You will be able to write a short summary after the meeting that the buyer confirms as accurate.
A week after a good discovery meeting, you sit down to write the proposal and open your notes. Some of it is clear. Some of it is not: was the deadline March or April? Did the buyer say the accountant charges extra, or that she might? You write the proposal from your best memory, the buyer reads it, and the first thing they reply with is a correction. The proposal now feels slightly off, and so do you.
A short written summary, sent the same day and confirmed by the buyer, prevents all of that. It is the most useful piece of writing in discovery, and one of the least used. This lesson shows you how to write one that the buyer reads, corrects and agrees to.
Send the summary the same day, while the meeting is fresh for both of you. You still remember the tone of what was said and the details you did not write down. The buyer still remembers the conversation and can correct you without having to think back.
A summary that arrives three days later reads like paperwork. One that arrives the same evening reads like someone who was paying attention. It also gives you a natural reason to be in the buyer's inbox before they have moved on to other things.
Write it from your note template, the one you set up in lesson 6.3, Take notes without losing the room. The headings in that template map almost directly onto the summary.
A discovery summary is a short written account of what you learned in the meeting, sent to the buyer to confirm. It has five parts: their situation, the problems in their words, the impact, what success looks like, and the agreed next step.
Their situation comes first, in two or three sentences of plain facts, so the buyer can see you understood the setup. Then the problems, written in the buyer's own words, in quotation marks where you have them. This is where the exact phrases you wrote down earn their keep. After that, the impact: the numbers the buyer worked out with you, and any other consequences they named. Then what success looks like, the future state from lesson 3.2, Gap selling: current state, future state and the gap, again in their words and with any measures they gave you. Last, the next step that you agreed, with a date.
Here is the summary Priya sent Joel, the cafe owner, on the evening after their meeting.
"Hi Joel, thanks for this afternoon. Here's what I took away, so you can check I've got it right. You run two cafes in Tiong Bahru, the second opened about eight months ago, and you do the books yourself, mostly on Sunday nights. The two outlets close up differently, and you said you 'can't tell if it's mistakes or if someone's taking money.' You estimated the books take you about five hours a week, which we worked out at around S$5,000 a year of your time, plus about S$1,500 extra your accountant expects to charge this year. Your accountant needs clean records by the end of March. You said success would be 'getting my Sundays back' and knowing the till matches the sales every week. We agreed I'll put together two options and we'll go through them next Thursday at 3pm. Is there anything I've got wrong or missed?"
The figures in that email are Joel's, from the example in lesson 4.2, Put a number on the impact, with the buyer. Notice what is not in it: anything about Priya's services, prices or experience. That comes later.
End with a request to correct anything wrong. "Is there anything I've got wrong or missed?" works well. It invites changes rather than a polite thumbs up.
Asking for corrections does two things. It gets a reply, because people find it hard to ignore a summary of their own situation that might be slightly wrong. And it often brings new information. Joel replies the next morning: "Mostly right. It's actually my wife and me on Sundays, and the accountant said end of February, not March." Two corrections, both useful, and the deadline is now a month closer.
When the buyer corrects you, thank them, update your notes, and use the corrected version from then on. A summary the buyer has corrected is better than one they simply approved, because it is now partly theirs.
If there is no reply after a couple of days, a short follow-up is fair: "Just checking the summary I sent looks right before I put the options together." Sales foundations lesson 6.2, Follow-up messages that add something, covers the tone.
The confirmed summary becomes the base for the proposal. Every problem, number and goal in it is something the buyer has agreed in writing. When you present options, you can link each one back to a line in the summary, and the buyer recognises it. How to build and present the proposal itself is covered in Present, handle objections, and close.
It also helps inside the buyer's organisation. A short, clear summary is easy to forward. Rachel, from module 3, forwarded Hafiz's summary straight to her director, which did more to brief him than any meeting would have. Write it so that someone who was not in the room could understand it.
Keep it short. Most summaries fit in under three hundred words, and Priya's has fewer than two hundred. If yours runs much longer, you are probably including your own commentary, and that belongs in your notes rather than the buyer's inbox.
Have your notes from your most recent discovery meeting open before you start the activity below.
Write a discovery summary for your most recent meeting in the five-part structure and send it to the buyer for confirmation.
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