Every rep prepping for Thursday’s discovery call does the same thing. Read the website. Skim the funding announcement. Ask an AI assistant what the company does. That research is free, and it comes back nearly identical for every vendor calling that account this week. It wins you nothing.
What nobody else has is the private half. Which of your use cases have actually closed in accounts like this one. What those deals quantified. What buyers in these titles raised on past calls, and the objections that came back. That lives in your value framework and your closed business cases, and until now it was not something you could pull up ten minutes before a call.
Value Discovery Prep is how you pull it. You connect Minoa to Claude or Glean once, then ask for prep on the account. Minoa returns a brief: a point of view to open with, two or three hypotheses with the evidence behind each, the questions that test them, and figures from closed-won deals you can actually quote.
What is in it for you
A defensible hypothesis, not more context
You walk in with a claim about their business, grounded in deals your team already closed. Not a company summary the buyer already knows.
Questions rooted in your value framework
The questions come from the use cases you actually sell, so the answers drop straight into a business case instead of a notes doc.
Numbers you can put on the table
Every figure carries how many deals sit behind it and whether the cohort matched this segment. If it does not carry both, it does not get shown.
Ten minutes of prep, not ninety
No blank page. No hunting through old decks for the one account that looked like this one.
This runs on the Minoa MCP server, which inherits your role. Prep reads your value framework, your accounts, and the deals you already have access to. It never shows you a colleague’s deal you could not open in the app.
Connect Minoa to your assistant
One-time setup. Five minutes.1
Add the Minoa connector
In Claude, go to Settings > Connectors, click Add, and enter
https://mcp.minoa.io. There is a one-click version on the Claude setup page that pre-fills it for you.2
Sign in with your own Minoa account
Claude redirects you to Minoa. Sign in, then click Authorize. You sign in as you, not as a shared bot, so every action is logged under your name and scoped to your access.
3
Confirm it worked
Ask “what business cases do I have open right now?” If your real deals come back, you are connected.
Run the prep
Ask for it in plain language. No commands, no syntax.1
Give the website, not just the name
Ferrari.com beats “Ferrari”. Name matching is exact and fails quietly, so a real company can come back looking like a company nobody has ever sold to. The domain is what ties the brief to your existing account and its deal history.2
Name who is on the call and what they do
Titles unlock what buyers in those roles have historically prioritized in your deals. “VP Engineering and their Director of Procurement” produces a different brief than no attendees at all.
3
Say what you actually want out of the call
“What should I open with” and “what are their likely pain points” and “which use case should I lead with” pull different things forward. Ask for the one you need.
Read the brief in this order
What comes back is written for someone reading it on the way into a room, not a research report to settle in with.
Start at the last row. A brief that admits it has thin data on this segment is telling you which hypothesis to test first, and that is the cheapest question you will ask all week.
In the call
Three moves, in this order.- Open with the point of view, then stop talking. A specific claim invites a correction. A company summary invites a nod.
- Put a number down and ask them to fix it. “Teams your size usually tell us this runs around twelve minutes a contract. What is it for you?” A buyer correcting your number is a buyer validating your number, and it costs them thirty seconds.
- Bring three questions, not eleven. A call where you test three hypotheses and understand why one was wrong beats a call where you worked through a list.
Turn the call into a business case
The point of grounding discovery in your value framework is that the answers land somewhere. They do.1
Correct what you got wrong
Which hypothesis survived contact, which one died, what nobody predicted. Say it back to your assistant or record it on the deal.
2
Build the case on what they confirmed
Ask for a business case for the account. Minoa recommends use cases based on what wins in similar deals, adds them, and drafts the value hypothesis. See Create a Value Hypothesis.
3
Record where every number came from
“Their VP Legal Ops said 12 minutes per contract on the September 18 call.” That input becomes traceable rather than plausible, and it holds up when the CFO asks.
Known limits
Worth knowing before you rely on it in front of a customer.- Thin tenant data means thin sections. If your workspace has few closed business cases in this segment, the brief says so rather than inventing a benchmark. That is the behavior you want.
- It writes briefs, not documents. Prep returns a written brief in chat. To produce a shareable document, build the business case and generate from the deal page.
- No file upload over MCP. Your assistant can read a local file and write values into Minoa, but it cannot hand Minoa the file. Upload it to Deal Context to keep it with the deal.
- Editing the value framework stays admin-only. Prep reads the framework. It does not change it. See Permissions and Governance.
Key takeaways
- Public research is table stakes. Your closed-won deals are the part a competitor cannot get.
- Lead with the domain. Name matching fails quietly and costs you the whole deal history.
- Names and titles sharpen the brief. Tell it who is in the room.
- The question list is the deliverable. Everything above it is the reasoning.
- Read “what is not known” first. It points at the hypothesis worth testing.
- Never forward the brief. Internal document. Generate a value hypothesis for the buyer.