The key to understanding what a prospect wants and needs lies in asking great sales discovery questions. Discovery questioning is a skill every successful salesperson must master, and follow-up is a critical part of that.
This post dives into the tactics for asking great questions and how to train your sellers to follow up to learn more on sales calls.
What Is a Sales Discovery Question?
Sales discovery questions help you uncover the prospect’s real pain points, decision-making criteria, budget, and timeline. The best approach is to ask consultative questions that transition the conversation from surface-level issues to the business-wide impact and urgency of solving them.
What Is a Follow-Up Question?
A follow-up question is one a seller asks after they’ve received the answer to an initial question. Follow-up questions help sellers add context and understand the information the buyer has shared.
Follow-up questions in sales help the salesperson dig deeper and discover the underlying wants, needs, and emotions that will be involved in the buyer’s decision-making process.
When used correctly, follow-up questions can help your sellers:
- Establish a trusting relationship with a potential buyer
- Recommend a solution that aligns with the buyer’s needs
- Position themselves as a strategic advisor
Developing Great Sales Discovery Questions
Creating effective discovery questions requires a combination of preparation, active listening, and adaptability. Here are some guidelines to help your sellers come up with great sales discovery questions.
Understand the Customer
Research the buyer’s industry, company, and role. Understand their challenges, pain points, and goals. Outline the information you need to gather and the insights that will help tailor your recommendation.
Ask About Goals and Opportunities
Develop questions that cover key areas such as challenges, goals, current solutions, decision-making process, budget, timeline, and desired outcomes. Include open-ended questions that encourage the buyer to share their pain points and perspective.
Probe for More Details
Be prepared with probing questions that dig deeper into the context and reasons behind the prospect’s responses. For instance, “What are the biggest obstacles your team faces in achieving [specific goal]?” and, “Can you provide an example of how [challenge] impacted a recent project?”
How to Improve Sales Discovery Questions
Coach your sales team to use these tactics for asking great questions during their next sales conversation.
1. Plan Questions Ahead of Time
If your sales team is following a defined sales process, one of the first steps should be to research and plan for calls.
Part of the pre-call planning process should include a list of questions that seem like a good idea to ask a prospect based on what your sellers know about the individual, their company, and the situation.
Your sellers can expand on this list of initial questions with potential follow-up questions that will help them dig deeper and get even more information.
2. Practice Active Listening
To ask effective follow-up questions, your sellers must pay very close attention to the response the prospect or customer gives to initial questions.
Work to help your sellers understand the importance of letting the other person answer each question in detail before responding with a follow-up. They should pay attention not only to the words spoken by prospects but their tone, gestures, and facial expressions as well.
This kind of insight is especially important in uncovering emotional drivers in the decision-making process.
3. Ask Open-Ended Questions
The questioning stage of the sales process is about getting as much information as possible from the buyer. And the best way to do that is with open-ended questions.
Open-ended questions are designed to encourage full, meaningful answers using the subject’s own knowledge and/or feelings. They are the opposite of closed-ended questions, which encourage a short or single-word answer (Yes or No questions, for example).
To get the most out of initial questions and follow-up questions, your sellers should practice making them open-ended.
4. Probe, But Don’t Interrogate
Having a list of questions can help a salesperson feel confident going into a sales call. But sticking to the list too closely can make the conversation feel scripted and unnatural (even like an interrogation).
Encourage your people to prepare questions but also to follow the natural flow of the conversation. Ideally, your sellers will ask a question, get a response, and—based on that information—ask a follow-up question that digs deeper.
Best Discovery Questions for Sales
Specific discovery and follow-up questions will change based on the opportunity and the details of the situation. With practice, your sellers will learn to ask probing questions in the moment. Here are a few to get them started:
- Can you tell me more about that?
- Why does that matter to you and/or your business?
- Can you be more specific about that?
- How did that impact you?
- How did you feel about that?
Follow-up questions are typically received positively by a qualified prospect. That being said, your sellers should avoid asking loaded questions or questions that are obviously only serving their own agenda (since this will break trust with the buyer).
Your sellers should also avoid questions that might belittle, patronize, or make the prospect feel uncomfortable.
Some examples of follow-up questions to avoid are:
- How much do you care about the well-being of your employees?
- What level of service are you willing to pay for?
- Are you actually the person who will be making the decision?
How Can Sales Leaders Train Sellers to Ask Better Discovery Questions?
Effective discovery is a skill that requires practice, sales coaching, and reinforcement. Sales leaders can improve questioning skills by incorporating this into sales training:
- Teaching a structured discovery framework
- Role-playing real customer scenarios
- Reviewing call recordings and providing specific feedback
- Coaching sellers to ask fewer, more thoughtful questions and to actively listen to responses
- Reinforcing curiosity over pitching
The goal isn’t simply to ask more questions—it’s to ask questions that uncover business impact, buying motivations, and desired outcomes, leading to more meaningful customer conversations.
Asking Sales Discovery Questions With Purpose
Great discovery isn’t about asking more questions—it’s about asking the right ones with purpose and intent. When your sellers show up prepared, lead with curiosity, and uncover what truly matters to the buyer, they build trust and create momentum that carries through the entire sales cycle.
Help your team ask smarter questions, uncover real buyer pain, and drive more qualified pipeline with IMPACT Selling® from The Brooks Group.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Discovery Questions
Q1. What are sales discovery questions?
Sales discovery questions are open-ended questions sales professionals use to uncover a prospect’s goals, challenges, priorities, decision-making process, and current situation. The purpose is to understand the prospect’s needs before recommending a solution. For example: “What challenges are preventing your team from reaching its goals this year?”
Q2. Why are discovery questions important in the sales process?
Without effective discovery, sales conversations often become product-focused instead of customer-focused. Discovery questions help salespeople:
- Identify the prospect’s business problems and desired outcomes
- Determine whether there’s a good fit between the prospect’s needs and the solution
- Build trust and credibility by demonstrating genuine interest
- Create more relevant and compelling recommendations
Q3. What are the best types of discovery questions to ask?
The most effective discovery questions are open-ended and encourage the prospect to share details. These questions help uncover both the business need and the urgency for change. Common categories include:
- Current state: “How are you handling this today?”
- Challenges: “What obstacles are you facing?”
- Impact: “How is this affecting your business?”
- Goals: “What outcomes are you hoping to achieve?”
- Decision process: “Who else is involved in evaluating solutions?”
