How to Run a Discovery Call That Actually Discovers Something
We've been taught to ask the right questions. Nobody taught us to actually listen to the answers. And the person on the other end of your call knows it.
Here's a thing that happens on almost every EdTech discovery call.
The salesperson asks: "So what are the biggest challenges you're facing this year?"
The school leader answers. Honestly, usually. They talk about workload. About the pressure they're under. About the thing that didn't work last time and why they're cautious now. They give you something real.
And then the salesperson picks it apart.
Not intentionally. Not unkindly. But they've already heard enough to know which feature to pivot to, and they're off — slotting what they've just been told into a pre-existing narrative about why their product is the answer. The actual human experience being described? Gone. Processed into a sales cue and discarded.
The school leader notices. They always notice. And the next time someone asks them that question — maybe the very next vendor call, maybe yours — they give a shorter answer. A safer one. The real challenges stay where they've learned they belong: unsaid.
We've forgotten that the person on the other end of the call is a human being, not a brief.
They've heard it all before. That's the problem.
School leaders and MAT executives are not naive buyers. They've been on the receiving end of more EdTech pitches than they can count. They know the format. They know the questions that are really just warm-up acts for the demo. They know when they're being listened to and when they're being processed.
And because they know all of this, they've built a version of themselves for supplier calls. Polite. Reasonably engaged. Vague enough to avoid saying anything that will trigger forty minutes of product features they didn't ask for.
That version isn't the person you need to be talking to. It's the armour they put on because nobody gave them a reason to take it off.
The question "what are your biggest challenges this year?" has been asked so many times, in so many calls, as a precursor to the same pivot, that it has stopped meaning anything. It's a ritual. Both sides know their lines.
What happens next — the part nobody talks about — is that you end up building your entire pitch on information that was never quite true. You think you understand their situation. You don't. You understood the edited version they felt safe to share with a stranger who was clearly already halfway to the demo in their head.
What it actually feels like to be on the other end
I want you to sit with this for a moment.
You're a head of a secondary school. It's Tuesday morning. You've got a budget that doesn't stretch, a staffing problem you're managing hour by hour, and an Ofsted visit that's been hovering on the horizon for two terms. You've agreed to a thirty-minute call with an EdTech company because something in their email was just relevant enough.
They ask how you are. You say fine. They ask about challenges. You mention workload — the honest, universal, bone-deep exhaustion of it. And before you've finished the sentence, they're nodding with slightly too much enthusiasm and saying "yes, that's exactly what our platform addresses."
They didn't hear what you said. They heard a keyword that mapped to a feature.
How does that feel? Not catastrophic. Not offensive, exactly. Just... deflating. Like talking to someone who's waiting for their turn to speak. And you think, not for the first time: I don't know why I bother being honest in these calls. It doesn't change anything.
That moment — that quiet, unremarkable decision to stop being honest — is where your deal dies. Not in the follow-up. Not in the proposal. Right there, in the gap between what they said and what you heard.
Genuine curiosity about another person's situation is one of the rarest things in a sales call. It is also one of the most disarming.
The shift is smaller than you think
I'm not asking you to become a therapist. I'm asking you to be genuinely curious.
When someone tells you they're struggling with workload, don't reach for the feature. Ask what that actually looks like for them. Which part of the job is heaviest right now? What did last term feel like? What would have to change for next term to feel different?
Let them get to the end of a thought before you respond. Not as a technique — as basic human respect. They're telling you something real. Receive it.
Ask how things affect them personally, not just institutionally. "How does that land for you?" is a question almost no salesperson asks. It's also the question that opens every door worth opening.
The information you get from a conversation where someone feels genuinely heard is completely different from the information you get from a processed discovery call. It's more specific, more honest, and far more useful. And the relationship that conversation builds — the sense that this person actually got it — is worth more than any demo you could run.
What you're actually selling
EdTech buyers aren't buying software. They know that. You know that. They're buying a little more breathing room in an impossible job. They're buying the confidence that they've made a good decision with a tight budget. They're buying the feeling that someone understood what they were dealing with and offered them something that actually fit.
You can't sell any of that if you don't know what their life actually looks like. And you can't know what their life looks like if you're too busy mapping their answers onto your pitch to actually listen to them.
The discovery call isn't a box to tick before the demo. It's the most important conversation you'll have with that school. Treat it that way. Treat them that way.
Ask the question. Then — and this is the whole thing — actually listen to the answer.
If you want to go deeper on how to run sales conversations that actually move things forward, the Education Sales Mastery course is built around exactly this. And if you're building out a full commercial approach for your EdTech business, B2Education Mastery covers the whole engine.
