Account executive · Discovery
Brief
“Thursday discovery call with the VP of Customer Support at a 300-person e-commerce company. They use Zendesk and said on a podcast that their ticket backlog doubles every holiday season. They are wary of AI chatbots after a bad pilot last year. Goal: agree to a scoped pilot conversation with their operations lead.”
Illustrative buyer setup
- Title
- E-commerce Support VP: Holiday Backlog Discovery
- Category
- Discovery
- Difficulty
- Hard (6-minute call limit)
- Persona
- VP Customer Support, mid-market e-commerce
- Opening line
- “I’ve got twenty minutes. Fair warning, our last AI pilot was a mess.”
- Hidden pain
- Seasonal contractors take weeks to ramp, so backlog builds before they are useful
- Objections
- “We tried a bot already.” “Zendesk has AI add-ons.” “Nothing new before our Q4 freeze.”