Insight7 Partners with UT Dallas to Advance Sales Discovery Education With AI
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Kehinde Fatosa - 10 min read
DALLAS, TX — A new partnership between Insight7 and the Center for Professional Sales at the University of Texas at Dallas is transforming how students learn sales discovery—proving that teaching better questions creates better business professionals.
Teaching Discovery, Not Scripts
Professor Howard Dover’s program challenges 60-80 students each semester to conduct deep discovery interviews with executives across America—with no product to sell. Armed with 19 carefully crafted questions, students explore how businesses operate, what challenges executives face, and where opportunities lie in the current market.
By their eighth interview, students ask fundamentally different questions than in their first. The transformation happens across four dimensions:
Building Curiosity: Students learn that the first answer is rarely the complete answer. Through repeated executive interactions, they develop the instinct to probe deeper, ask meaningful follow-ups, and pursue insights beyond what’s immediately obvious.
Developing Business Acumen: Students immerse themselves in how executives think and speak about their businesses. This exposure builds a vocabulary and conceptual framework that will serve them whether they become salespeople or business leaders.
Analyzing Market Trends: Conducting hundreds of interviews creates a unique vantage point. Students begin recognizing patterns across industries – emerging challenges, shifting priorities, and opportunities that individual conversations might miss.
Data Synthesis: The course teaches students to move beyond collecting interviews to actually synthesizing them. Using AI tools, they learn to spot themes, track changes over time, and extract actionable insights from large conversation datasets.
“We’re not just teaching students to make sales calls,” Dover explains. “We’re teaching them curiosity and business acumen through deep discovery with no product attached.”
The result is transformative: students don’t just learn techniques – they fundamentally change how they think about business conversations and what questions are worth asking.
The Scale Challenge
Each semester generates 500+ executive interviews. The problem? Most AI analysis tools fail beyond 15-20 documents.
“The software told us it was analyzing all 500 interviews,” Dover explains. “It wasn’t. Our students were doing the work, but we couldn’t give them the full picture of what they’d learned.”
This limitation extends beyond academia. “Most companies are focused on compliance checks but the real opportunity is aggregating what customers are actually telling you across all your conversations. That intelligence is sitting there, but it’s trapped.”
The Solution
The partnership enables processing 200+ interviews simultaneously, tracking how student questioning evolves and market insights shift over time. Twelve student teams per semester now access research-grade analysis tools.
For organizations with thousands of customer conversations, the infrastructure is finally catching up. The question is whether teams will use that capability to go deeper – uncovering patterns hidden across hundreds of discovery conversations.
About Insight7
Insight7 enables organizations to extract actionable insights from customer and sales discovery conversations at scale.
About UT Dallas Center for Professional Sales
The Center prepares students for sales careers through experiential learning, including executive discovery interviews.
