Discovery Question Library

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Discovery Question Library

Discovery Question Library

How to organize your discovery questions with Coda

Why (& how) organizing your questions can help you sell more.

Chris James

🌊 Hello, I’m Chris James! I think about discovery questions a lot.

I’m a maker, music producer, and enterprise Solutions Engineer at Coda. Most of my work involves moving into the unknown and creating something new. I’ve learned that asking the right question is often more important than knowing all the answers.

In an ideal world, I would walk into each discovery call with a curated list of questions. But when things get hectic it’s hard to find time to prepare. And for new teammates, it can be a struggle to get up to speed on which talking points land the best.

💡 Observation: teams that share their best discovery questions win more business.

Better questions are the foundation for better conversations with customers, which lead to clearer alignment (and better deals).

Successful AE’s or SE’s all have their go-to discovery questions. They also know the context behind the ask, as well as where it will likely lead the discussion. To effectively share this collective knowledge, a team needs to 1) organize those questions and 2) make them easy to find.

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A Coda doc to organize and access discovery questions.

I used Coda to build an interactive doc that organizes discovery questions in a way that feels much more like using an app. It consists of two main parts:

1. Question library, for admins to organize questions

The

Question Library⁠

is the core of this doc, and gives a structured way to track your team’s best discovery questions. I’ve also added on some tools to gather feedback and track usage over time.

I categorized by Value Proposition and Segment , because personally I’ve found it most valuable to keep those things in mind when talking to customers.

Value Proposition helps me make sure that any question I ask is something the customer cares about. Segment helps me ask questions that are specific to their size, industry, or use case.

2. Discovery app, for teammates to easily find questions

The

Questions⁠

section is where teammates can pull from the library and build a list of targeted discovery questions to use in their next call. They can also view notes taken during past calls in the

Answers⁠

section, as well as make suggestions using the

Submit a New Question⁠

page.

3. My quick walkthrough of the doc

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4. Questions? Feedback? Ideas about discovery?

Reach me at

cjames@coda.io⁠

🌊

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