Discovery call (disco)
The first real sales conversation, which salespeople call a disco: the vendor learns your problem, its cost and who decides, before any demo or quote.
In sales slang the call is a disco and a busy week is “back-to-back discos”. A good one is mostly questions: what hurts, what it costs now, what was tried, who signs and by when. Behind the questions the vendor is usually filling in a qualification framework such as BANT or MEDDPICC. Prep that used to take an hour of reading the website, LinkedIn and news now often takes a few minutes with a chatbot, so expect the vendor to arrive knowing your org chart.
Related terms
- Paid discovery (phase 0, inception): A short, separately priced project before the build: workshops, a technical feasibility check and a scoped plan with a quote you can take to any vendor.
- BANT, CHAMP and MEDDPICC (sales qualification): Checklists vendors use to decide whether your deal is worth their time: budget, decision maker, pain, timeline and how the purchase gets approved.
- Pilot success criteria (exit criteria): Measurable conditions agreed before a pilot starts that decide whether it passed and the buyer moves to a full contract.
- Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE): An engineer who works with a customer or business team to turn AI models into systems that run in their environment.
