Most agency owners do one of two things before a discovery call:

  1. Spend 90 minutes deep-diving the prospect's company history, reading their last six press releases, and pulling LinkedIn profiles for the entire leadership team. (This is pretty rare…)
  2. Skim the prospect’s website on the way to the call and wing the rest.

Both approaches suck.

The 90-minute approach produces a wall of context that the owner can't deploy strategically inside the call. The skim approach produces an unprepared call that the prospect immediately senses. Both of these approaches fail for the same reason. They aren't pointed at the intersection of potential prospect problems and your solutions.

Here is a 15-minute pre-call research checklist to run a great discovery call - it creates three incredibly useful tools for you to use in the call:

  • A working hypothesis about the prospect's problem
  • A list of signal-based questions they can ask
  • A recall trigger you can mention to show you were ready

Everything else is wasted prep.

The Over-prep and Under-prep Trap

The over-prep trap is a failure mode for senior leaders who grew up in an enterprise-scale sales organization. Being ready meant you had a 20-page brief. This kind of over prep is pretty rare, but, the brief is still useful for an enterprise pitch where you need to know the buyer's history and the competitive set in detail. For a 30-minute discovery call with a CMO at a $30M company, the brief is overkill. And worse, yet, it sets you up to talk more than you listen and probably diminishes your curiosity to some extent.

The under-prep trap is the more common failure mode for owners who came up running deals fast and never built a research habit. They show up cold, ask generic discovery questions, and the prospect mentally notes that this firm didn't bother to learn anything before the call. The prospect is polite, but is already eliminating the firm from contention.

Both traps share a root cause - the agency owner or rep isn't sure what research is for.

The pre-call research has exactly three jobs:

  1. Form a working hypothesis about the prospect's actual problem
  2. Surface specific question hooks that prove you understand their context
  3. Identify one recall trigger that lets the prospect know you did the work

If your research isn't producing those three outputs, the time spent isn't really worth it. In case you aren't going to use a call-prep tool like Discovery Lab or Discovery Lab Pro (and you should - it’s going to make your discovery calls stand out in your prospect’s mind), I've put together a discovery call prep checklist for you

The 15-Minute Discovery Call Prep Checklist

Phase 1: Company Snapshot

Open the prospect's website on one tab and their LinkedIn company page on another. Answer these four questions:

  • What do they actually sell, in plain language, beyond the marketing copy on the homepage?
  • What stage is the business in: pre-revenue, early traction, scaling, mature, or restructuring?
  • What's the buyer's industry context (regulated, commoditized, fragmented, consolidating)?
  • What signals are visible on the homepage and the news section (new leader, recent funding, product launch, geographic expansion, layoffs)?

You aren’t memorizing the company history, rather you are locating the prospect in your mental map of the market landscape.

Phase 2: Person & Pain

Open the prospect's LinkedIn profile and their three most recent posts or activity. Answer these four questions:

  • How long have they been in this role?
  • What did they do before this role, and how does that shape what they care about?
  • What are they posting or engaging with publicly, and what does that say about their priorities?
  • What pain is implied by their role plus the company stage you identified in Phase 1?

The first three answers are context & the fourth is the where your insight magic starts to conjure. A new CMO at a Series B SaaS company with a recent funding round has a different pain than a 7-year CMO at a profitable mature business. The role plus the stage tells you what they're under pressure to deliver right now.

Phase 3: Signal Scan and Hypothesis Lock

You now have all of this context about the company and the person you are going to speak with. You can see signals that give you insight into what this prospect needs. Your job right now is to match your best attributes with their biggest needs. This is where you connect your thinking and your work to their opportunity. Look at:

  • Job posts from the company in the last 90 days (these reveal the prospects needs & priorities)
  • Press releases and news in the last six months (these reveal the corporate narrative)
  • Any podcasts, talks, or articles the person has done (these reveal their thinking)
  • Competitors they are explicitly compared to in their category

If the signals match your hypothesis, lock it in and write three signal-based questions you can ask in the call. If the signals contradict your hypothesis, revise. The point of Phase 3 is to walk in with a falsifiable theory, not a packaged pitch that you'd give to anyone.

The reason to do this research at all is so that your discovery call can show that you understand their business, how your services fit inside and impact their business, and show off just how freaking smart you are…

What to Research (and what to skip)

Once you start looking you'll be tempted to chase research rabbits. Let’s try to avoid that and keep you on task.

Worth Researching:

  • The prospect's role tenure and prior background
  • The company's stage and recent funding events
  • Public job posts (the most underrated signal in B2B sales research)
  • Recent corporate news that suggests pressure or priority shifts
  • The prospect's public content (podcasts, posts, talks) where they reveal their thinking
  • Competitive positioning the prospect explicitly references

Not Worth Researching:

  • The prospect's entire LinkedIn history beyond two roles back
  • The company's complete product catalog
  • All seven members of the leadership team
  • The company's full investor list
  • Industry reports that take more than five minutes to skim
  • Glassdoor reviews (almost never strategically useful)

The signal-to-noise ratio on research collapses pretty quickly unless it is tied to the problems that you solve.

The Hypothesis That You Bring

The single most useful output of pre-call research is a working hypothesis about the prospect's actual problem (and how your solution fits). The hypothesis should be:

  • Specific enough to be wrong
  • Tied to evidence you found, not vibes
  • Held loosely, so you can revise it inside the call

A vague hypothesis like "they probably want better marketing performance" is useless. A specific hypothesis like "I think this new CMO is under pressure to prove ROI in her first 90 days because the CFO has flagged marketing spend as the largest unmanaged budget line in the company, and her last role was at a company that ran a similar exercise" is useful.

Tim's Take: A specific wrong hypothesis is better than a vague right one. The specific wrong one gets corrected in the first five minutes, but leaves an impression of being proactive and insightful. If it's really vague, there's nothing to sharpen & nothing to work with. Showing really good thinking and insight, but coming to the wrong conclusion is better than coming to no conclusion at all.

Tools That Compress Time

The 15-minute checklist works without any tools beyond LinkedIn and the prospect's website. A few tools make it faster:

  • Discovery Lab & Discovery Lab Pro are discovery call prep tools designed specifically for agencies by my team
  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator for role history and recent activity surfacing
  • Crystal Knows or Clay for personality and communication style inference
  • Built With or Wappalyzer for SaaS prospects to see what's in their stack
  • Phantombuster or similar for batch enrichment when you're prepping multiple calls
  • Claude or GPT with a structured prep prompt (see the AI prompts for discovery calls post) to compress phase 3 into 90 seconds

What to Do With This

If you've been over-prepping discovery calls, set a 15-minute timer the next time you sit down to prep one. The discipline of stopping at 15 minutes will produce sharper output than the absence of the discipline produces in 90.

If you've been under-prepping, the checklist gives you a structure that takes less time than skimming a website with no plan. The 15 minutes will pay back in close rate by call number three.

For the full prep system & feedback, check out Discovery Lab Pro & connect it to Call Lab Pro to let SalesOS strengthen your discovery process, give you sharp talking tracks & specific feedback on your sales calls and next steps for follow up.