# Marcus Delgado, VP of Sales at Fieldvine (B2B field-ops SaaS, ~90 employees) — read of Discovery Call AI, May 6 2026

> 14 years carrying bags and leading reps, currently managing a 9-person inside sales team that runs roughly 60 discovery calls a week. Already on Gong. Already on Salesforce. Already on Outreach. My stack is heavy enough.

## How I got here

Our SDR-to-SQL conversion dropped four points last quarter and our Head of RevOps pulled a Gong sample and basically proved that our reps ask two questions per call instead of six. I went down a rabbit hole Tuesday afternoon Googling "AI discovery call coaching tools gong alternative" and this showed up somewhere around the third or fourth result. I clicked because the title matched exactly what I was looking for, not because anything about it stood out.

## What I clicked first

"Turn Discovery Calls Into Closed Deals" is a fine headline. It's not embarrassing. It's also the headline I'd write if I had fifteen minutes and a template. The subhead -- "AI-powered discovery call guidance that helps your sales team uncover customer needs, build trust, and move deals forward" -- tells me approximately nothing I couldn't have guessed before I arrived.

What actually stopped my scroll for a second was "Proven to increase close rates by 23% in 60 days." That's a specific number with a specific timeframe. That caught my eye. Then I kept reading and found zero support for it. No link. No "based on X customers." No footnote. That number is doing a lot of work on this page and it's standing completely alone.

## Where I paused

The "Built by Wishdeal Studio" line at the bottom. That's the thing I'd want to understand before anything else. Is this a dedicated product company or is this one of several tools coming out of a studio that also builds other things? I'm not saying studio-built products are bad. But if I'm going to ask my reps to install something that sits on top of their live calls -- real-time, in their ear, during a conversation with a prospect -- I need to know there's a team whose entire job is this product and whose company does not go away if the studio pivots. That line made me feel like I was buying a side project.

## What I distrusted

Besides the naked 23% claim: the feature list reads like it was written to cover a checklist, not to explain a real workflow. "AI scores on discovery depth, rapport, and close-readiness" -- what does that mean, operationally? How does a model score rapport? Is that NLP sentiment? Talk-to-listen ratio? I've seen Gong do this for three years and I still debate with my team about whether the scores mean anything. This page acts like that's a solved problem.

"No dropped calls, no excuses." That's in the Mobile App section. It's punchy but it's also the kind of copy that makes me think someone was riffing on a draft at 11pm. It addresses nothing I was worried about.

Also: no customer logos, no quotes, no names, no numbers that aren't the 23% claim. Not one. For a product selling into sales teams -- people who make their living reading buying signals -- the absence of social proof is loud.

## What would convince me

One case study, written like a story, not a stat sheet. I want to know: what was the team doing before, what specifically changed when they started using this, who pushed back internally and why, and what did the numbers look like at 30 days vs 90. Give me a real sales leader's name and title and company. If I can Google that person and they exist, I'll take the 23% seriously.

Alternatively: a 10-minute Loom from a rep who uses it daily. Not a polished demo. A real call review showing the AI prompts firing, what the rep did with them, and what the score looked like after. That would do more than any feature bullet.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. How does this layer on top of Gong? We already record and transcribe. Does this replace it, compete with it, or bolt onto it? If I'm paying for both I need a reason.

2. The 23% close rate improvement -- what's the sample behind that? How many teams, what was the baseline, did they also change anything else during those 60 days?

3. Who built this and how many people are on the product full-time? I saw "Wishdeal Studio" at the bottom and I want to understand the company structure before I put this in front of my reps.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The problem this solves is real and I have that problem right now. But the page gives me nothing to act on except a phone number I don't trust yet. If someone at the company sent me a short personal note that answered question two above, I'd reply.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-06. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*