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Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.

We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.

Succession

So you've booked a discovery call. Take a minute to celebrate getting to this point. Whether it was from cold outbound, a serendipitous conference connection, or a sweet sweet inbound enquiry, you and/or your team have done one of the hardest parts of sales (or marketing - shout out to the ones smashing it on SEO, brand awareness and eye-catching ads), getting a busy person to give up their time to hear about how you can help them.

Now the next challenge begins. You've got 30-60 minutes to understand enough about their science, pains, role, budget and priorities that you can position your offerings as a solution that is not only worth it to them to break the status quo for, but one their whole team can get behind.

Sales is nuanced, there are lots of little places to trip up, but there are also lots of little places you can build trust, establish credibility and create urgency. For today, we'll focus on 3 core things that can make or break the outcome of a discovery call:

You might be thinking, but what about what we sell? The way you position your solution should be dictated by the first two, not a one-size-fits-all pitch deck.

Let's break down where people go wrong at each stage, and what you can do to progress more deals through your pipeline (or quickly disqualify them so you can focus on the ones that count).

The discovery doesn't start when you join the call. It starts the moment the meeting is confirmed. What you do between booking and showing up determines whether you spend the time asking the right questions or wasting the first half catching up on things you could have figured out beforehand.

This is the thing most reps skip entirely, and it's one of the easiest wins.

When you're confirming the meeting, ask: "Are there any colleagues who should join us to make sure we cover everything relevant to your team?" If you've already had a prior conversation and they've mentioned other people involved in the project or the decision, suggest including them directly: "You mentioned Sarah is leading the assay development side. Would it be useful to have her join so we can cover her perspective too?"

Then leave it up to them, so it seems thoughtful not pushy. Getting two or three stakeholders on the first call saves you weeks of chasing introductions later.

You should walk into the call knowing:

This is a small thing that makes a big difference. Before the call, send a short note: "Looking forward to our conversation. So I can make sure we cover what matters most to you, is there anything specific you'd like to get out of this call?"

Their answer tells you everything about where their head is at. If they want to understand pricing, they're further along than you think. If they want a general overview of your technology, they're in learning mode and you need to educate before you sell. If they want to see specific data, they're probably evaluating you against a competitor or the status quo.

This changes what you prepare. If they're in evaluation mode, bring relevant case studies and be ready to talk specifics. If they're in learning mode, focus on understanding their problem. If they want pricing, have concrete numbers ready.

Once you have this context, prepare accordingly. If you're using slides, strip out anything that isn't relevant to their situation. A 40-slide deck that covers every use case for every customer type signals that you haven't thought about them specifically. Five targeted slides that speak to their therapeutic area, their team size, and their likely challenges signal that you have.

Better yet, don't default to slides at all. Come with questions and a conversation plan. Keep relevant slides in your back pocket for when specific topics come up naturally. "Actually, I have some data on that. Mind if I share my screen for a second?" feels a lot more credible than marching through a predetermined deck.

AI tip: Before the call, paste the prospect's LinkedIn profile, their company's website, any recent publications or news, and the context from their pre-call email into Claude or ChatGPT. 

Here’s a prompt you can copy and adapt:

The more context you paste in, the better the output. Use the output to build your conversation plan, not as a script, but as a starting point so you're not walking in cold.

This is where discovery calls are won or lost. Not because reps ask bad questions, but because they ask surface-level questions, accept the first answer, and move on.

The best discovery questions follow a ladder: you start broad, then go deeper based on what they say. Problem identification leads to root cause, which leads to business impact, which leads to urgency. Each answer should shape your next question.

Here's how to structure it, grouped by what you're trying to learn at each stage.

Start by understanding what's actually going on in their world right now. Don't open with "tell me about your challenges." Be more specific:

When they give you an answer, go deeper. If they say "we're struggling with variability in our assay results," don't just nod and move to the next question.

Ask: "How long has that been an issue? What have you tried so far to fix it? What happened?"

This is question laddering. You're moving from identifying the problem to understanding its root cause, and what that tells you is whether they've been living with this pain for years (low urgency) or whether something has changed recently that's made it intolerable (high urgency).

Not every problem is a buying problem. Some pains are real but not prioritised. You need to find out which category this falls into:

Their answer here tells you how to pace the deal. If they're in exploration mode, that's fine, but know that going in so you don't waste three months treating it like a hot opportunity.

A good reframe if you're unsure where they stand: give them an easy way to be honest about their timeline. Something like "Are you at the stage where you're actively solving this right now, or is this more about exploring what's available so you're ready when the time comes?" No pressure either way. But their answer completely changes how you should spend the rest of the call and what you do afterwards.

Giving people permission to say "we're just looking" is one of the most underrated things you can do in discovery. It stops you chasing deals that aren't real yet, and it builds trust because you're clearly not trying to force a timeline that doesn't exist.

When they ask about a specific feature or capability, resist the urge to just answer it. Instead, get curious about what's behind the question. "That sounds like it really matters to your team. Can I ask what's prompting that question?"

Feature questions aren't always what they seem. Sometimes they're asking because it's a genuine must-have for their workflow. Sometimes they're asking because they had a bad experience with a previous vendor around that exact thing. The context behind the question shapes how you should answer it, and you won't get that context unless you ask.

You need to know who else is involved, but asking "who's the decision-maker?" feels interrogative and can put people on the defensive. Try these instead:

Pay attention to how they answer. If they immediately start naming people and offering introductions, that's a green flag. They're bought in and they're already thinking about how to champion this internally. 

If they go vague ("I'd need to run it by a few people"), you might not be talking to the right person yet, or they're not convinced enough to bring others in.

Dig in gently: “Totally understand, when you say a few people, are we talking about someone on the scientific side who’d need to validate the approach, or someone on the commercial side who’d need to approve the spend?”

This forces specificity without being pushy. Most people aren’t being evasive, they just haven’t thought through the buying process yet because they’re still figuring out whether they even want this.

Help them map it out.

If they’re unsure who needs to be involved, walk through it with them: “In our experience, decisions like this usually involve someone who owns the workflow day-to-day, someone who controls the budget, and sometimes someone from procurement or IT. Does that sound like how it works at your company, or is it simpler than that?”

Make it easy for them to bring people in: If they mention a colleague but seem hesitant to loop them in, offer to remove the friction:

“Would it help if I put together a quick one-page summary of what we discussed today that you could share with them? That way they’ve got context before we all get on a call together.”

This does two things:

If they say “yes, that would be really helpful,” they’re actively championing.

If they brush it off, they’re either not bought in yet or they don’t have the internal influence to move this forward.

Both are useful things to know now rather than later.

Budget conversations don't have to be painful. The trick is treating it as a practical alignment question, not an interrogation.

Adapt based on the tone of the conversation:

If they're not ready to go there yet, don't push. But at minimum, understand whether funding is allocated, needs to be fought for, or doesn't exist. That determines your entire approach going forward.

One thing that's easy to forget: the seniority and technical background of the person across from you should change how you ask questions.

If you're talking to a bench scientist or lab manager, go deep on the technical workflow. They want to know you understand the science. Ask about their specific assays, their instruments, and their pain points at the protocol level. They'll respect you more for asking a good technical question than for showing them a polished slide.

If you're talking to a VP or director, zoom out. They care about milestones, headcount, timelines, and whether this aligns with where the company is heading. "What are the two biggest things your leadership expects your team to deliver this year?" is the right altitude for this conversation.

If you're talking to procurement or finance, speak their language. ROI, total cost of ownership, implementation timeline, vendor requirements. Don't try to sell them on the science.

Here's the key: your pitch should be built live from what they've told you. Not from slide 14 of your standard deck.

If they told you their biggest pain is variability, you should focus on reproducibility and consistency features. If they told you they're under pressure to hit a Q3 milestone, frame everything around speed to implementation. If they mentioned they've tried two competitors and both fell short, find out exactly where those solutions failed and position against those gaps specifically.

The best positioning sounds like: "Based on what you've shared, it sounds like the core issue is [their words, not yours]. Here's specifically how we address that..." Then show them the one or two things that directly solve their stated problem. Not your full feature set, definitely not your company history (nobody bloody cares), just the thing they told you they need.

Hold the rest back, if the call is going well, they'll ask.

Final open-ended questions

Before you wrap up, leave room for what you didn’t think to ask.

Two questions we like to use:

“What questions should we have asked you that we haven’t yet?”

“Is there anything you wish {our solution} did that we haven’t talked about?”

These sound simple, but they can be some of the most valuable questions in the whole call.

Sometimes you’ll get “no, I think we covered everything,” and that’s fine.

But sometimes you’ll get the thing they’ve been sitting on for 20 minutes waiting for the right moment to bring up. The stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into a discovery framework but ends up being the thing that makes or breaks the deal.

And here’s the other reason these questions matter:

Sometimes they’ll mention something you actually do offer but didn’t think to bring up.

Maybe it didn’t feel relevant based on how the conversation went, or it just didn’t make it into your talking points. If they walk away not knowing you can do that thing, they might rule you out for a gap that doesn’t exist.

We put together a full list of 60 technical discovery questions for life science sales, grouped by stage of the conversation, check it out here: https://succession.bio/toolkit/sales-discovery-questions

You had a great call, you asked the right questions, and opened up about their real challenges. You're doing a little happy dance on your way to the kitchen to get your caffeine top-up before your next call.

Now the question is: do you convert that momentum into a next step, or just let it slip? (if you didn’t just get an Enimen lose yourself brain worm reading that we can’t be friends)

Your follow-up email should prove you listened. Not with a summary of your product capabilities, but with a summary of their situation as they described it.

"From our conversation, it sounds like your team's main priority is [their words]. You mentioned that [specific pain] is creating [specific impact], and that you'd ideally want this resolved by [their timeline]. Here's what I think the best next step would be based on that."

This does two things. It confirms you understood them (which builds trust), and it gives them something concrete to share internally when their manager asks "so what did that vendor say?"

Don't default to "let's schedule a follow-up call." Based on what you learned, the right next step could be very different:

The follow-up should feel like a natural continuation of the conversation, not a pivot into sales mode.

Send your follow-up the same day, ideally within a couple of hours. They'll never be more engaged than right after the call, and every hour you wait, their attention shifts to the 47 other things on their plate. If you need a few days to prepare something specific to them, give them a timeline for that in your follow-up. 

If they don't respond to your first follow-up, that doesn't mean they're not interested. It might just mean they're busy. Follow up again with something new: a different angle, an additional resource, a quick note referencing something relevant that happened in their space since you spoke.

Beyond pre-call research, there are a few ways AI can compound your discovery skills over time. None of this requires a fancy tech stack. If you’ve got access to ChatGPT or Claude and a way to record your calls, you’ve got everything you need.

Use a call transcriber

Tools like Granola, Fathom, or even Zoom’s built-in transcription give you a searchable record of every call. This isn’t just for note-taking, over time you build a dataset of how different types of buyers respond to different questions.

Some transcription tools can plug directly into your AI tool of choice, so you don’t even need to copy and paste transcripts manually. 

Review and improve after every call

After each call, paste your transcript (or let your integration handle it) and run this prompt:

This turns every single call into a coaching session, even if you don’t have a manager reviewing your calls.

Train on your own patterns

After you’ve done 10–20 calls, feed a batch of transcripts in together:

The patterns it surfaces will sharpen your question set faster than intuition alone.

You’ll start to notice things like:

Build a reusable pre-call brief that learns over time

Instead of running one-off prompts before each call, you can build a dedicated tool that already knows who you are, what you sell, what your best discovery calls look like, and what patterns you’ve spotted across your ICP, so you just paste a prospect’s details and get a tailored brief in seconds.

Here’s how to set it up in both ChatGPT and Claude.

In ChatGPT - create a Custom GPT

A Custom GPT is a personalised version of ChatGPT that remembers who you are, what you sell, and how you like things structured, so you don’t have to explain it every time.

Now before each call, open that GPT, paste the prospect’s details, and it generates a tailored brief using everything you’ve baked in.

To keep it learning: after every batch of 5–10 calls, run the pattern analysis prompt, pull out insights, and add them to the “LEARNINGS FROM PAST CALLS” section. Update files regularly.

In Claude - combine a Project with a Skill

Claude has two features that work well together:

Step 1: Set up the Project

Now every conversation in this Project uses that context automatically.

Step 2 (optional if you’re using Claude Code): Add a Skill

A Skill in Claude Code is just a markdown file that acts as a saved set of instructions for each time you want to run the same task.

Here’s how to create one:

Create a command like /discovery-prep that:

The file name you saved your skill under becomes the slash command automatically, just type /discovery-prep and Claude follows whatever instructions are in that file.  

Workflow becomes: open Project → type /discovery-prep → paste details → get brief in ~60 seconds.

Keep it learning (monthly cadence)

This takes ~20 minutes and compounds fast.

After six months, you’ll have a tool that understands your market almost as well as you do.

If you don’t want to set all this up yet

Just save the prompt somewhere easy to access and copy + paste it each time you want to use it.

The more calls you transcribe and review, the better your AI-generated pre-call briefs become, because you're feeding it real examples of what your specific ICP cares about, how they talk about their problems, and what makes them lean in versus check out.

Pre-call research shapes the questions you ask. The questions you ask determine the quality of information you get. The quality of information you get dictates how you pitch and how specific and compelling your follow-up is. None of these stages work in isolation.

The reps who consistently convert discovery calls into pipeline aren't doing anything magical. They're just doing all three well, every time, letting each stage inform the next, and learning from each call.

Before your next discovery call, send the pre-call email asking what they want to get out of the conversation. Use their answer to build a tailored conversation plan. On the call, listen for the answers that should shape your pitch and follow-up. Then send that follow-up within two hours, referencing their exact words.

Let us know how it goes.

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Episode 84: [Leadership] Selling your company and what comes next with Bill Arteca