Having recently been asked to do a couple demos for customers without the chance to talk to the customer prior to the demo has reminded me about the importance of the discovery call. Not that I ever thought it wasn’t important — just that I may have forgotten how important it is. As a presales person, here are the questions I want to be able to answer after I’ve had a few hours to digest the discovery call:
- What will the audience for the demo look like (all business, all IT, combo, other)?
- Given finite time, what parts of the product should I plan to show? What features can I skip?
- What should my sample data look like to reflect their business?
- Who am I competing against so I can position appropriately?
- Are there any words or phrases the prospect uses that I should be sure to use?
Aside from soliciting critical information for the demo, the discovery call is also an opportunity for the presales person to establish rapport and competence. For the competence to shine through, the conversation needs to flow. “Good question,” is a sign you’re doing well, and the best way to rack those up is to have a laundry list of questions you might ask. Note the bold, italics, underline, and text color change on “might” in that last sentence. The questions I’m sharing below are just suggestions.
About the Discovery Questions
- This list assumes you’ve done some basic homework about the prospect organization. Heading into the discovery call, you should know if they’re B2B, B2C, or something else. You should know where they’re based. Their size, roughly. What type of products or services they sell. Basic due diligence.
- Even if you have been told by the telesales person or the sales rep who the competition is, you should hear it for yourself on the discovery call. Ask what other vendors they’re talking to about this project.
- Every Microsoft Dynamics discovery call, regardless of solution focus, should ask about the prospect’s current use of Microsoft technologies, with an emphasis on Outlook/Exchange, Microsoft Teams and Power BI, but also SharePoint, OneDrive, and Azure.
- The questions are influenced, partly, by what is demo-able today; as new features are added, we should all be updating the questions. I’ll try to keep this post updated, but no promises.
- I’ve tried to list the questions in the actual order I ask them. You don’t need to follow my order, but the idea is to start with high-level, open-ended questions to understand how the organization works, and then get into more and more specifics. And I’ll reiterate again: the goal should be a free-flowing conversation, heavy on us asking questions and letting the prospect talk. I am NOT suggesting you robotically ask question after question as presented here.
- Every question in this list is in there for a reason. If you can’t figure out why I’m asking a question, think some more or skip it.
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing presales discovery questions
Microsoft Dynamics Sales presales discovery questions
Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service presales discovery questions
Microsoft Dynamics Field Service presales discovery questions
Microsoft Dynamics Customer Insights presales discovery questions
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing discovery questions
Overview
Can you give us a high level overview of your marketing goals and efforts today?
What does the marketing tech stack look like today?
What type of customer segmentation are you doing today?
What is your system of record for customer data?
Relationship w/ Sales
How are leads handed off from Marketing to Sales today? Describe the process.
Is there an SLA for Sales accepting leads from Marketing, or is it informal?
Do you do any type of lead scoring?
What feedback have you heard from Sales about the quality or quantity of leads?
Web Marketing
What software is running your main website?
What do you use to manage your search marketing campaigns today?
What platform do you use to drive traffic your main website?
Are you doing any type of personalization on your website today?
Are you embedding any forms in your website that relate back to marketing campaigns?
Email Marketing
What system do you use today for outbound email marketing?
Are you taking advantage of any automation features?
Do you create your campaigns in-house or do you primarily use an agency?
How many contacts are in your marketing database?
How often are you sending out email campaigns?
Is it safe to assume you are able to track leads to conversions?
Advertising
Do you do any traditional advertising like TV, print, radio?
If so, are you doing anything to measure it?
Event Marketing
Do you ever host large, in-person events for prospects or customers?
Do you ever host webinars?
If so, which provider do you use to host the webinars? Webex? On24? Someone else?
If so, do you have a software solution to help with that?
Microsoft Dynamics Sales discovery questions
Sales Process
Who are your customers?
Can you describe your typical sales process?
How many sales people are involved in a single deal usually?
How do they collaborate on an opportunity today?
Lead Management
How do your salespeople get leads?
Do you do any kind of lead scoring for your salespeople today?
What factors go into scoring an individual lead?
On your site, do you use any kind of chatbot or virtual agent for inbound inquiries?
Sales Roles
What is the size of your sales team? # of users?
What are the different roles within your sales organization?
Do you have field sales people that visit accounts in-person?
Do you know if they're mostly working from laptops or phones when in the field?
Do you have an inside sales team?
Do you record their calls?
Do you analyze their calls in any way today?
What telephony system do you use?
Research & Networking
How do your sellers currently research for prospects?
Are you currently using LinkedIn in your sales organization?
Do you subscribe to any B2B data brokers like Hoover's, D&B, or Zoominfo?
Miscellaneous
What other tools do you have in your current Sales tech stack?
Do you use any kind of Configure-Price-Quote tool to sell your products?
Where is your sales collateral stored today? Do you have a CMS or LMS for it all?
How do you generate proposals today?
How do you forecast today?
Do you use any kind of software or technology for sales enablement?
Do your salespeople have access to a customer's service history (i.e. cases)?
Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service discovery questions
Overview
Can you describe what a typical Customer Service representative is doing in a day?
Can you describe the organizational structure of the service department?
How many customer service reps do you have?
What does the typical case volume look like on a daily or monthly basis?
Channels
What channels can customers contact you through today (phone, email, web, chat, social)?
What is the breakdown of interactions by channel?
Are you currently using any chatbots or virtual agents to assist customers?
How many different applications are your CSRs using to resolve issues?
What languages do you offer support in?
Do you have any kind of self-service portal for customers to use?
Do you maintain a knowledge base?
Is the knowledge base for employees? Customers? Or both?
CSR Experience
Do cases go into a single queue, or do you currently route to different people or teams?
What does your escalation process look like today?
Does your current solution use any scripts for CSRs to follow?
Do you offer Service Level Agreements, or SLAs, to customers?
Do you offer different levels of service for different customers?
Do your CSRs do any upselling or cross-selling today?
Reporting
What metrics are you most concerned with today in Customer Service?
Do you know how often you're currently resolving issues with the first call?
Customer Service Stack
What phone system are you using today? How happy are you with it?
Do you currently record phone conversations?
If yes, what type of analysis do you perform with the recordings?
What applications will your Customer Service solution need to integrate to?
Do all of those applications have APIs, or are some really old?
What do you use for surveys to measure customer satisfaction?
Microsoft Dynamics Field Service discovery questions
Overview Can you describe what your field service organization does? What type of service agreements do you have with your customers today? What are the most important KPIs for the field service organization? Are there any metrics you'd like to get today but can't? Technicians How many field service technicians do you have? Are the technicians full-time employees, contractors, a hybrid? How are you tracking skills or proficiencies for each technician today? What does training look like today? What's the average tenure of a technician? Work Orders Can you describe a typical work order? How long does the average work order take? How many work orders, on average, does a technician complete in a day? Do you know how much it costs just to roll a truck? What devices are your technicians equipped with? Phones? Tablets? If a tech needs help in the field, what can they do today for help? What's the turnaround for an invoice to a customer if they are billed for work? Scheduling Who schedules your technicians, and how are they scheduled? Does the dispatcher have access to estimated drive times or traffic info? Describe the typical working hours for your technicians? Are they uniform? Can your customers schedule their own services? Proactive/Predictive Service Do any of your products send data back to you for monitoring? If not, is that something you hope to do someday?
Microsoft Dynamics Customer Insights discovery questions
Size and Scale
How many unique customer profiles do you think you have? Your best guess is fine.
Do you currently have any kind of data warehouse for customers?
If Yes, tell me about it--what's it built on? what's in it? what's wrong with it?
What systems do you have today that currently house some data about a customer?
ERP? CRM? Customer Service? Marketing? Point of sale? Loyalty? Forums?
Is there any streaming data that you currently capture, like product telemetry?
Are any of the systems that have customer data on-premise, or are they all in the cloud?
Have you ever purchased 3rd party data about your customers, like from a data broker?
If Yes, who did you purchase data from? How did it work out? Are you still using them?
Action
What is your current Marketing Automation solution?
Are there other uses of a unified customer profile that you've envisioned?
Reporting & AI/ML
Are there any metrics about customers you’d like to be tracking that you can’t?
How does your organization currently define "churn"?
Are you doing anything today to predict customers likely to churn?
Are you doing anything to predict a customer’s lifetime value?
How are you using that predicted lifetime value?
Does your Sales or Service team have visibility into it to make decisions?
Are you doing any kind of dynamic product recommendations through any channel?
If so, what are you using to generate the product recommendations?
Do you do any customer segmentation today?
If so, are the segments defined by Marketers? By artificial intelligence? A combo?
Are you using Power BI anywhere within your enterprise today?
Do you have any data scientists in-house? If not, are there plans to hire any?
If Yes, will he/she/they be involved in this evaluation process?
If No, do you plan to hire any? Or are you looking for a tool just for business users?
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