What makes a good discovery call?

One thing above all: the rep diagnoses the problem before pitching anything. That means uncovering the buyer’s current state, quantifying the impact of the gap, getting to the root cause, and establishing a reason to change now. A call full of good rapport and a clean demo that never named a quantified problem is a call that will slip.

How does Keenan score my discovery call?

Paste the transcript and Keenan scores it against the Gap Selling method, checking discovery depth, impact quantification, root cause, stakeholder coverage, and next-step ownership. You get a composite score and the one gap doing the most damage, in about a minute.

Why is a general model a poor judge of a sales call?

General models summarise. They tell you what was said, not what was missing. Ask one to review a call and it praises rapport and lists the topics covered. It cannot reliably tell you that the rep never quantified the gap, because it has no method to score against. Keenan has.

Do I need the recording, or just the transcript?

On this page you paste the transcript. On a Platform seat you can upload the audio or video and skip the paste entirely.

Keenan is a coach in the Replicate Labs harness, built on the Gap Selling and Gap Prospecting methodology created by Keenan, the author of Gap Selling. He coaches reps on real work: discovery calls, cold email, and live deals, by voice.

Yes, for three scores here. After that the breakdown is a call: Keenan walks the transcript with you moment by moment. Recording upload and the voice breakdown sit under a Platform seat.

Gap Score · specimen call

57 of 100. Found the problem, never made it cost anything.

Keenan · scored on Gap Selling

Biggest gap: no number on the impact, so no reason to move now.

Score my discovery call · for AEs and the managers who coach them

Was that discovery, or a demo? Keenan scores the call on Gap Selling.

Keenan wrote Gap Selling. Paste the transcript of a call that felt good and he reads it the way the buyer lived it, scores it out of 100 against the method, and names the moment it turned into a pitch. Three scores, no signup.

Score my discovery call Score a cold email instead

Anonymised before he reads it. Names, companies and contacts stripped in memory, never stored, never used to train any AI.

Paste your call transcript below. Pick a typical discovery call, the kind you run every week. Sending cold emails too? Score one instead

Got the recording instead? On a Platform seat you can upload the audio or video and skip the paste.

Anonymised before he reads it. Names, companies, and contact details are stripped in memory and never stored. Not used to train any AI. Privacy policy.

What Keenan looks for

Six things a diagnosis depends on.

The score is fidelity to Gap Selling, the method Keenan wrote for finding out what is going wrong in the buyer’s business before anyone opens a deck. Below, a specimen call marked on the six principles. The live score breaks them into nine weighted dimensions.

Specimen call, marked for scale. Yours is scored live above. Gap Score

57/100

Symptom-level

Warm call, good questions, the buyer named "slow onboarding" and the rep took it as the problem. Nobody put a number on what slow costs, so nobody had a reason to move this quarter.

Score yours

Diagnose before you prescribe78

Discovery is diagnosis. If you are pitching before you understand their world, you are guessing.
Find the problem, not the symptom64

"Onboarding is slow" is a symptom. A missed number is a problem. Peel until you hit the business outcome that is going wrong.
Get to the root cause41

Know why the problem exists, the controllable driver in their people, process, or tech. Treat the symptom and it grows back.
Make the impact hurtBiggest gap32

Put a number on what the problem costs today and what it compounds to if nothing changes. No impact, no urgency, no deal.
Let them do the talking71

The buyer should talk more than you. Ask open, layered questions, and never bank a polite yes as a real one.
Land a real next yes55

Leave with a specific, buyer-owned, time-bound commitment. A recap email is only a receipt.

After the score · Coach

The breakdown is a call. He walks the transcript with you.

The score names the gap. On a seat, Keenan takes the call apart with you out loud: the line where the buyer handed you a symptom, the question that would have turned it into a number, and the next yes you should have left with. If you cannot talk, type.

Upload the recording. Gong, Fathom, Fireflies or the file itself. No pasting.
Rerun the moment as a roleplay. A buyer who holds the line, built from your personas, scored against the same method.
Every call after it, scored. One drill at a time, until the impact question is a habit.

Platform: managers see the pattern across the team, never the transcript

Discovery call · 14:20 · Jamie Okafor · Ops DirectorHonestly, onboarding is slow, but we get there in the end. It is fine.

Keenan · Make the impact hurt32/100You took "slow" as the problem and moved to the demo. "Fine" was the moment to ask what it costs.

0numbers on the impact in a 41-minute call. No cost, no reason to move this quarter.

It felt like a good call.

Most calls that slip felt good in the room. The buyer was friendly, the questions flowed and the demo landed. A general model reviewing the transcript praises the rapport and lists the topics. Keenan looks for what was never said.

01
A symptom taken as the problem.
"Onboarding is slow" is what the buyer said. What is going wrong in the business because of it never came up.
The deal rests on a complaint nobody costed.
02
No number on the impact.
Nobody asked what a late start costs a month, in her figures. Without it, doing nothing is free.
No cost of inaction, no reason to move this quarter.
03
A polite yes banked as a real one.
"Send me the deck and I’ll loop in the team" ended the call. Nobody owns it and nothing is dated.
The next step is a receipt, and the deal goes quiet.

Leaderboard

The sharpest discovery calls, scored by Keenan

Top the board, win the signed set.

The sharpest discovery call and the sharpest cold email each win a signed set of Keenan’s three books: Gap Selling, Gap Prospecting and Gap Enablement. Whoever is on top when the competition closes takes the set.

The board is open.

No entries yet. Score your discovery call and opt in to take the top spot.

There is a cold email board too

The same coach, judged blind.

14 of 15

Blind verdicts favoured Keenan over five frontier models on the one job we have published so far, a cold email written from one brief. The judges were five models that are not ours, each reading as three different buyers. The frontier models had no system prompt; Keenan ran as it ships. There is no published call study yet, so read this number as a result about email. The call scorer is the same coach on Gap Selling.

Read the study

dimensions on the sheet, nine in the live score

The sheet above shows the six principles. The scorer reads nine weighted dimensions, from diagnose-before-prescribe to the next yes, and returns a line on each.

The live scorer · call mode · Gap Selling

free scores here, then the coaching

Keenan scores the calls you bring and walks them with you. On a Platform seat he does it by voice and rebuilds the moment as a roleplay against a buyer who holds the line.

Three scores per visitor · no signup

A rep, asked the basics

Rep

He asked me questions I couldn’t answer. Basic ones. The kind that make you realise you’ve been guessing at things you should actually know. Humbling. Useful. Worth every minute.

Lee ChandlerSales Professional

Bring the call that felt good. Keenan will tell you what was missing.

Three transcripts here, no signup. After that the breakdown is a call: on a Platform seat Keenan walks the recording with you out loud and reruns the moment against a buyer who holds the line. Or talk to Keenan about the deal that went quiet after it.

Bring us a live deal