#553 - How to Run Discovery Without Obsessing Over Questions | Gal Aga ft. Aligned

AE's really are optimizing a lot for the perfect discovery questions instead of what good looks like, which I think that's really the holy grail of where you crack discovery. We keep seeing all the posts, all the recommendations, here my top 10 questions. As an AE you go and you feel that, you know, that sounds smart, that's how really discovery should look like. You write everything down in notes. The breakthrough really isn't about the question and where people get stuck is because they think about what to ask. It's not about really selling smart in the question. It's about understanding the situation, identifying the gap that's missing right now in the discussion. Good morning everybody and welcome this episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Folk and I'm here with my co's Nyxigelski. And today for a round two, we have the man who has built five sales organizations from scratch, took teams from one to 10 million AR in two years, two times and once from 40 to 100 million ARR and is doing things to level up the sales organizations, discovery every single day. His name is Gal. He is the CEO over at Aligned. Nick, why should people listen? We got into all sorts of, I don't know what I would call them, phenomenal discovery nuggets in this episode. Things around like why you should not be memorizing the questions you're going to ask on a discovery call. We talked about showing slides on a first conversation. We talked about what happens when late in a deal, you fight, fight, fight to get in front of the global SVP and they see the world totally differently, then all 14 other people that you've talked to and how to rescue those deals. And so this was a master class episode in terms of what I would call 2026 discovery. If you feel like your discovery is a little bit stagnant and maybe stuck in 2017, this is an episode to listen to. And three, two, one, let's roll. All right, Gal, welcome back to 30 NPC. I hope you remember we start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. Let's get yours. A E's really are optimizing a lot for the perfect discovery questions, instead of what good looks like, which I think that's really the holy grail of where you crack discovery. We keep seeing all the posts, all the recommendations. Here are my top 10 questions. As an AE, you go and you feel that, you know, that sounds smart. That's how really discovery should look like. But really at the end of the day, the breakthrough really isn't about the question and where people get stuck is because they don't know what to ask. They think about what to ask. And it's not about really sounding smart in the question. If an AE comes to a line and says, we need better deal visibility, that's a need, that's a future state. It's not the problem that makes them need better deal visibility, for example. So what to do is really good tactical way to go and approach this is you have the conversation and you just label things down. I really like to have, you know, if you have a framework, gap selling, medic or something like that, then you have maybe a table and you kind of feel in the levels, the layers that you need to complete and you just label, right? When someone tells you something, you write it down, okay, I have pain, I have a problem, I have a root cause. So if I'll go quickly through examples from a line, these are a few things that we try to listen for. So, you know, AE's will a lot of times start discovering that they'll hear, we have a very complex sales process, okay? That's great, but it's a fact, it's not a problem. You don't go to the CFO with that and get budget, right? So you want a dig deeper and then maybe they'll go and say, we lose to hidden stakeholders and single threaded deals. Okay, that's a root cause of a problem. Still, it doesn't get budget. Then if you go from there deeper, you get to a point where the VP sales will tell you, our win rate is really low. We'll miss 2026 if we don't fix this in age one and this could affect fundraising. Now, now you kind of get deeper to a problem, impact level, priority level, it might not all happen on call one, but that's how you can think about it. And so if you train your mind to identify that you're now here, you now have this level, you're still missing these layers, then the questions will come. But if you optimize for the questions, you're just not going to get there. Well, now I feel bad because my question is memorized, which is great. What's tip number two? Thinking about the first discovery call, I think a lot of us are trying to, again, prepare questions and the TPs prepare observations, prepare points of view. I think that's the biggest thing that can bring AE's to take that jump to having a high quality discovery versus thinking about the question that they want to ask during the call. The essence of this is buyers don't want to educate you. They want to feel understood and a great discovery really starts with the research before the call. When you have the call around optimizes for the questions, then it really is all about teaching me about your business. But when you're coming in with a hypothesis with assumptions with research and you're showing that, and so a POV really let discovery signals to me as a buyer, and I'm buying all the time, you know, this AE has done the work, this AE gets my world, so that opens up the conversation that makes a natural flow. And it's also how to do this, right? It's so easy today with AI. You can do a counter research, you can do industry research, but then what you want to come up with is a hypothesis of what might be broken in their world and some assumptions, right, that are tying into your product. And then during the call, right, just let the conversation flow from there. So for example, I was speaking with XXSDR, a understand you have 10 stakeholders involved in your on average and deals. It's a very education heavy motion and champions are director level, rarely budget owners. So I'm assuming it's very common that deals break when champions struggle to sell internally. How much is that an issue that affects quote attainment and where does that usually start to fall apart? So essentially, I came in with a show that I've done some research. I'm assuming something based on that. And now there's a more natural discussion that can develop from there and the buyer will feel, okay, they get my business. And there's a natural conversation. Today's show is brought to you by consensus, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, what does success look like today? Slide. You can steal that exact 30 MPC demo deck template powered by consensus. Go check it out on the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by pipe drives easy to use and customizable CRM with built in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B or C, which is it for you? Now, A, B and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, pipe drives built in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow up question, not on scrambling to take live notes, and we will take full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30 MPC Closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. Today's show was brought to you by outreach, the agentic AI platform for driving execution across every stage of your deal. Great sellers drive velocity at every stage of their sale. And one thing that's worked well for me is assigning red line deadlines to my prospects when we kick off vendor review. Even artificial micro deadlines for things like first cut of red lines and security review helps my prospects get their internal team moving. We built a guide on how to help you drive six and seven figure deals with our friends at outreach. Get it free in the show notes phenomenal. Round us out. What's number three? Okay, again, related to prep and this is my favorite. We talked about not scripting, right? But I think there's a part that you just have to nail that just makes the entire conversation flow. Okay, so thinking will beat scripting. If you really open strong, the first so the tip is plan the first five to 10 minutes, just nothing, nothing more than that. This is where it helps. So what to do is first, it really matters. It makes a whole lot of difference. The context of that conversation. A lot of A's make the mistakes of just having the same discovery call, but for every, every deal. But did you reach out? Did they reach out? Is it an active project? If they reach out or you reached out, also a different situation versus a non active project? Are there now, right, really about to to sign with someone maybe, right? So that context really changes how you open, how you plan the conversation and prepare a strong opening frame. And really when you do that, the first five to 10 minutes are optimizing for a poor, for giving context. So they can have an actual conversation, you know, they can actually understand what we're talking about. And it really drives a better flow. So let's take a few examples. Let's say you reached out. A good, really solid go to question that have just worked for me all the time is something like, I know where you reached out, but is there anything specifically going on right now that has led you to agree to take this call, right? And you just pause. So when you say something like that, really invites them to give you context. And then it could be that this is it the entire conversation. just develops from there. You don't need anything else. And there's a really, really reason that led to the call It might be that they're even actively evaluating and they're about to close, right? If that doesn't drive a conversation then a good rule of thumb is is to prepare one or two slides for that conversation because I think buyers today, you know, they come in with that expectation of show me give me something show me value fast and as long as this is not a demo this is not education is just framing of here's a little bit of context about what we do and we speak with leaders like you all the time This is a word we typically hear. Where does this show up in your world, right? I noticed that this is where you can use this assumption I noticed this I noticed that that that that that that that okay, you're sharing what you hear from other leaders Here's what I noticed in your space and then you're asking a question right around that and then that helps the conversation develop So I think that's good for when you reach out and then if they reach out then, you know, you have context probably right there are SDR notes There's a demo form reflect back what they already shared and create continuation So for example, I heard from John SDR that you're Midway in the process of looking into digital cell rooms to help with upmarket deal complexity Especially around accessing stakeholders standardizing your cells process. So can you share a bit more about your process today and where you saw value when looking already into the space Right, so I know if I know that they're advanced right now in looking into the space then, you know, I want to address that And I want them to take it for there and not disrupt from scratch if they've now been doing four demos with four different vendors And they're repeating the same discovery questions again and again, but let's just cut to the taste and start faster already go So let's go back to your first takeaway, which is Think about what you're trying to get or what's missing from the conversation Not try to think about how can I ask this perfect discovery question And that's usually when a discovery question will feel like cringy or canned. It's because someone stuffed in a canned question out of context or at the wrong time And so when you're out of line when you're coaching your sellers or you're working with your team, what are some of the common things you teach your sellers to get on a first discovery call Discovery serves building the business case. Okay, it's not for you. It's there's an element for you, which is just which I will frame as qualification. Okay, so yes, you want to determine if there's something that could potentially close and flipped an opportunity or bring back, but really the whole essence is to support the sales process, the buying journey and to end with the solid business case Of why choosing you versus a competitor or why do anything at all, et cetera. The reality is there's no way you can get everything on the first call. I'm a big believer in a in a gap selling. I just love the framework of root cause problem, future state, the current state and all that. So we use that as a framework And we know that on the first call we want to understand a high level problem. We want to get to root causes because A demo on the first call we do a disco demo on the first call and really a good demo, a good quick demo, right? It's not going to be a deep one cannot address a problem. It it only can address root causes of a problem. Right. So for example, if a problem at a line is we're missing quote our win rate is low or we need to solve cell cycle challenge and then I'll show demo flows in a line of how we can cut cell cycle and prove win rate. It's basically almost everything in the product does that. And now it's too generic and the second problem is that it doesn't create a belief that you will solve my situation because we need to get down into the details of OK, what's leading to the low win rate. So what's leading to low win rate might be poor multi threading it might be demos that we probably won't help with a lot in discovery. We won't help with a lot, but it might be the business case. OK, that the champion is failing to sell internally that we can help with it might be just follow ups losing momentum between calls we really help with that as well. So understanding the root causes is really something critical that we get on the first call. So the situation context where they are a the high level problem. OK, is there a win rate impact cell cycle impact a trying to go up market and not succeeding things like that. And then some root causes and better understanding of facts in their situations. These are the things that really are must having the first call. So you mentioned plan the first five to 10 minutes of the call and then let yourself have a more organic conversation from there. You talked about problems root causes the situations. If I'm a new AE I might have all these things swirling around in my head. How do you start to get these things in the first five to 10 minutes of a sales call. I think we talked about the two scenarios, right, if we reached out if they reached out and for a line, we have a good solid slide deck in place for that, which we really try and understand the beginning of the call. If they have zero context, then we won't show any slide that really goes deep into context will probably talk on a high level. Explain what it is, explain the topic and then from there talk about the challenges over slide and then stop at the end to ask questions, then we can be like 10, 15 minutes only on that slide or even a longer conversation can develop only on the one slide. So that's in a non active project outbound. They don't know us. They came in with the zero context referrals from from VC or something like that. Most cases is inbound. We're very inbound heavy flow. So there's just an open discussion and that open discussion really starts earlier with more context based on the SDR notes or the demo form if it got directly to the A's calendar. We skip an inbound SDR. We go directly straight to the A and then from there, they're just framing and trying to go deeper instead of just going from scratch. They're coming in with the POV. They're doing the prep. I want to add about one thing you put in the prep about like these different levels of discovery, but before I do that, I have one more question, which is you're talking about like showing slides and showing a mini demo on your first discovery call. I'm wondering if you can share how you budget the 30 minutes that you have for that because my guess is like you have some time for rapport, some time for like your disco, some time for demo and some time for next steps, but I'm curious about the time breakdown. So for us, it's 45 minutes that gets automatically booked from a demo request unless we have we have routing unless it's an it's an IC or a smaller company. So there are some rules there. So it might be a shorter conversation. If SDR's book it or arrays do outbound, then again, we're trying to book 45 minutes and then the way that we time it is, you know, there's like a minute or two or three just for rapport opening, not being a sales zombie, the just goes there and jumps in, you know, and also adapt to the person if they're really cut to the chase, then, you know, be cut to the chase. Then there's around so it depends on if it's in bound or outbound, you know, active project, non active project and how many people also join right so there are a lot of things you need really need to think, but think for the majority of the conversations. It's around 15 minutes so you get to probably the 20 minute mark or you're having a conversation and then another 15 minutes around the actual product showing examples and then ideally there's like 10 in the end for closing and closing is not next steps closing is more questions more validation right. A little bit high level about you know who's going to be involved and then talking together about the next step if you leave a lot of people try to leave five minutes and then they end up with two minutes and then these two minutes you can do anything right they have they have objections that they didn't share you don't have time to solve if they do share and then you know it doesn't matter if you try to go grab that next step. Like you need to go through certain phases in order to get to that next step I consistently find that the second you make it real and ask for more time or ask for time with other stakeholders all of a sudden like the richest realist most friction in the conversation which is a good thing comes up at the very very end and so we've been trying to start winding down our meetings with like. Seven eight nine minutes left because that's usually when the conversation actually gets real i want to ask you about something you put on the prep doc which is you were talking about the three levels of discovery mastery and you were talking about a lot of folks start at level one. Get stuck at level two and then if they can make it to level three that's where you see them flourish and for context you lead a growing sales team and you've posted on LinkedIn about I don't know I think the like 132 deal cycles that you sat through as the CEO of a venture back company over the last year so you you do a lot of buying and you also oversee a lot of selling and so I'm wondering if you can speak to some of these levels that you've observed level one is where you don't want to be at. You want to graduate from really fast and it's not a sales motion. you can really stay around, okay, and build and optimize for, because basically it's discovery equals qualification. Basically, the way that A is think at level one is very seller centric, is, you know, discoveries for me, are they worth my time? Do they have the budget? Do you have timeline equals six months, three months, or whatever it is, right? I need answers in order to move this deal along internally or maybe even worse, I need to feel, you know, the CRM boxes for my VP to not be mad at me, right? This is the basic SDR level that typically you see SDRs at. It's not even good for SDRs, even SDRs, you know, need to level up from that level. You'll see a lot of transactional sales motions stay there, and I think that transactional is just going to disappear from the world with AI and everything that's happening, like the value of AE has to go higher, but that's another topic. So what does it look like? It basically, it means typically you see qualification criteria like BANT, which is another topic I'm not a big fan of. You ask surface questions, you have budgets, is your time, what is your timeline to make a decision, things like that? Discovery really leaves in your notes of the first conversation. You never revisit it. You may be revisited just once, maybe at the end to just pressure. Hey, I guess solving each problem is not a priority when you try to pressure someone to answer you. And really, the outcome is discovery never shapes the buying process, buyers feel interrogated, they don't feel that you're really helping them, and then you get stuck with low ACV, heavy discounting, chasing, and getting ghosted. So to move to the level two, you really need to stop qualifying and start understanding depth and really try to get discovery to help the buyer. Level two is a discovery really as problem understanding, right? It's where AE start to think in a more buyer-centric way. You're really realizing discovery is for the buyer. It helps them see why change matters. It helps me now tailor my demo. It's a critical stage or a call and I really need to mastery. And what it looks like, you probably start learning some deeper frameworks, medics, spies, that gap selling to go beyond just band need, right? They have a need. Yes, they share the need with me. You go deeper impact urgency, business problem, root causes, things like that, and then you know how to leverage it during the demo and during the process. And then the outcome is that your buyers feel more understood, they feel heard, they want to work with you, deals make more sense to them, but still at that type of level, at that level, discovery is still a stage, and yes, you're really doing well better at that stage, but it's not something that you leverage throughout the entire process. Your buyers are still struggling to sell internally. They might still get stuck with a poor business case. They won't achieve consensus. New stakeholders are joining at the later stage. You're not using discovery again to help them. And you're basically not using it through the entire process. I think this is where AE's gets stuck because to really level up in a CV to close really big deals, discovery needs to just beat the essence of sales process. Like when I go on a call and I talk, okay, like convincing, okay, making a case, telling stories, running discovery, same level. It's the essence of the process. So I think that's how you graduate from a level two. You stop looking at it as a stage. And really level three is discovery as the sales process is where you start thinking about and equipping buyers, facilitating the buying journey. Discovery is just a tool. It's a tool to do that. It's how I influence the buying journey. It's how I help drive confidence. Census is how I shape every decision because I know how to execute. So for example, you understand that it's not a stage. Yes, you do the same thing on the first phase and on the sales process of going deeper. But then you continuously throughout the process try to build a business case. Okay, new stakeholders join. You continuously have more conversations with them and try to get their points of view and tries to get their fresh perspective and open up the problem definition because if you're not getting alignment between all stakeholders on what we're trying to solve here and new people are looped in, meet process, then it doesn't matter what you did at stage one, right? One example. Another one, you're iterating throughout the sales process on the business case or maybe you were using mutual action plan throughout the sales process to discover how the decision is made into a line and how the process between us is going to take place and that mutual action plan helps you all the time figure out more about the decision process and the friction and where they are and what has changed with how they're going to buy and what has changed with where we are against the competition, right? So you're using that as a tool to drive all the time alignment and better understanding of how you're going to execute the sales process. Could you give me an example of what a level three seller did in one of your Q3 or Q4 deals or what they learned about a company's buying process that made that specific prospect very unique or allowed them to close the deal. I'm trying to understand what this would actually look like in practice on a deal. So I think a deal that about the closes comes to mind but it didn't yet is one where we realize it's really big one that's now in final negotiation but one where the AE kind of kept adding more stakeholders throughout the process like naturally more people came in and we got to a point where we got to their SVP global sales and she basically saw everything differently. Everyone had an idea of the problem and where they're seeing friction, the root causes and everything but we knew to come to that conversation with letting them talk a lot, sharing what we've learned so far and trying to then get her perspective and the fact that they did that pretty late in the process led to us understanding she was the SVP of strategic sales enterprise sales. It led to the understanding that she has other priorities, other really critical things. Yes, she gets that the root causes the challenges that they're seeing on the day to day should be solved but there are more pressing issues in her mind right now for the next six months that are higher priority that we didn't understand and they didn't understand right. So we ended up meet process understanding or what seemed like the end of the process, understanding that we need to find a potentially new executive sponsor. So it's the same champion which was a enablement leader went to the meat market VP and then we were able to build a business case there and now we're at final stage of closing that deal. You basically had a rep who knew what they were trying to get in their sales cycle. There's a certain type of champion you need with a certain set of business priorities that you typically see that will get a deal close that aligned and as they were going throughout the organization they hit this roadblock where it was like this person doesn't have what I need and I might need to change the traditional person I would go to which might be a traditional strategic head of sales and I might have to go find a different champion that doesn't have the exact same title as my other deal but has the thing that I'm looking for to close this deal. We'll sell our courses and enablement services to sales organizations and we're working on one of our first big deals the other day and we met with the champion and the champion really cared about prospecting right a person was the director of mid market sales and so we were like awesome we go into the big team meeting it's the CRO and the head of enterprise sales we're ready to talk all about prospecting guess what they're like yeah I don't know if top of funnel is a problem for our organization and we were like oh shoot and so we actually had to pivot in that conversation to your point of like re-documenting our hypothesis and saying like if it's not prospecting what is it and it actually forced a problem discussion across the group for them to all align on this is the problem we're trying to solve versus if we just went into presentation mode and started to try to pitch assuming we had understood the totality of the organization there's no way we would we would win the deal so we ended up winning the deal not off of prospecting but off of our multi-threading courses and that was like a big key to leveling up in our sales motion it's not assuming that one person's problems are representative of the entire organization's problems where we keep missing things as salespeople is the understanding again that there are layers you know the world challenge challenges problems pain there are different layers and strategicness of you know of all of that definition essentially every discovery is a business case okay pain problem impact priority all of these form a business case and the level that the champion or the working bees right that you're speaking with are looking at the day-to-day is different from the person that's approving the budget and I see it all that all the time right managing a team I have VPs I have we have a large team here at every department even even my VPs often they don't get the high high high level things that are board level priorities that are that feel more pressing and we will go tomorrow we have an okay our planning meeting okay every quarter we do that meeting everyone every department is going to talk about the key challenges that they have to see if there's some dependencies with other departments and to see if they tie to the overall most strategic priorities for the company right now right and they might present some challenges and they will think that this is the biggest thing to focus on this quarter but it might not be it might clash with other resources with other projects and it might not tie to the most strategic things that are going on so even VP level sometimes the own budget won't have a full kind of clear idea of what's eventually the most critical thing right now for the business so really understanding that is is so critical that different people look at different things and you have to have these different conversations today shows brought to you by consensus which helps you demo keep selling even when you're not in the room before I show a demo I set it up like it might have to work without me I include these three slides before I drop in number one the biggest problems I learned in discovery number two how we solve those problems and number three eight what does success look like today slide you can steal that exact 30 mpc demo deck template powered by consensus go check it out on the show notes today show is brought to you by pipe drives easy to use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence my favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you they're focused on a b or c which is it for you now a b and c have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them now pipe drives built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question not on scrambling to take live notes and we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30 mpc closures hub there's a link in the show notes today show was brought to you by outreach the agentech AI platform for driving execution across every stage of your deal great sellers dried velocity at every stage of their sale and one thing that's worked well for me is assigning red line deadlines to my prospects when we kick off vendor review even artificial micro deadlines for things like first cut of red lines and security review helps my prospects get their internal team moving we built a guide on how to help you drive six and seven figure deals with our friends at outreach get it free in the show notes go we're running out of time we got to move to the last question which all right we're going to do a little bit different one here you've talked about the level three selling quite a bit on this episode and you yourself has have sat through hundreds of buying cycles it sounds like is a buyer and I'm wondering if you can give me one example of something that a level three seller did with you that you think all the folks listening to this episode can learn from yeah so I think recently we went through a big revops project and with an outsource company that helped us do really major changes and when they were kind of pitching to us and we were selecting the right vendor they really understood exactly the last thing that we that we talked about when they came I joined that conversation as well as a strategic topic and I'm I was more in the weeds of of was taking a little bit of the CRO hat for that conversation they knew how to really not get to the details and how to frame things differently for me bring me up to speed on the project and and really they asked the right questions from there so they brought me up to speed on and where we are the project they open really strong with what we're trying to get from the conversation today and then they didn't go really deep they stayed on the high level and and that really allowed the conversation to develop because this could have really gone the wrong way so I think discovery continuing discovery and an executive call is very tricky is one of the areas that a lot of reps miss they either ask too many questions or they start with questions which also doesn't work so they they did it really well context point of view the recap the process the set expectations from where what we're going to go through in that conversation and really kept it high level enough and that we could have a good conversation phenomenal well thank you for joining us everybody stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon already Nick it's time for a three step recap and then one thing you can do all right three step recap number one first thing is before you get on to a discovery call try to think about what you're trying to get out of that discovery call not the questions you're not you're going to ask not that new thing you saw on LinkedIn but think about the problems you want to get the root causes you want to find and then the question will come naturally that's number one number two only prep the first five to ten minutes of the call because you don't know where they're going to take you so plan what you want to get plan your point of view and your agenda but then organically listened to your prospect as you go and then lastly number three what a level three discovery seller does is they continue to discover and inform the prospects buying process that means one bring a POV to every discovery call to shape the way they think about problems to bring in new people in the organization to make sure that you understand the organization's problems but then three constantly mapping the buying process because who holds powers different in every single sales organization are in liquids one thing people can do you talked about it in step one armand sit down for a second and write out on a first call what are some of the things that you feel like are really important for you to get this should be really really simple but bullet points on a piece of paper and use that to guide you in your next conversation I promise it will be more fluid than if you write out questions to memorize and what's one thing people can steal so if you liked what Gaul was talking about in this episode we put together a playbook on how to win more deals using what is called a give get equilibrium and this episode we talked a lot about what you need to get from a discovery call but there's also things you need to give to make the buyer say you know what I want to learn more we put together a playbook and there is a link for you to get it for free in the show notes I recommend you check it out if you liked what Gaul was talking about in this episode thanks for listening we'll see you next week on the show today shows brought to you by consensus which helps you demo keep selling even when you're not in the room before I show a demo I set it up like it might have to work without me I include these three slides before I drop in number one the biggest problems I learned in discovery number two how we solve those problems and number three eight what does success look like today slide you can steal that exact 30 mpc demo deck template powered by consensus go check it out on the show notes today show is brought to you by pipe drives easy to use and customizable CRM with built in meeting intelligence my favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you they're focused on a b or c which is it for you now a b and c have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them now pipe drives built in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow up question not on scrambling to take live notes and we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30 mpc closures hub there's a link in the show notes today show was brought to you by outreach the agentic ai platform for driving execution across every stage of your deal great sellers dried velocity at every stage of their sale and one thing that's worked well for me is assigning red line deadlines to my prospects when we kick off vendor review even artificial micro deadlines for things like first cut of red lines and security review helps my prospects get their internal team moving we built a guide on how to help you drive six and seven figure deals with our friends at outreach get it free in the show notes