Discovery call questions that get you the truth

Discovery questions are the questions you ask a customer before you pitch — to find out what they already do, already pay for and already hate. Good ones give you quotable evidence about your positioning. Bad ones ask people to predict the future, and everyone is polite about hypotheticals.

Below: a free generator that writes a question set for your specific business, then a bank of example sales and customer discovery questions grouped by positioning component and by the signal rules that keep answers honest.

The generator

Get your question set

One sentence about what you're building and who you're about to talk to. No account needed.

The bank

Discovery questions by positioning component

Five components of positioning. Each answer you collect here is a sentence you can quote back in a pitch.

Competitive alternatives

What customers would do if you didn't exist.

Before you started looking, how were you handling this?
Walk me through the last time this problem came up. What did you actually do?
If this tool disappeared tomorrow, what would you go back to?
Who else did you look at, and why did you rule them out?

Differentiated capabilities

What you have that alternatives don't.

What was the thing your old approach couldn't do at all?
Which part of your workflow still needs a person to babysit it?
What did you have to build yourself because nothing on the market did it?
When you show this to a colleague, what part do they ask about first?

Differentiated value

The value those capabilities create for customers.

What changed in your week after you started doing it this way?
How much time or money did the old way cost you last month?
What did that failure actually cost the business the last time it happened?
How do you report the result of this work to your boss?

Best-fit customers

Who cares a lot about that value.

Who on your team feels this problem most, and how often?
What had to be true about your company before this became a priority?
Who signed off on the budget, and what convinced them?
Which teams here would not care about this at all?

Market category

The context that makes your value obvious.

What did you type into Google when you started looking?
Which budget line does this come out of?
How would you describe this kind of tool to a peer in one sentence?
Where does this sit next to the other tools your team already pays for?

Signal rules

Mom Test questions vs. questions that lie to you

Three rules decide whether an answer is high signal or worthless. Past behaviour, real spend, and never pitching mid-interview.

Past behaviour

Ask what already happened, not what someone would do.

High signal
Walk me through the last time you had to reconcile an invoice by hand.

Low signal
Would you use a tool that reconciles invoices automatically?

Real spend

Money, headcount and hours already committed are the only reliable proof.

High signal
What are you paying for today to cover this, in tools or people?

Low signal
Would you pay $99 a month for this?

No pitching

Never describe your product before you have their story. Compliments are noise.

High signal
What's the most frustrating part of that process for you?

Low signal
We automate this end to end — does that sound useful?

Once you have the answers, they become your positioning

Paste the transcript into Vocara and every positioning claim comes back tied to the customer's own words — nothing invented.