Your discovery calls have a revenue problem

Sometimes when something keeps coming up in conversations, I’ll make a note of it. I keep a tally in my notebook in the page corner. And over the last few weeks, I’ve counted 31 founders and startup people around two questions.

Twenty asked some version of, How do I ask better questions? And 11 asked a version of, Who's my Bullseye Customer, my best customer?

These are two different questions trying to get at the same thing underneath. Really, it’s, How do I find paying customers?

When I wrote this up in a LinkedIn post recently, I said that doing a demo first ruins what you might learn. And that’s true if your goal is learning.

But if what you want to do, first and foremost, is increase your revenue, to get that person on the call to sign up, then starting a customer call with a demo isn’t mysterious at all. It makes sense given the goal. You're not there to learn, you're there to sell, and "customer discovery" is just a pretty hat you decided to wear on the way out the door.

I started noticing the pattern during two webinars I did recently on the Bullseye Customer one-liner and how to ask better questions. (Probably why I had so many people asking about asking better questions.) During one of those Q&As, I asked someone how they started a customer conversation and they said, “Well, we started with a demo.”

I wasn’t sure I heard that right.

Then, “Does it make sense?” “Could you see yourself using this?” And, “Is this something you'd pay for?”

Questions like these depend on something already seen. They need the demo. And the answers you get are reactions, telling you 👍 or 👎. But what these questions don’t tell you is what happened the last time this person had this problem, what they did about it, what they'd already tried, or what it cost them.

And in a few of the call descriptions, I heard about an offer at the end, as I imagine there always is. Almost no one took it, especially after the awkward, polite Q&A — tight-lipped smile and all.

I've written about some of the parts that work better before — how to build a Bullseye Customer specific enough to actually find, where those conversations come from, and why the useful questions are about the past instead of what they might do.

What I haven't written about is how those pieces stack up against the question founders need answered, Will any of this help me find paying customers? Which is a real and necessary question for any business, startup or otherwise.

Does it matter? Yes, it matters. I believe the order matters if you want to learn about what your customers need, want, and where the pain points are. The order matters. Start with discovery, learn, listen. Then, test three versions of the product after you've learned what happened without it. Then, at the end, ask, Is there anyone else I should talk to who has the same situation as you?

None of this is guaranteed to produce a paying customer this week. But what it can produce is a shorter list of people worth calling and evidence that people in the same situation may say yes for the same reasons. That’ll inform and super charge your roadmap.

The one-liner narrows who you're looking for until you could open LinkedIn tomorrow and start a list. Might be a short list, but it’s a start. The past-tense questions tell you whether the problem is real enough that someone already spent time or money working around it. The split-call structure means you find that out before you show them anything, so their reaction to your product is information rather than politeness. And running it weekly for six weeks — what I call a Listening Cycle — is how the pattern starts to show you whether you're looking at one market or three competing ones. I might be biased here, but…

That last part is where the revenue question actually gets answered. Not in any single call, it’s in the pattern across them. Five to get quick signal and 12-15 to get qualitative significance.

So, to those 31 founders: you want paying customers, you're right to want that. And discovery isn’t lead generation, but you can't do lead gen effectively without it.