (mbfinotti/sales-skills@sales-call-review).
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: Maya-Beth Finotti
  version: "1.0.7"
---

# Discovery Questions

Build the sequenced question set a rep carries into a sales discovery conversation, plus the follow-up ladders and branch logic to adapt it live.

Four questioning frameworks with a publicly documented structure converge on one spine:

- SPIN (Rackham, 1988)
- Sandler's Pain Funnel
- MEDDPICC's Three Whys
- GAP Selling's Problem / Root Cause / Impact chart

The spine: isolate a real problem, dig to its root cause, quantify the impact, then establish why now. This skill encodes that convergence, not any one acronym. Vendor question-count and talk-ratio benchmarks are directional at best - never set a number to hit.

## Interview

Ask before drafting. One question per message; offer multiple-choice answers when possible; skip anything the user already answered or that their notes make obvious.

- B2B, or B2C? (B2C here means considered, high-ticket consumer sales - coaching, remodeling, financial advice - not impulse retail.)
- Who is the persona, and how senior? (End user, manager, executive - seniority changes question count and depth.)
- What does the product do, and what problem does it solve, in one sentence each?
- What call is this: SDR qualification (15-30 min), AE deep discovery (30-45 min), persona-specific follow-up in a running deal, or a single B2C consultation? How long?
- Deal size and cycle complexity? (Transactional single-buyer / mid-market few stakeholders / enterprise buying committee.)
- Inbound or outbound origin? (Inbound buyers arrive with intent to confirm and deepen; outbound buyers need problem awareness built first.)
- What is already known from prior touches - outreach replies, notes, a prior call, a deal record?
- Does the team mandate a methodology (SPIN, MEDDPICC, Sandler, GAP, other)? If so, the set must map to its vocabulary.
- Is the buyer in a regulated context (healthcare, finance, government)? (Adds decision-process and procurement questions; constrains what can be asked about data and finances.)
- What pain does the rep already suspect? (Becomes the hypothesis to test - never a fact to confirm.)
- What next step would make this call a success? (The set must close toward it.)
- By what date must this call have produced a booked next step? (A hard date promotes the impact triad - a figure won on this call is what a dated ask is argued from - and demotes decision-context coverage, which pays back across the cycle, not today.)
- One-off win or compounding asset: a sheet for this one call, or a reusable persona template the team reruns? (Compounding promotes decision-context coverage and the full follow-up ladder, since both amortize across calls and personas; one-off keeps the bare spine.)
- Effort ceiling: how many of the call's minutes are yours to spend on questions, how much rehearsal will the rep actually do, and how much of the buyer's patience can you spend? (A low ceiling deletes the decision-context stage outright and caps every ladder at two rungs.)

## Workflow

1. Run the Interview; collect every answer before writing a question.
2. Gather context. If you can browse the web, research the company and persona; otherwise work f