Andy NearyI help insurance professionals turn brand awareness into business growth.

The secret to running a successful discovery meeting.

30 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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1:03

In this segment, Andy Neary explains the core purpose of a discovery meeting: to determine whether a prospect is a good fit, even if that means disqualifying them. He stresses the importance of setting clear expectations about the meeting’s agenda and next steps, and of explicitly identifying the true decision makers. Neary warns against presenting proposals to individuals without decision‑making authority, noting that doing so dramatically reduces the chance of winning the business. The advice is practical, aimed at sales professionals who want to run efficient, outcome‑focused discovery calls.

Chapters

Your job in this meeting is to qualify or disqualify. If you walk out of this discovery meeting feeling like it's not a good fit, that's okay. Set clear expectations. Make the promise of what you're going to talk about in the meeting and what's going to happen next. Players. You need to identify who the key decision makers are. There is a chance, especially in a discovery meeting, that you are not talking to the actual decision makers. It happens once in a while that you, conduct that discovery meeting with somebody from their team whose job is to be there to fact-fund. You have to identify who the decision makers are, even if they're not in that meeting right now, because you must make it clear that you are not going to be proposing your services and making the ask to get hired if those decision makers are not involved. If you're putting a proposal in front of somebody who is not in a decision-making capability, who's going to be sharing your information with the final decision makers, the odds of you winning that business are extremely low.