What types of industry trends or product focused data do you leverage to align to a pain point during the discovery process? And what do you lead with?

An interesting first question, and one that assumes pain points and value language is completely understood - Let's do this insted. I'll give you my recipe for building a best-in-class pain/discovery process that you can use to either a) create a net new discovery process or b) tweak the one you're running in service of actually helping the customer, as opposed to running the customer through a marketing approved, but irrelevant discovery call.

When creating a pain narrative that fosters a truly valuable conversation with a prospect, I always recommend focusing on understanding three key areas, in this order: the category, the language, and then the customer. Let me explain why.

Understanding the Category

First, why understand the customer last? It might sound counterintuitive, but when entering a new sales environment, the goal is to leverage trends and data effectively. Starting at the category level reveals general customer sentiment and overarching market dynamics that are otherwise easy to overlook.

When researching a category, keep it broad. Understand the general language used and write down every emotionally charged phrase you come across. This is the key to crafting discovery questions that drive high-value conversations, prompting the prospect to acknowledge their challenges: "Yes, I do have those problems. Yes, I want to solve them."

Some helpful resources include:

• Gartner Magic Quadrant: It’s a staple for understanding vendor positioning, though analyst biases exist. Focus on the patterns in the language analysts use to differentiate vendors, not on any one company's score.

• Forrester Wave Report: Forrester’s insights often forecast upcoming market shifts. Their analysis can help you anticipate what pains and language might resonate with buyers in the near future.

• G2 Crowd: This is an effective way to understand customer pain through real reviews. Ignore the fluff and focus on strategic commentary that qualifies why reviewers like or dislike certain vendors.

Understanding the Language

Once you’ve absorbed information from analysts and user reviews, it’s time to develop a "Pain Menu"—a slide that showcases all potential pains that could be impacting your customer. The pain menu is a powerful tool for discovery because it gets the prospect talking, but make sure it’s concise and tailored to your audience.

Here’s where it gets interesting: If you can present a compounding narrative—highlighting how different operational or tactical pains roll up into a bigger strategic challenge—you’ll get a richer discovery outcome. For example, detailing how disjointed sales processes hinder scaling can connect to broader themes of strategic inefficiency. This demonstrates that you understand both the practical and the big-picture implications of the problem, building credibility.

Augmenting with Data

Emotionally charged language draws prospects in, but you need data to substantiate the value of addressing the pain. My advice? Keep it simple. Find something that supports a 10x ROI—particularly in the current environment where financial leaders crave realistic yet compelling metrics.

Use data to align with a strategic initiative, like "We’ll help you scale efficiently, enabling a 2026 at full revenue productivity." You can present "worst case, most likely, and best case" ROI scenarios. This helps financial decision-makers see that even the worst case justifies the investment. Make sure the worst-case scenario is both realistic and favorable, and position it as being tied to customer adoption success. For example: "Our worst case happens when customers don’t engage fully with our professional services and enablement. We’ve made big improvements in how we support adoption, including x, y, z."

Finally, Understanding the Customer

Finally, dig into understanding the customer. I leave this for last because it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operational pains during customer interviews. To build a great pain menu, focus on developing pain content that connects the operational layer with the strategic vision of the business.

Use customer interviews to pressure test your language. Test your pain statements with different personas and try to bucket the winning language with the appropriate titles—this ensures your discovery process resonates across both operational and strategic layers.

I'll start with the 2nd question first...

Personally, I coach my team that leading with a well positioned "suggestive discovery" question is the most effective at opening a conversation focused to get to pain and uncover value. At AlphaSense, that may sound something like...

"Typically when I speak with other EVPs of M&A, they'll usually come to us because they are are either struggling with ensuring they do not 1) miss potential targets that fit within their investment thesis, 2) overlook critical information as part of the due diligence process, or 3) lose on the right opportunities because they are too slow to act compared to the competition. I'm curious to understand to what extent each of those challenges resonate with you?"

Let's break that apart into it's important parts...

• Social Proof: by starting with something like "typically when I speak with other [insert title]" it creates the perception that this is a regular type of conversation in my line of work, and I'm creditable in working through these situations

• Focus on pain: by starting with typical problems that other similar individuals are "struggling with", I'm immediately bringing the focus of the conversation into pain

• Relevant pain: then I proceed to mention 3 relevant pain points that I know is 1) common to my prospect and 2) that my solution can solve, and I do so in a way that invokes "negative language". Words like "miss", "overlook", and "lose" are all negative words that an individual wants to avoid

• Open ended question: Finally, I close with an open ended question the turns the conversation over to the prospect the share which of their struggles relate, and even opens them up to introduce a new struggle that I may not have already listed

Once you then understand their pain through the "suggestive discovery" framework, you can use whatever product focused data or industry trends to effectively craft a way to continue the conversation. Supplemented by product value propositions, use-cases, success stories, etc.