Why Discovery Calls Are Getting Shorter, and What That Means for Reps

Five years ago, a standard enterprise discovery call ran forty-five minutes to an hour. Today, plenty of buyers across ANZ are pushing back on anything longer than twenty, and some are declining a discovery call altogether in favour of a written brief or a short async video. This shift has crept up on a lot of sales teams, and reps who were trained on the longer format are finding their usual approach doesn’t fit the time they’re actually being given anymore.

This isn’t buyers being difficult. It’s a direct consequence of how much research they can now do before ever speaking to a rep, and it changes what discovery is actually for.

Buyers Arrive Already Informed

The traditional discovery call assumed the buyer knew relatively little about your product and category, and a large chunk of the call was spent establishing basic context: what the product does, who else uses it, how pricing works. That assumption doesn’t hold anymore. Buyers have typically read the website, watched a demo video, checked review sites, and increasingly used AI tools to summarise your positioning against competitors before they ever get on a call.

This means a rep opening a call with “so tell me a bit about what you’re looking for” is often asking a buyer to repeat information they’ve already made available or could reasonably expect the rep to have found. It reads as either laziness or a scripted process the rep hasn’t adapted, and both cost credibility in the first ninety seconds of the call.

The reps handling this shift well have restructured their opening from information-gathering to hypothesis-testing. Rather than asking open questions to discover basic context, they arrive with a specific, informed hypothesis about the buyer’s situation and use the call to confirm, correct, or sharpen it. “Based on what I’m seeing, it looks like your evaluation is going to hinge on integration complexity more than price, is that a fair read?” does more work in one sentence than five minutes of generic open questions, and it signals competence immediately.

Shorter Doesn’t Mean Less Depth, It Means Less Waste

The mistake some reps make in response to shrinking call length is trying to cram the same volume of questions into a smaller window, which just produces a rushed, checklist-feeling call. The better response is recognising that a chunk of the traditional discovery framework, background context, basic use case explanation, general company information, can now happen before the call through research, forms, or a short pre-call questionnaire, freeing the actual call time for the parts that genuinely require a live conversation: reading tone, probing on ambiguous answers, and building the kind of rapport that written exchange can’t replicate.

A well-run twenty-minute call that spends its full time on decision criteria, internal politics, and specific pain points will surface more useful information than a forty-five minute call that spends fifteen minutes on background the rep should have already known.

What This Means for Qualification

Shorter discovery windows put more pressure on qualification accuracy, because there’s less time to course-correct a poorly qualified conversation mid-call. Reps need to be more deliberate about which questions actually predict deal outcome and prioritise those first, rather than working through a fixed script top to bottom regardless of what the call reveals early on.

This is where frameworks like MEDDIC earn their keep in a compressed format. Instead of methodically working through every letter in order, strong reps identify which one or two elements are most uncertain or highest-risk for a given deal, based on pre-call research, and spend the majority of live call time there. If the economic buyer is already clearly identified through prior context, spending five minutes confirming it again is wasted time that could go toward understanding decision process, which is often the least visible and highest-risk element in ANZ’s more committee-driven enterprise deals.

The ANZ Context Adds a Layer

ANZ buyers, particularly in mid-market and enterprise segments, tend to value directness and dislike feeling like they’re being taken through a sales process rather than having a genuine conversation. A rep who treats a shortened call as an excuse to speed-run a script rather than adapt it tends to land worse here than in markets more tolerant of an obviously process-driven approach. The compression has to come with genuine adaptation, not just faster delivery of the same generic structure.

There’s also a practical timezone and access reality specific to this market. With a smaller pool of decision-makers and tighter calendars, especially across dual AU/NZ or AU/Singapore remits, getting even twenty minutes with the right stakeholder can be harder to secure than in larger markets where more people hold adjacent buying influence. That scarcity raises the cost of a wasted or poorly structured call significantly, because the second chance isn’t guaranteed to come easily.

Adjusting Discovery Structure for a Shorter Format

Teams adapting well to this shift are generally doing a few consistent things. They’re moving background and context-gathering to pre-call async touchpoints, a short form, a targeted pre-read, or research the rep does independently. They’re training reps to open with an informed point of view rather than a blank-slate question, which immediately signals preparation. And they’re being ruthless about prioritising the two or three highest-risk unknowns in a deal rather than working through a full generic discovery checklist regardless of relevance.

None of this means discovery matters less. If anything, it matters more, because there’s less room to recover from a poorly run call, and buyers who’ve already invested time researching independently expect the live conversation to add real value rather than repeat what they already know. The reps and teams treating this shift as an opportunity to sharpen their process, rather than a constraint to complain about, are the ones seeing conversion rates hold steady or improve even as average call length keeps shrinking.

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