Most discovery calls run through a dozen questions that feel productive, fill the time, and change nothing. Five specific questions move a sponsor toward a yes, because each one closes off a way these deals stall: an unclear metric, an undefined win, a repeated mistake, a guessed-at audience, a budget number nobody’s willing to say out loud. Ask these five and you leave the call knowing whether a proposal is worth writing, and exactly what it needs to say to get a signature. Skip any one of them and you’re building that proposal on a gap the sponsor already told you about, if you’d asked.
What are your sales goals this quarter, and what’s standing in the way of hitting your sales metrics?
The generic version of this question, “what are your marketing goals,” gets you a vague answer: brand awareness, community goodwill, being seen as a good corporate citizen. Ask about sales goals and the roadblock specifically, and you get the number someone in that building is being held to, plus the reason they haven’t hit it yet. That’s the problem the sponsorship has to solve. A property that hears “we need to grow revenue in the northeast fifteen percent this year, and our sales team can’t get past the gatekeeper at three of our top accounts” has a specific opening to build toward, something “brand awareness” never hands you. Every question after this one is either building on that first answer or wasting the sponsor’s time.
Exactly what metrics do you use to determine how a marketing campaign performed?
Every property asks about audience. Almost none ask how the sponsor grades a win. Different sponsors in the same industry get judged on completely different things: leads captured, social impressions, foot traffic at a single activation. A regional bank sponsoring the same festival as a beverage brand is chasing account sign-ups, not eyeballs, and a proposal that leads with impressions numbers is answering a question that bank never asked. Ask it in these exact words, because a specific “what metrics” question gets you a specific number, and a number is what the proposal needs to move. Build a proposal around the wrong metric and it gets rejected in a budget meeting by someone who never saw your deck, because it doesn’t move the number that department is judged on.
What have you tried before to hit your sales goals that worked, and what didn’t work?
This surfaces two things: what already has internal buy-in, so you can build on it instead of replacing it, and what already failed, so you don’t propose a version of the same idea and get filed under “we tried that” without a second look. It also tends to surface a name, the person who championed the thing that flopped, sat through the fallout, and will be in the room when your proposal gets reviewed. Skip this question and you find out about that history in the budget meeting, from someone other than the sponsor, when it’s too late to do anything about it.
Tell me about your target market, and what actions are you trying to get them to take?
This question does something research alone can’t. It gets the sponsor’s own language for their own customer, plus the specific action they want that customer to take: buy, sign up, switch brands, show up to something. You could pull a demographic straight off a media kit, but you’d still be guessing at the verb. A property’s job is moving a customer from one action to another, and that bridge doesn’t get built without knowing which action the sponsor is chasing. A demographic alone doesn’t tell you what to build. Knowing whether the sponsor wants that demographic walking onto a car lot, downloading an app, or switching insurance providers tells you exactly what to build.
I believe I can help you solve this problem, and I want to put together something for you. What budget range do you want me to stay within?
Ask this last. Asked in the first five minutes, before any diagnosis, this sounds like every other property that opened with “what’s your sponsorship budget,” and sponsors learn fast that a full answer gets a bigger ask, so they lowball it or dodge entirely. Asked here, after you’ve repeated their goals back to them correctly and told them you can help, the same words land as a planning question from someone who already has a plan. Most sponsors will give you a working number worth building around, because the alternative is naming no range at all and getting a proposal built to a guess.
Ask a version of all five and you get a clear read on the fit before you’ve written a word. Roughly two out of three discovery meetings surface a problem serious enough to end things right there, before a proposal ever gets written. That’s not wasted time. That’s the questions doing their job for free, on a call, instead of doing it expensively, after a proposal gets rejected.
What changes for a sponsor when you ask these five instead of pitching
A marketing director sits through calls where the caller already assumes what she needs before asking her anything. When someone names the metric she’s judged on, asks what she’s already tried, and asks what action she’s trying to drive, she isn’t being pitched. She’s being interviewed by someone building a case for her internally, and she takes notes and flags it for her VP as worth a follow-up. That flag is what gets a proposal opened on a Tuesday afternoon instead of left for budget season.
The budget question lands as a planning conversation for her, because she just heard her own goals stated back accurately and knows exactly what the number needs to cover. That’s the number she’s willing to defend to her own boss.
Why most discovery calls ask the wrong questions
Most callers default to logistics: how many attendees, what’s included in the package, when’s the deadline, how many past sponsors renewed. Those questions are for a sponsor who already said yes. Asking them on a discovery call skips the decision and jumps straight to paperwork, which is how properties end up sending proposals to sponsors who were never going to say yes, because nobody asked the five questions that would have surfaced the mismatch in the first place. The proposal gets written, the sponsor takes two weeks to reply with a no, and the property calls that a slow month instead of calling it what it was: a discovery call that never happened, followed by a proposal that never had a chance.
Pull up your notes from the last discovery call you ran. Count how many of these five questions you asked out loud and got a straight answer to. If it’s five, you know exactly what belongs in the proposal, in what order, and what number to put on it. If it’s fewer, you’re about to write one on a hunch, and the sponsor is about to find that out before you do.
