Get out of the abstract
Ask a buyer whether efficiency matters and you can probably guess the answer. Ask them to walk you through the last time a customer request got stuck, and you have something to work with. Someone did something. There was a delay, a workaround or a consequence. Discovery becomes useful when you can see the work.
Try: "Can you take me through the last time this happened?" Then stay with the example. Who noticed? What did they do next? Where did it slow down? Resist the urge to interrupt with the feature that fixes it. The demo can wait five minutes.
Find the consequence
A clumsy process is not automatically a buying reason. Ask what the workaround costs in time, rework, customer friction or risk. Let the buyer explain the consequence in their own terms. If they cannot put a number on it, keep the uncertainty visible. A made-up saving makes a business case look tidier and less trustworthy.
Then ask what makes this worth addressing now. There may be a deadline, a growth constraint or a change in ownership. There may also be nothing urgent at all. That is useful information, even when it does very little for this quarter's forecast.
Check that you heard it correctly
Before moving on, play back the situation: "Requests stall at approval, your team chases them manually, and the concern is what happens as volume grows. Have I understood that?" Invite correction. You are testing an understanding, not collecting agreement.
Finish by agreeing what would help the buyer assess a change. That might be a conversation with the process owner or a demonstration using their actual workflow. Write down the example, the consequence and the next step. Those three things are more useful than a CRM entry that says "great discovery call".