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Sales enablement managers, Sales managers, Account executives, RevOps teams, Founders
Prepare the Required Inputs listed in the Workflow Prompt. Use as much detail as necessary.
1. Copy the Workflow Prompt.
2. Paste it into your AI tool.
3. Replace the "Required Inputs"
4. Run the prompt.
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You are a sales enablement lead. Create a practical discovery playbook that helps sales reps uncover business pain, qualify opportunities, and guide better sales conversations.
### Required Input
- Product or Solution: [What is being sold. Example: "workflow automation software for operations teams"]
- Target Buyer: [Primary buyer and user roles. Example: "VP Operations, RevOps manager, team leads"]
- Sales Motion: [Inbound, outbound, enterprise, SMB, partner-led, or mixed]
- Deal Stage Covered: [Where discovery happens. Example: "first qualified call after demo request"]
- Qualification Criteria: [Current framework or must-know criteria. Example: budget, authority, urgency, impact]
- Common Customer Problems: [Known pain points. Example: manual reporting, slow approvals, poor visibility]
- Differentiators: [Why buyers choose this solution. Example: fast setup, native integrations, strong support]
- Constraints: [Compliance, tone, sales process, markets, or claims to avoid]
### Input Validation
Review all required inputs before creating the playbook. If any field is missing, vague, contradictory, or too broad, ask specific clarification questions and pause until the answers are provided.
### Instructions
Build the playbook as something a rep can use before, during, and after a discovery call. Start by defining the purpose of discovery for this sales motion, including what the rep must learn and what the buyer should feel by the end of the conversation.
Map the discovery conversation into a realistic flow. Include opening context, agenda setting, problem exploration, impact discovery, current process review, stakeholder discovery, urgency assessment, decision process questions, qualification checks, and next-step alignment. Do not write a robotic script; provide flexible talk tracks, question banks, and guidance on when to use each question.
Create strong question sets that uncover business impact, not just surface pain. Include follow-up prompts that help reps dig into consequences, costs, workarounds, failed attempts, internal priorities, and buying motivation. Add listening cues that show when a rep should slow down, probe deeper, or move toward summarising.
Include qualification guidance that helps the rep judge whether the opportunity is real, risky, early-stage, or ready to advance. Explain what good, weak, and concerning answers look like. Add red flags and how reps should respond without sounding confrontational.
Translate discovery findings into next actions. Include how to summarise the call, confirm priorities, prepare the next meeting, personalise the demo, and capture notes in a useful format.
### Output
Provide:
- Playbook Purpose
- Discovery Call Flow
- Question Bank by Topic
- Follow-Up Prompts
- Qualification Guidance
- Strong vs Weak Answer Examples
- Red Flags and Rep Responses
- Call Summary Template
- Next-Step Guidance
- Manager Coaching Notes
Add a version tailored for senior enterprise buyers with more strategic, business-impact discovery questions.
Product Solution: Cross-Border Customs API Hub (Automated compliance add-on module).
Target Buyer: VP of Global Logistics, Director of International Operations, and Supply Chain Team Leads.
Sales Motion: Mid-Contract Expansion / Account Cross-Sell (Warm Outbound to Existing Domestic Customers).
Deal Stage Covered: First Dedicated Discovery Call (Triggered after a domestic customer expands into international shipping lanes or logs interest in automating customs compliance).
The Discovery Objective: Shift the customer’s mindset away from viewing customs compliance as a standard “cost of doing business” managed via manual spreadsheets. By the end of this call, the buyer must feel that continuing to rely on manual data entry is an unhedged operational risk that actively restricts their company’s capacity to scale freight volumes. The rep must uncover the exact manual data steps, quantify the hidden labor leakage, and establish clear technical and financial qualification criteria.
“Hi [Name], I’ve been tracking the mileage and route optimization wins your domestic dispatch team has logged over the past year using our core engine. Given that your organization is actively scaling up your international cross-border lines this quarter, I wanted to spend our time today mapping out your current compliance data pipeline. The goal is to see if we can apply that exact same automation model to eliminate the manual spreadsheet processing currently bottlenecking your international division. If we find an alignment, we can look at setting up a sandbox test; if not, you’ll at least have a benchmark of how your peers are optimizing their lanes. How does that sound?”
Pivot smoothly from the agenda into open-ended workflow exploration. Do not rush to a product description. Listen for indicators of team burnout, typing errors, or manual copy-pasting from the company ERP system into localized customs clearance templates.
Uncover the layout of their legacy systems. Determine who owns the database architecture and identify what internal security clearances are required to introduce a read-only API gateway.
Lock in the commitment for a technical sandbox mapping session. Frame this next step as a low-friction technical validation exercise rather than a commercial contract negotiation.
Listening Cue: When the buyer provides a surface-level answer like “Yeah, our team spends a lot of time typing data into forms,” do not move to the next section. Slow down, lean into the gap, and use these precise prompts to uncover the root pain:
- “Can you pull back the curtain on that a bit more? When you say ‘a lot of time,’ roughly how many hours out of a standard shift is a senior route planner dedicating purely to manual data transcription?”
- “What internal workarounds or macro patches has your team attempted to build in the past to try and solve this data loop internally?”
- “And when those internal spreadsheet macros fail or break due to a regulatory customs field update, who on your team is stuck rebuilding the system code?”
Use the following framework to judge whether the expansion opportunity is a real, high-velocity deal or an early-stage research project:
| Buyer Response Classification | What the Buyer Says | The Hidden Reality / Rep Evaluation |
|---|---|---|
| Strong / Highly Qualified | “We just won an automotive parts contract that adds 40 cross-border runs a week starting next month. My team is already maxed out working overtime on spreadsheets, and if we hit a border delay, our contract fines are $1,200 per delayed load.” | Green Light. High impact, hard metric quantified, clear timeline urgency, and defined financial consequences for failure. Focus on rapid sandbox onboarding. |
| Weak / Low Urgency | “Our current spreadsheet setup takes a little bit of time, but the team knows the fields well. We might look into automating this sometime next year if our cross-border freight volume grows significantly.” | Amber Light. No immediate scaling pressure, low perceived pain, and an indefinite timeline. Do not push for an IT sandbox review yet; keep the buyer engaged with relevant industry benchmark data. |
| Concerning / Blind Alley | “I love the idea of automation, but our IT team has locked down our ERP database completely. They have banned all external vendor API integrations for the next two fiscal cycles due to a legacy migration project.” | Red Flag. Absolute architectural roadblock. The operational pain exists, but the technical path to closing the deal is completely blocked by corporate IT policy. See escalation path below. |
The Buyer’s Stance: “Our IT desk will never let an external software plug directly into our master database system.”
Recommended Rep Response Track: “That is an entirely appropriate boundary for your IT team to maintain. We actually designed our Cross-Border Hub specifically to respect that security parameter. We don’t perform deep database read-write integrations or drop custom middleware code into your core systems. Instead, we utilize a secure, read-only data gateway stream that simply mirrors your active …
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