If you want the single highest-leverage area where Product Marketing can move revenue, it's discovery. Not the pitch deck. Not the battlecard. Discovery. Most deals are won or lost here, and most organizations haven't figured out how to make it work.
I've seen this at Kustomer. The symptoms are always the same: low conversion from first call to second call, deals stalling in early pipeline stages, and sales leaders blaming lead quality when the real problem is how those leads are being engaged.
The Five-Question Problem
When I started listening to Gong recordings at Kustomer, I noticed a consistent pattern. Reps opened every call with the same five vague questions: "What's your biggest challenge?" "How many agents do you have?" "What tools are you using today?" "What's your timeline?" "Who else is involved?" All five in rapid succession, surface-level answers, then straight into a product demo.
These questions can work. Asked without structure, without depth, and without any connection to the value narrative the rep is about to deliver, they leave the prospect feeling interrogated and the rep walking away with generic information that doesn't help them tailor the rest of the conversation.
Building the First Call Deck
I built a First Call Deck that wove discovery questions throughout the conversation, interleaved with value. The structure: open with a brief point of view on a market trend, ask a targeted question tied to that trend, share a relevant proof point or customer example, ask a deeper follow-up, repeat.
This does three things. It makes the conversation feel natural because the prospect is responding to ideas, not answering a checklist. It surfaces richer information because the questions are contextual. And every question maps back to a specific value proposition the rep can reinforce in the demo or proposal.
The Qualification Guide
After the first call, a rep needs to answer one question: should we invest time in this deal? I built a Qualification Guide around three dimensions: ICP fit (size, industry, use case), readiness to buy (defined timeline, budget, decision process), and pain points mapped to value prop (do their stated challenges match what our platform actually solves?).
It was a thinking tool that helped reps make more consistent, evidence-based decisions about where to invest time. It also reduced deals that progressed deep into pipeline before stalling, because reps were catching disqualifying signals earlier.
Why PMM Owns This
There's a common assumption that discovery and qualification belong to Sales Ops. PMM sits at the intersection of market intelligence, competitive positioning, and customer insight, the three inputs that make discovery effective. Sales Ops can build the process and the CRM fields. PMM provides the substance: the questions to ask, the value narratives to weave in, the qualification criteria that separate a strong opportunity from a weak one.
Everything I built for discovery came from our win/loss interview data, Gong call analysis, and Voice of Customer research. The questions in the First Call Deck weren't invented in a brainstorm; they were reverse-engineered from the conversations that led to our best outcomes.
Measuring the Impact
Enablement only matters if you measure whether it works. We tracked adoption and outcomes. Adoption: how many reps were using the First Call Deck and Qualification Guide, with coaching follow-up when usage lagged. Outcomes: progression rates from first call to second call, average deal cycle length, win rate by stage.
Progression rates improved as reps had more productive first conversations. The more important outcome was qualitative: sales leadership shifted their perception of PMM from "the team that makes decks" to "the team that helps us win." That shift in perception changed what we were able to build together.
The Enablement Ecosystem
The First Call Deck and Qualification Guide are part of a broader system: competitive battlecards, vertical talk tracks, ongoing feedback loops between PMM and Sales, an objection handling guide. Each asset reinforces the others.
Before you build any of it, go sit in on ten sales calls. Listen for where conversations break down. That's where your highest-leverage opportunity lives, almost always in discovery.