Build a sorted bank of questions you can use in any discovery meeting.
Many sellers prepare for a discovery meeting by opening an empty note and trying to remember which questions went well last time. With twenty minutes to go before the meeting, you might manage about five questions (also illustrative). A list pulled from memory like this is usually short and mostly about how the buyer works today. It also leaves out the follow-ups that made your better meetings work.
A question bank solves this. It's a short, sorted list of tested questions, kept in one place so you can scan it before any meeting. Keep yours in your meeting template, next to the opener you saved in lesson 1.4, Write and rehearse your discovery opener. Set aside about thirty minutes to build it. You'll be using your work from lessons 2.1 to 2.3, so keep those notes open while you write.
A discovery meeting moves through five stages, and each one gets its own heading in the bank. The order comes from lesson 2.2, The question funnel: from wide to specific. Each heading narrows the conversation further than the one above it. Add these five headings to your template:
Current situation: how things work today Problems: what is not working, and where Impact: what the problems cost in money, time, risk or how the buyer is seen Decision process: who is involved, how they decide, what the timeline is Next steps: what happens after this meeting
Most meetings only reach some of these topics. You should still fill in all five. That way, when one topic runs dry, you can see where to go next and you won't get stuck at the top of the funnel asking how things work today.
Write at least four opening questions under every heading. With five headings, that gives you twenty or more in the bank. Make each one an open question, worded in plain language the way you'd actually say it across the table.
Hafiz sells payroll software to small firms. Under current situation, his bank includes "Walk me through what happens from the end of the month to the day staff get paid." and "Who handles leave and claims at the moment?" Under problems, he has "Which part of payroll do you dread most?" and "When did something last go wrong with a payslip?" Under impact he has "Roughly how many hours does payroll take each month, and whose hours are they?" Under decision process he has "When you last changed a system like this, how did the decision get made?", and under next steps, "What would you need to see from me to take this further?" His finished bank held twenty-four opening questions.
When a heading is drafted, check each question against lesson 2.3, Questions that sound like interrogation, and fixes. Rewrite any question with one of the three faults it describes: leading the buyer towards a particular answer, stacking more than one question together, or starting with "why".
Some of your favourite questions may produce very little. Wei Ling, the adviser you met in lesson 2.1 (also an invented example), liked to open with "What are your financial goals?" It rarely got her anything useful, because most clients have never put their goals into words. She got far better answers from "What would you like to be different about money a year from now?", so she kept the new question and deleted her old favourite.
Modules 4 and 5 cover impact and decision process in much more depth. Anything you write under those two headings now is a first draft, and you should come back to it when you reach those modules.
Most people write their opening questions and stop there. The follow-ups matter more, because they take the conversation down to the real problem. For each opening question, think of the answer you hear most often and write the two follow-ups you'd expect to ask after it. These are its follow-up layers.
Build them from the event, effect, cost pattern in lesson 2.1, Open, layered and follow-up questions. Word each follow-up so the buyer's own words can go into it, and mark that gap with square brackets, for example [their word]. The brackets remind you to repeat the buyer's own term for the problem and not swap in yours. Under "Which part of payroll do you dread most?", Hafiz's first layer is "You said [their word]. What happened the last time?" His second is "What did that lead to, for you or for the staff?"
You can put the same follow-up under several opening questions. General ones such as "What happened then?" and "How often does that happen?" work after many different opening questions, so reuse them wherever they fit.
Go through the bank and tick every question you've asked in a real meeting that got a useful answer. Any question without a tick is an experiment: a question that hasn't been proven in a real meeting yet. Choose two or three experiments to try at your next meeting. Afterwards, tick the ones that worked and change or delete the ones that fell flat. Do this after every meeting. Within a month or two (an estimate), the bank becomes a list of questions you trust.
Keep the bank to one or two pages, and never more than two. If it runs long, cut questions that overlap and any you know you'd never say aloud. Hafiz reads his bank on his phone in the lift on the way to every meeting. Length decides whether a bank gets used: sellers use one they can scan in two minutes and tend to skip one that takes ten minutes to read.
The bank is finished when it has at least twenty opening questions across the five topics, with two follow-up layers under each one. Every question has passed the lesson 2.3 checks, and the proven ones are ticked. The whole bank is no more than two pages and sits in your meeting template next to your opener.
Open your meeting template and your notes from lessons 2.1 to 2.3 before you begin.
In your meeting template, write a question bank of at least twenty opening questions across five topics, with two follow-ups under each.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).