If you’ve been on enough analytics discovery calls, you already recognize this pattern.
You’re brought in by the economic buyer for what’s meant to be a high-level conversation: outcomes, priorities, budget, maybe a pilot or a short workshop. Then the calendar invite changes. It’s forwarded. Or you join the call and watch the participant list grow.
Now the room is full of analysts, engineers, and spreadsheet power users. The questions shift quickly. Tools. Edge cases. Hypothetical workflows. SQL joins. Dashboard architectures. “What would you do if…?”
Without realizing it, the conversation has changed. You’re no longer having a buying discussion… you’re being evaluated in real time. This isn’t just frustrating. It’s risky.
I’ve seen this dynamic play out repeatedly at Stringfest Analytics. Calls that begin with clear strategic intent slowly drift into technical interrogation. By the end, the buyer is quiet, the energy is gone, and the next step becomes an “internal review.”
And here’s the part that catches many people off guard: you can answer every technical question correctly and still lose the deal.
This post outlines a simple way to use targeted questions to pull discovery calls back out of the weeds, and back into the space where real decisions actually get made.
Why technical deep dives kill momentum (even when you nail them)
This is the pattern I see over and over again on discovery calls:
- The sponsor brings in the team for alignment. Totally reasonable. They want buy-in and don’t want surprises later. But the moment this happens, the call shifts from a decision conversation to something closer to a working session.
- The most technical people naturally take the lead. They live in the data every day. Their instinct isn’t to decide but to pressure-test. Do you understand their tools, their edge cases, their constraints? The questions are about validating you, not moving the decision forward.
- The conversation slides into specifics. Tools, architectures, “what if” scenarios. You’re no longer talking about confidence, speed, or risk… you’re debating implementation details that may never matter.
- You engage to prove credibility. It’s hard not to. You answer well. You go deeper than planned. And without anyone explicitly saying it, your role shifts from strategic partner to tactical contributor.
- The buyer fades into the background. The language gets more technical. The energy drops. By the end, it’s barely a buying conversation at all.
What happens next is predictable:
- Follow-ups slow down.
- Decisions get deferred.
- The deal doesn’t blow up. It just quietly dissolves while they “discuss internally.”
The uncomfortable truth is this: buyers aren’t hiring you because they lack technical expertise. They already have smart people who know the tools.
They bring in outside help because they want:
- clearer decisions
- fewer bottlenecks
- less risk
- more confidence that things won’t break or stall at the worst possible moment
And those things almost never surface in these types of conversations.
The fix: four questions that re-anchor the call (and why this works even if I’m “the Excel guy”)
Before getting into the questions, it’s worth addressing something that sometimes surprises people.
Yes, I work primarily in Excel. And that’s exactly why this approach works.
Excel is lightweight. It’s already licensed. Teams already use it. There’s no procurement cycle, no platform migration, and no political fight about tools before you can make progress. That makes it a perfect place to apply modern analytics workflows quickly and cheaply: Power Query for reliability, Python in Excel for exploration, Copilot for interpretation and documentation.
That’s also why I don’t start discovery calls by talking about tools. I start by anchoring the conversation around outcomes, momentum, and risk… and then we decide how to support that, often using tools the team already has (which, for my clients, just about always happens to be Excel).
These four questions are how I do that.
1. “What decisions do you want your team making more confidently?”
This question changes the frame immediately. It pulls the conversation away from tools and toward outcomes. Most analytics problems aren’t really tool problems. They’re decision problems.
You’ll hear answers like:
- “We want to trust pipeline forecasts without second-guessing them.”
- “Leadership needs cleaner scenario analysis for budgeting.”
- “Marketing needs to move faster without debating the numbers every week.”
Notice that none of these answers require a specific platform to articulate. They’re about confidence.
That’s intentional. When you anchor on decisions first, the tooling conversation becomes a means, not the main event. And confidence is something buyers will happily pay for, regardless of whether the work happens in Excel, Python, or both.
2. “Where are projects currently slowing down or stalling?”
This question surfaces friction without turning the call into a shopping list of technologies. Buyers don’t experience analytics pain as schemas or column types. They experience it as delays, burnout, and missed windows.
Typical answers sound like:
- “Reporting takes two weeks longer than it should.”
- “No one agrees on metrics definitions, so everything stalls.”
- “Analysts spend most of their time cleaning data instead of analyzing it.”
This is where lightweight tooling really matters. When the goal is restoring momentum, introducing a heavyweight platform often makes things worse before they get better. Modern workflows in Excel let teams remove drag quickly, without a long change-management tail.
From here, you’re talking about relief and speed, not implementation trivia.
3. “What would make you feel this investment paid off?”
This question makes some consultants nervous. It shouldn’t. It doesn’t create scope creep. It prevents it.
You’ll hear things like:
- “If prep time drops enough that the team can focus on insights.”
- “If leadership stops questioning dashboard accuracy.”
- “If the system holds up without constant manual fixes.”
Once this is stated, your proposal almost writes itself. And because Excel-based workflows are inexpensive and familiar, it’s much easier to tie the investment directly to outcomes rather than hours, licenses, or long-term commitments.
You’re defining value first. The tooling follows naturally.
4. “What risk are you trying to reduce by bringing in outside help?”
This is the quiet closer.
Organizations don’t bring in external help because everything is going great. They do it because something feels fragile.
This question surfaces the real stakes:
- “We can’t afford another audit issue.”
- “We’re exposed if one key person leaves.”
- “Delays here cost real money.”
And this is another place where Excel’s ubiquity works in your favor. Using tools the organization already understands reduces dependency risk, knowledge silos, and long-term fragility. You’re not adding a new single point of failure; you’re strengthening what’s already there.
That’s why this approach works so well. You’re not selling “Excel work.” You’re selling clearer decisions, faster momentum, and lower risk using modern analytics workflows that just happen to live in a tool the team already owns.
And that’s a much easier decision to say yes to.
How this changes the dynamic on the call
When I ask these questions, the shift isn’t dramatic, but it’s noticeable.
The technical people still talk, and they should. Their input matters. But it stops dominating the room. It becomes background context rather than the thing everyone is reacting to. The buyer stays present because the conversation keeps circling back to decisions, timing, and exposure. And I’m no longer answering questions just to prove that I belong there.
The call stops wandering. Instead of drifting into hypotheticals, it starts narrowing. What actually needs to be clearer? Where is time being lost? What feels fragile right now? Those are the things people start responding to. And that’s when the call turns back into a business conversation.
Conclusion
If you try nothing else from this post, try asking one of these questions on your next discovery call and then resist the urge to fill the silence. What tends to follow is a very different conversation. Not because the tools suddenly matter less, but because they finally show up in the right place, as support for a decision rather than a distraction from it.
And that’s when discovery stops feeling performative and starts doing its actual job.