Editor’s note: Chris Holman is a Master Certified Coach, executive coach to financial advisors, and author of the forthcoming book “Discovery Shift: Why Talking Less and Listening More Wins Business.”
You hear the phrase “discovery call” everywhere in financial advice. It gets tossed around the way a trendy bistro boasts about its “farm-to-table” salad. Never mind that the lettuce showed up in a cardboard box at dawn on a delivery truck. The label sounds elevated. The reality, in most cases, is factory-made.
And that’s the heart of the “discovery” problem. The profession has been using the wrong label for decades. Advisors aren’t actually doing discovery in their first meetings. They’re doing intake. They’re gathering data, filling software, checking boxes. Yet the meeting gets advertised as discovery, and everyone pretends the title fits.
Once you start listening closely, as we did at the Horsesmouth Discovery Lab when reviewing more than 100 advisor–prospect calls, the illusion becomes impossible to ignore. Almost none of those meetings included anything resembling discovery. They were structured, polite, efficient, and emotionally shallow.
Not malicious, just mislabeled. And the mislabeling matters, because when you think you’re already doing something well, you have no reason to improve it.
What’s actually going on in these first meetings
If you sit in on a typical first call, the pattern is predictable. Advisors ask for the basics: assets, income, retirement timelines, Social Security benefits, tax brackets, documents. They move quickly. They stay in control. They rely on the familiar script that came with their training.
That’s intake.
Discovery is something different entirely. Discovery begins the moment a client feels safe enough to reveal the truth about their relationship with money, such as the fear behind the portfolio, the resentment in a marriage, the shame around past decisions, the identity shift looming at retirement. None of that comes out in a checklist.
But because the profession has always used the word discovery, advisors assume that asking “soft questions” mixed into a data-gathering sequence qualifies as deep listening. It doesn’t. It’s intake with nicer lighting.
Why advisors cling to intake
Intake feels safer. It’s structured, predictable, and quantifiable. It gives advisors a way to demonstrate technical knowledge and maintain control of the meeting. And, if we’re honest, it eases the quiet anxiety that many advisors feel: I need to prove my value right now.
Meanwhile, the prospect is evaluating two forms of competence:
- Can you handle the technical mechanics?
- Can you understand how money works in my actual life?
Advisors are excellent at the first.
Most never learned how to do the second.
Intake dominates because the first feels concrete, while the second feels uncomfortable.
The human conversation that never happens
Here’s the bigger issue: Clients don’t make decisions based on spreadsheets. They make decisions based on emotional logic. Identity. History. Fear. Hope. Regret. Family patterns. A lifetime of messages about money, success, and self-worth.
Ask someone about retirement and you’re not asking about safe withdrawal rates. You’re asking a more vulnerable question: Who do you want to become once you stop working?
Intake never touches that.
And because it never touches that, advisors often build plans that look smart and feel hollow.
Clients admire the plan, but they don’t follow it. Not because the math is wrong, but because the plan doesn’t fit their internal story.
Intake builds a plan. Discovery builds commitment.
What mislabeling costs the profession
Calling an intake meeting a discovery call might seem harmless. It isn’t.
It causes several long-term problems:
- Advisors think they’re already doing discovery, so they never train for it.
- They treat emotional issues as technical issues.
- They solve symptoms and skip causes.
- They advise the client’s polite persona instead of the real person.
And the financial consequences are predictable. Clients delay decisions. They second-guess advice. They nod politely in meetings and then quietly do nothing.
Advisors interpret that as an education problem. It’s not. It’s an understanding problem.
If intake is the value, the robots really will win
This is the part no one wants to say out loud.
If the advisor’s core value is intake, which includes efficiency, accuracy, data, projections, then software will outpace them. Faster. Cheaper. Cleaner.
The one thing software can’t imitate is the emotional depth of a real discovery conversation. The profession’s defensible advantage is human understanding.
But you only unlock that advantage if you’re actually doing discovery, not mislabeling a data-gathering session as something deeper.
A cleaner definition
If the definition of discovery could be rewritten, it would be simple:
Discovery is when a client feels safe enough to tell the truth about money to you. And, quite possibly, to themselves.
That’s the moment everything changes. Most advisors never reach it in the first meeting. Some never reach it at all. Not because they aren’t smart, but because no one ever trained them to listen for the emotional doorway and stay one more beat before stepping past it.
If an advisor wants to shift immediately, here’s the move:
When you hear an emotional cue, don’t rush past it. Pause. Stay. Let the person go one layer deeper.
That single habit does more for trust and conviction than any perfectly worded “open-ended question.” It’s what turns a conversation from intake into genuine discovery.
The bottom line
Clients often act on advisor recommendations, and advisors quite naturally see this as success.
But action that begins outside the client is fragile. It tends to fade under stress, distraction, or competing priorities. When the advisor is the source of the momentum, the advisor also becomes responsible for keeping that momentum alive.
Discovery changes the equation. When clients reach their own understanding in the conversation and act from their own reasoning, the action has an entirely different weight to it.
It becomes owned rather than adopted. And ownership, not direction, is what drives lasting follow-through.
Thoughts to carry forward
- Software wins at efficiency and data.
- Only advisors can create real emotional understanding.
- That advantage appears only when discovery is actually discovery, not intake.