Discovery Call Copilot
Walk into every discovery call prepared, walk out with a decision
The problem
Small-business discovery calls fail in two boring ways: walking in cold, so the first fifteen minutes are questions a website visit would have answered, and walking out warm, with friendly vibes, no budget number, and a "send me something" that turns into a proposal written on guesses. The call felt good; the deal was never real. What's missing isn't charm, it's a repeatable before-during-after routine.
The tool
Once installed, this skill turns your assistant into the colleague who preps you before every discovery call and debriefs you after. Give it the lead's name, website, and whatever the intake form said, and it produces a one-page prep: what the business appears to do, the three hypotheses about why they called, the questions that test each one, and the disqualifiers to listen for. Your voice and offer are baked in during setup, so the questions sound like you.
After the call, ramble what happened for two minutes and it extracts the record: pain, budget signals, decision process, timeline, objections, and the honest gaps you forgot to ask about. Then it makes you decide: pursue with a next step, or pass with a polite no. Across sessions it keeps your call log, so patterns surface ("your last four losses all had no budget answer by call one") and next-call prep quietly improves from your own history. The manual, prompt-by-prompt version of this whole arc is in 7 AI prompts for discovery calls; this skill is what that article graduates into.
What's inside
- One-page pre-call prep from a name, a website, and intake notes
- Question sets that test hypotheses instead of running a script
- Post-call debrief from a spoken ramble: pain, budget, process, timeline, objections
- A forced pursue/pass decision with the reason written down
- A running call log with pattern callouts across weeks
- Follow-up email drafted from what was said, not a template
How to use it
- 1Click "Install skill" on this page and copy the install prompt.
- 2Paste it into your AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, anything that accepts pasted text).
- 3Answer the setup questions: what you sell, your price floor, your ideal client, your dealbreakers.
- 4Before each call, paste the lead's website text and intake answers; skim the prep page it returns.
- 5After each call, talk through what happened and act on the pursue/pass line before the day ends.
Example
A branding studio gets an inquiry from a restaurant group. The prep page flags that the group's three locations have three different logos, guesses the call is about consolidation, and suggests testing whether the founder or the new marketing hire owns the decision. On the call, the disqualifier surfaces fast: budget expectations sit at a third of the studio's floor. The debrief records it, the skill drafts a warm pass with a referral to a cheaper freelancer, and the log gains a data point that later shows restaurant inquiries have hit the budget floor problem four times running, which changes where the studio spends its outreach time. Scoring the ones worth a call in the first place is the [Lead Qualification Scorer](/toolbox/lead-qualification-scorer)'s job, one step upstream.
Pro tip
Do the debrief ramble in the parking lot, or the minute the video call ends. The budget hesitation, the sideways glance at a partner, the "we tried an agency once" aside: those details evaporate within the hour, and they are exactly what the pursue/pass decision needs.
Related tools
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