The mistake I hear on every new disco call

Title: The mistake I hear on every new disco call

Read time: 3 min

I've been working with a client now for a couple of weeks, and the first thing we do is have them send us calls to review to get a baseline understanding of how they’re executing.

I typically sit through a stack of their disco calls and by the second call my skin begins to crawl. The problems jump out immediately, same problem over and over, which is they're not qualifying leads into opportunities. They're pitching leads.

Remember this for the rest of your career. You cannot pitch a lead. Leads don't close. Opportunities close.

The problem is most founder don't know the difference between a lead and an opportunity. And because they don't know the difference, they're stacking their funnel with tire kickers and not understanding why no revenue is coming in.

Today we fix that.

A lead is not an opportunity.

A lead is someone who looks like they could be a good fit. That's it. That's the bar. Right title, right company size, right vertical, maybe they filled out a form or took a call. Cool. That's a lead.

An opportunity is someone who is ready, willing, and able to buy, because you qualified them.

Two completely different things. Most people treat every lead like it's already an opportunity, and that's where the whole thing falls apart.

So what does qualification actually mean?

It means you understand who the decision makers are and how they actually make decisions as a team. Not just "who signs the contract," who influences it, who kills it, who has to say yes internally before anyone says yes to you.

It means you understand the use case, and I mean really understand it. Tie it to a specific business case. Quantify the pain. Then go further, understand the downstream impact that pain is having residually on the rest of the org. Pain never stays in one department. It leaks everywhere.

Then and only then show them a clear path out of that pain with your product. If you can do that and they nod along and give you real buy-in on the path forward, you're getting somewhere. If they can't commit to that, you don't have an opportunity. You have a nice conversation.

Then there's timing.

Timing is a function of pain. Full stop. Pain is motivation. Someone with a ass on fire problem is going to move fast, dig for budget, escalate internally, whatever it takes. Someone who's casually browsing has zero motivation, and no amount of your effort is going to manufacture urgency that isn't there. You cannot sell your way around a lack of pain. Stop trying. This is the biggest culprit for most teams who think they have a pipeline of real opportunities.

You need to know who your champion is.

Not "a contact." A champion. Someone internally who is going to fight for you when you're not in the room. You also need to know who else they're evaluating, and what the actual deciding factors are on who they pick. If you don't know your competition in the deal and you don't know why they'd choose you over the alternative, you are flying blind and hoping.

The part that stings.

If you don't have all of this , decision makers, quantified use case, downstream impact, timing tied to real pain, a champion, and clarity on the competitive landscape, you do not have a qualified opportunity. You might feel good because you booked a follow-up call. That’s a false positive. It's exactly what I watched happen on call after call this week, good energy, good rapport, zero qualification, and a pitch delivered to someone who could really give a s**t less.

Whatever doesn't get flushed out upstream shows up downstream at the bottom of the funnel. Deals ghost. They get blocked internally by someone you never talked to. Momentum dies for reasons you never saw coming, because you never asked the questions that would've surfaced them.

You have to do the work in the mid-funnel before you get the results at the bottom. There is no shortcut around this. Period.

Stop worrying about closing deals. Worry about qualifying them, rigorously, against a specific criteria you don't deviate from. Do that, and your pipeline fills itself with real opportunities and real revenue you can actually close.

Sales in the AI era.

Everyone has a mandate to "do something with AI." That means you're getting flooded with people who want a demo because AI is the flavor of the quarter, not because they have a real problem.

That's noise. Signal is the person with a direct mandate to solve a specific bottleneck in their workflow, who's actually been told to go find a solution.

Those are the people worth all your time. Everyone else is a tire kicker with a mandate to look busy.

Here's how to actually run this in real deals, not just in theory.

Build a qualification checklist and put it in your CRM as required fields before a deal can move stages. Not a vibe check, actual fields.

• Decision maker identified? Yes or no.

• Business case quantified with a real number? Yes or no.

• Champion confirmed and tested. meaning they've actually advocated for you internally, not just said "sounds good"? Yes or no.

• Competitive landscape mapped? Yes or no.

If any of those are blank, that deal does not move forward in your forecast, no matter how good the call felt.

Run a "pain test" on every deal before you call it real. Ask yourself, if this person did nothing, what happens to them in 90 days? If the honest answer is "nothing," you don't have an opportunity, you have a lead who's wasting your time. Hair on fire buyers can answer that question instantly and specifically.

Tire kickers get vague or change the subject.

And train yourself to ask the uncomfortable questions early, who else are you evaluating, what happens if you do nothing, who has to sign off on this, instead of saving them for late stage when a "surprise" stakeholder or a competitor you never knew about suddenly blows up the deal.

The deal doesn't die at the bottom of the funnel. It dies here, in these questions you're avoiding at the top.

The takeaway 

Your close rate isn't a closing problem. It's a qualifying problem.

Every ghosted deal, every "let me check internally," every deal that goes quiet after a great demo, that's a qualification gap you created three steps earlier by not asking the hard question when you had the chance.

Fix qualification and your close rate takes care of itself.

Chase closing without fixing qualification and you'll keep booking calls that feel like progress and go nowhere.

See you all next week!

Darren

P.S. If you’re a venture-backed company interested in coaching, book a call here.

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