You are not trying to find the decision maker.
You are trying to find the argument, because the buying group is almost certainly having one, and the outcome of that argument decides your deal long after your call has ended.
Most discovery calls do not go looking for it. They are a feature demonstration wearing a questionnaire: eight minutes of polite questions, thirty minutes of what we do, and then a proposal nobody asked for. The tell is simple. If your next step after a discovery call is always to write a proposal, you were not running discovery, you were running a pitch with a warm-up.
Here is the order that works, and the order is the whole thing. What changed recently that made them look now. Who else is in this and what they disagree about. What happens if they do nothing. Only then what you do.
And one question most people never ask, which predicts how the purchase will actually go better than anything the prospect tells you about budget.
There is no decision maker
Gartner’s 2025 survey of 632 B2B buyers found buying groups running from five to sixteen people, spread across as many as four functions.
You have probably also seen “six to ten decision makers” quoted everywhere. I went looking for the source and the trail leads to Gartner pages that now redirect elsewhere, so I would treat the specific range as folklore and the direction as solid.
The number matters less than the second finding, which is the one I would pin up. Gartner reported in May 2025 that 74% of B2B buying teams show unhealthy conflict during the decision process.
Three quarters. So the default state of the group you are selling to is disagreement, and the person on your call is one participant in a dispute rather than a buyer with a decision to make.
That reframes the job. Asking “are you the decision maker” gets you a yes from somebody being polite about their own authority. Asking “who else has a view on this, and where do you expect pushback” gets you the map, and it also gets you something to arm your contact with, which is the only form of help you can offer between calls.
The order, and why it is that order
What changed. Start here, always. “Why are you looking at this now rather than last year?” Something happened: a person left, a number moved, a contract is ending, a system broke, somebody senior asked a question. If nothing changed, you have a curious prospect rather than a live one, and knowing that in minute four is worth more than anything else on the call.
Who else, and what they disagree about. Not just names. For each one, what they care about and what their objection will be. Finance will ask a different question from the person who has to use the thing, and the person who has to use it is frequently not in the room with you.
The cost of doing nothing. This is the question that separates a project from an interest. “What happens if you leave it as it is for another year?” If the answer is a shrug, your competitor is not another vendor, it is inertia, and inertia wins most of the time.
Then what you do. By now you know which three things to talk about, which is the actual payoff of the order. Most calls do this part first and therefore talk about all nine.
Notice that none of the first three questions is about your product. That feels wrong in the moment, and it is the difference between a call that tells you something and a call that fills a CRM field.
The question almost nobody asks
Here it is: “When did you last buy something like this, and how did that go?”
It sounds like small talk. It is the most predictive thing you will hear all call.
You find out whether procurement is involved and what it put them through. You find out whether they have been burned, which tells you what the real objection will be regardless of what they say now. You find out how long it took last time, which is a far better forecast than any date they give you. And you find out whether the previous supplier is still there, which occasionally reveals that you are being used to price-check an incumbent.
Follow it with “what would you do differently this time”. People answer that one honestly and generously, and the answer is a specification for how to sell to them.
There is a related point worth knowing. Two days ago I wrote about why lost-deal post-mortems produce the wrong answers, and the reason is that a buyer talking to somebody they rejected has every incentive to be kind rather than accurate. On a discovery call that incentive runs the other way. They want help, so they will tell you how they decide. This is the one window where the honest answer is available, and most sellers spend it talking.
When they ask for a price on the call
They will, usually early, and the standard advice to deflect is wrong because it reads as evasion.
Give them a range and a reason. “Engagements like this usually run between X and Y, and which end depends on whether you need A or B. Can I ask two more things and then I can tell you where you probably sit?” That answers the question, keeps the call alive, and qualifies both of you.
What not to do is quote a precise number before you know the scope, then feel obliged to honor it. On the handling of the push-back that follows a number, I have written about that separately and will not repeat it here.
Say that you are recording
A short practical note, because this has quietly become a live issue and most discovery-call advice predates it.
If you have an AI notetaker joining your calls, it is a recording device, and recording consent law applies to it exactly as it would to a tape machine.
Roughly a dozen US states require every party to consent rather than just one. California, Illinois, Washington and Pennsylvania appear on every list I checked; the published lists disagree about several others, and a few states are genuinely unsettled. Where parties are in different states, the stricter rule generally governs, and there is case law applying California’s requirement to a caller sitting in a one-party state.
I am not a lawyer and the lists conflict, which is exactly why the practical answer is not to track which state your prospect is in. Announce it every time, in one sentence, at the top: “I have a notetaker on, is that alright?” Nobody has ever objected to being asked, and it makes the question of which statute applies irrelevant.
Before lunch
Twenty minutes, and it will change your next call.
Write your four questions on one card, in order: what changed, who else and what they disagree about, what happens if nothing happens, and when did you last buy something like this.
Then look at your last three discovery calls and ask which of the four you actually asked. If the answer is none, that is not a discipline problem, it is that you had no card and were improvising while also trying to be impressive.
Then put one line at the top of your call template: the recording question. It takes four seconds and removes a problem you did not know you had.
If you’d like a second opinion on where your own calls are losing deals you should be winning, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on lead generation cover what happens before the call. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.