Discovery Call Questions for Energy / Utilities: A 25-Minute Playbook for Network and Asset Buyers

1. 1

   0:00–2:00 — Frame (do not re-pitch)

   "Thanks for making the time. When we spoke you said the thing that keeps coming back is unplanned distribution transformer failures clustering in heat events — that's the bit I want to dig into today, not the general tour. Fair warning on how I run these: I'm going to ask questions for the first fifteen minutes or so. I don't want to show you anything until I know whether it's relevant to your network — honestly, I'd rather tell you this isn't a fit than burn a demo slot on both of us. Still good for 25? And is there anything you want to make sure we get to, so I don't run us out of time at the end?"

2. 2

   2:00–6:00 — Open the thread (pick ONE, then shut up)

   Choose one opener. Do not stack. • "Tell me how the transformer replacement program runs today, start to finish — from how a unit gets flagged to when a truck actually goes out." • "You said last time that summer is when it hurts. What did last summer actually look like on a bad week?" • "What's made this something you're looking at this year rather than last year?" For a Vegetation Management Program Manager, swap in: "Walk me through how you build the annual cut plan — what decides which spans get the truck this cycle?" For a Manager Regulatory Affairs: "How much of last period's unplanned SAIDI ended up being excludable, and how hard was that to defend?"

3. 3

   6:00–10:00 — Layer 2: the mechanism

   You're after who touches it, which system it lives in, and where it breaks. • "Walk me through the last unit that failed unplanned. What actually happened — who saw it first, SCADA or a customer call?" • "Below the recloser, how do you find the fault? Are crews patrolling the feeder?" • "Where does condition data actually sit — is it in the asset register, in the inspection contractor's system, or in someone's spreadsheet?" • "How does a unit get onto the proactive replacement list? Who signs that off — is it a CBRM score, criticality ranking, or an engineer's judgement?" • "What's the workaround the planners have built to get around that?" Three follow-ups minimum before you move. If they say "we're basically run-to-failure with a small proactive program," the next question is not a new topic — it's "how small? What proportion of last year's replacements were planned versus emergency?"

4. 4

   10:00–14:00 — Layer 3: the cost (then 'how do you know?')

   • "What's your unplanned distribution transformer failure rate per 1,000 units running at right now?" • "And how do you know? Is that from the OMS, or is someone reconciling it by hand after the event?" • "When one of those goes at 9pm in February — what's the full cost? Emergency truck roll, overtime, the customer minutes, the pole-top fire report?" • "How many customer minutes does an average pad-mount failure on that feeder put on the board?" • "Where did unplanned SAIDI land against target last year — and what did that do to your STPIS position?" • "On the vegetation side, what's spend per line kilometre doing year on year? And what proportion of unplanned outage minutes on rural feeders is still vegetation-caused?" After a heavy answer: count to three. Say nothing. The number they weren't sure they'd give you arrives in the silence.

5. 5

   14:00–16:00 — Layer 4: the stake

   • "Who's feeling that most — is it you, the GM Operations, or the Chief Engineer?" • "Whose number does the unplanned SAIDI figure actually sit against at the exec table?" • "How many worst-served customers are you carrying on the long rural feeders, and what did GSL payments come to last year?" • "What have you committed to — is there a reliability improvement target you've put in front of the board or the regulator with a date on it?" • "If the trend looks the same going into the next reset, what's the conversation you're having then?" This is the layer that moves deals. If you leave the call with a symptom and a mechanism but no name and no date, you have notes, not a deal.

6. 6

   The minute-6 trap: 'So what do you actually do?'

   30 seconds, tied to their words, then hand the ball back: "Short version — we take loading, temperature, fault and switching history you already have and rank which specific units on a feeder are most likely to fail, so your planners aren't choosing between 4,000 pole-mounts on install date alone. But I'd be guessing at whether that's useful until I understand one more thing: when a unit does get flagged today, what has to be true before it makes the works program?" If they push a second time, give a clean 60 seconds, then: "Can I go back to the thing you said about the inspection data sitting with the contractor? That's the part I'm not clear on." Almost everyone lets you.

7. 7

   16:00–20:00 — Qualify the path (never as a checklist)

   • "If you decided this was worth doing, what actually happens next in your shop? Does it go to the asset committee, and who else gets pulled in?" • "What are the gates — type approval, OT security review, chief engineer sign-off? Which of those bite if there's no hardware involved?" • "Have you tried to fix this before? What happened to that?" (The graveyard of the condition monitoring platform bought three years ago is your real competitor.) • "What's forcing the timing — the next determination, a summer readiness review, an ombudsman escalation?" • "Is this a line item that already exists in the maintenance budget, or would it need to get created in the next submission?" • "And if you just keep doing it the current way through next summer — what happens?"

8. 8

   20:00–23:00 — Targeted relevance (90 seconds, only what they raised)

   "Two minutes on the part you raised, then I'll stop. You said the problem isn't which feeders — your engineers know the feeders — it's which of the 4,000 units on them goes first. The way that usually starts here is retrospective: your own SCADA, outage and switching records, no hardware, nothing touching the energised network, nothing on the OT side. We rank the fleet, then we compare that ranking against the units that actually failed last summer. If it just confirms what your Principal Distribution Engineer already knew, that's a cheap validation and you've lost nothing. If it flags 30 units nobody was watching, that's a different conversation — and it's evidence you can put behind a business case rather than a vendor brochure." Stop. Ask: "Does that land, or is there a piece of that you'd expect your engineers to push back on?"

9. 9

   23:00–24:00 — Playback in their words

   "Let me check I've got it. Unplanned transformer failures cluster on day three or four of a heat event, and the reason is you can see the fleet age curve but not which specific units are cooking — condition data is whatever the linesman noted on the last visual. That put you [their number] over on unplanned SAIDI last year, which you said cost you at the STPIS end, plus GSL payments on the worst-served customers out past the recloser. And the pressure's coming from your GM Operations because summer readiness gets reviewed in September. Did I miss anything, or get anything wrong?" The "or get anything wrong" is where the last hidden detail falls out. Write down exactly what they say next.

10. 10

    24:00–25:00 — Close a dated, named next step

    "Based on that, the useful next thing isn't a demo. It's 45 minutes with you, your Principal Distribution Engineer, and whoever owns the asset register — you said that's [name] — where we scope exactly which data we'd need for a retrospective run on one region's fleet. No hardware, no network connection, so none of the type approval or OT gates apply yet. I've got Tuesday at 2 or Thursday morning. Which works better?" Then confirm out loud: who's attending, what you'll cover, and what they'll bring — last two summers of unplanned transformer failures with dates, and a sample export of the asset register so you can see what condition fields actually exist. Send the invite before you hang up.

11. 11

    What goes in the CRM

    Their words, verbatim, not your paraphrase. Good: "We had eleven pad-mounts go in four days in the February event. I couldn't tell you which one was next and neither could the control room — first we knew was the call centre. That's the third summer in a row and the GM asked me in the debrief whether it was predictable." Useless: "Prospect has asset condition visibility challenges." Also capture: unplanned SAIDI vs target, transformer failure rate per 1,000 units if they gave it, the name of the failed condition monitoring platform and who bought it, the asset committee date, and when the next submission is being drafted.

1. Rep

   Thanks for the time. When we spoke you said the February heat event put more pad-mounts on the ground than you'd budgeted for. That's what I want to dig into — I'll ask a lot of questions for the first fifteen minutes and I won't show you anything until I know if it's relevant. Still good for 25?

2. Buyer

   Yes, but I'll be upfront — I've got a chief engineer who vetoes anything that goes near an energised asset without type approval, and we're two years into a five-year determination with no allowance for anything new. So I'm not sure what we're doing here.

3. Rep

   That's fair, and I'd rather know that now than at minute 24. Park the buying question for a bit — I'm genuinely trying to understand the failure pattern first. Walk me through February. What actually happened?

4. Buyer

   Four consecutive days over 40, overnight minimums never got below 27. Day three we started losing pad-mounts in the growth-corridor suburbs. Eleven units in four days, two pole-top fires, one of them next to a school. Every crew was committed and we were pulling contractors off planned work.

5. Rep

   Eleven in four days. How did you find out about each one — SCADA, or the call centre?

6. Buyer

   Below the recloser? Call centre, almost always. The control room sees the recloser operate and then infers. We send a crew to patrol the feeder to find it. On a good day that's forty minutes, on that week it was hours because there was nobody to send.

7. Rep

   So the patrol time is sitting inside your restoration estimate. What did that week do to your unplanned SAIDI?

8. Buyer

   That single event was about eighteen per cent of our unplanned minutes for the year. We tried to get part of it excluded as a major event and the regulator didn't wear all of it.

9. Rep

   And how do you know the eighteen per cent — is that out of the OMS, or is someone reconciling it after the fact?

10. Buyer

    Reconciled afterwards, by hand, by one analyst, for the STPIS submission. Which is its own problem. Look — before you go further, we bought a condition monitoring platform three years ago. Sat in a separate portal, nobody in the control room ever logged in, and the alerts were rubbish. I'm not doing that again.

11. Rep

    Good — that's the most useful thing you've said. What specifically killed it: was it that nobody trusted the alerts, or that it never got into the works program?

12. Buyer

    Both. It flagged units the engineers knew were fine, so they stopped looking. And nothing it produced ever made it into the asset register or the ADMS, so planners ignored it. Honestly, my thirty-year engineers already know which feeders are the problem.

13. Rep

    I'd expect them to. My question isn't which feeders — it's which of the four thousand units on those feeders goes first, and when. If I ran a ranked list blind against your last two summers of failures and it just matched what your Principal Distribution Engineer would have told me, would that be worth knowing, or a waste of his afternoon?

14. Buyer

    It'd be worth knowing. But our asset data is a mess — half the rural transformer records have the wrong install date and we've got no nameplate data at all on some of the older fleet.

15. Rep

    That's normal, and it's usually the reason to start rather than wait. Install date carries less signal than loading, temperature, fault history and switching records — which you do have. Realistically we'd model the portion of the fleet where the data's usable and the exercise tells you which records to fix first. What proportion of the fleet do you think has decent loading data behind it?

16. Buyer

    Metered substations, so maybe sixty per cent. The rural spurs, no.

17. Rep

    Sixty per cent is workable for a first pass. Last thing on process: if the engineers looked at that list and found it credible, what actually happens next in your shop?

18. Buyer

    It'd have to go to the asset committee, and realistically it belongs in the next submission. We start drafting the reliability chapter about eighteen months out.

19. Rep

    Then the timeline that matters isn't this quarter — it's having two summers of your own evidence sitting behind that chapter instead of a vendor's claim. Let me play back what I heard: eleven pad-mounts in four days, you can't see them below the recloser so the call centre finds them for you, eighteen per cent of annual unplanned minutes from one event, and the last platform died because it never reached the works program. Anything I got wrong?

20. Buyer

    That's about right. Add that the GM asked me in the debrief whether it was predictable and I didn't have an answer.

21. Rep

    That's the sentence that matters. So the next step: 45 minutes with you, your Principal Distribution Engineer, and whoever owns the asset register — retrospective only, your historical data, no hardware, nothing touching the OT network, so type approval doesn't come into it yet. Bring the February event log and a sample register export. Tuesday at 2, or Thursday morning?

22. Buyer

    Thursday. And bring something the engineer can pick apart — he will.

What are the best opening discovery call questions for Energy / Utilities buyers?

Open on one specific thing they already told you, not a menu. For a Head of Asset Management: "Walk me through how a transformer gets from flagged to replaced — who decides, and on what data?" For a Manager Network Performance & Reliability: "What did last summer's worst event do to your unplanned SAIDI, and how much of it did you try to exclude?" For a Vegetation Management Program Manager: "What decides which spans get the truck this cycle — condition, or the cycle?" One question, then silence. Stacking three questions lets them answer the easiest one.

How do I get past the symptom layer when a utility buyer gives me a generic answer?

Use three follow-ups on the same thread before changing subject. If they say "we're mostly run-to-failure," don't move on — ask what proportion of last year's replacements were planned versus emergency, then how a unit gets onto the proactive list, then who signs that off and against what criteria. The mechanism you're hunting for is where the data actually lives: the asset register, the inspection contractor's system, or an engineer's spreadsheet. That's the answer that tells you whether a deal exists.

Which metrics should I ask about on a discovery call with a DNSP?

Ask for the ones that carry money and get reported externally: unplanned SAIDI and SAIFI against target, STPIS position at the end of the period, unplanned distribution transformer failure rate per 1,000 units, vegetation management spend per line kilometre year on year, number of worst-served customers and GSL payments made, and capex spend against regulatory allowance. Then always ask the second beat: "How do you know?" If the number is reconciled by hand by one analyst after the event, that's a finding in itself.

How do I handle the 'we're locked into this regulatory period' objection during discovery?

Treat it as timing information, not rejection. Ask when the next submission is being drafted and who owns the reliability program business case — that's the real buying calendar, often 18 months ahead. Separately, test the opex path: work that defers transformer replacements or reduces emergency truck rolls may sit inside maintenance rather than needing new capex allowance. And make the case that starting now produces two years of the utility's own data behind the next submission, which is far stronger than a vendor claim.

Should I demo on a utility discovery call?

No — and if they ask at minute six, give 30 seconds tied to what they just said and hand the ball back. Utility buyers are being asked to expose their network, their asset data and their engineering judgement to a stranger. A demo at minute six tells them you were never going to diagnose anything. Save two minutes at 20:00 for exactly the mechanism they raised — usually a retrospective analysis on their own historical data with no hardware and no OT connection, because that's the version that clears no gates and can start immediately.

What does a good next step look like after a utility discovery call?

Never "I'll send some information." Prescribe: 45 minutes with the buyer, the Chief Engineer or Principal Distribution Engineer, and whoever owns the asset register, scoped to a retrospective run on one region's fleet. Name what they bring — the last two summers of unplanned transformer failures with dates, and a sample asset register export. Get the invite out before the call ends, and if the asset committee is the real gate, book a fifteen-minute prep call the day before it sits.

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