How to Run an Expert Call Program for Commercial Due Diligence — The Client-Side Playbook

There are plenty of guides out there about expert calls — almost all of them are written by expert networks telling you how great expert calls are, or written for the experts themselves explaining how to behave on a call. Arches Global, for example, recently published a workflow guide focused entirely on pre- and during-call tips for the expert, not the client.

What nobody has published is the client-side playbook: the actual end-to-end process of planning, running, and getting value out of a 20–50 call expert program during a live commercial due diligence. This guide fills that gap.

It's written for the PE associate who just got staffed on their first deal and needs to stand up an expert call program in the next 48 hours. It's written for the consulting engagement manager who's done this a few times but wants to be more systematic. And it's written for anyone who suspects they're spending a lot of money on expert calls and not extracting as much value as they should be.

No fluff. No selling. Just how it actually works.

Step 1: Define What You Actually Need to Learn

Before you contact a single expert network or draft a single question, you need to be brutally clear about what you're trying to figure out. This sounds obvious, and everyone skips it.

To ensure your commercial due diligence process is both efficient and effective, clearly define objectives and establish what you aim to achieve. In the context of an expert call program, this means writing down — literally writing down — the 5–8 key questions your investment committee needs answered before they'll approve this deal.

These typically fall into a few buckets:

• Market dynamics: Is the market growing? At what rate? What's driving it? What could slow it down?
• Competitive positioning: How is the target positioned vs. competitors? Is that position defensible?
• Customer quality: Are customers sticky? What's driving retention or churn? Would they switch?
• Revenue sustainability: Are there any one-off factors inflating recent performance?
• Growth levers: What are the realistic paths to grow this business post-acquisition?

During a commercial due diligence, there is often a target in mind and clear questions that the investors are looking to answer — this often has to do with pin-pointing industry growth rates, understanding competitive advantages and relative positions of firms, as well as other questions that the investment firm needs answered before they are ready to pull the trigger on a deal.

The practical move: Write your key questions in a shared document. Get your deal lead or partner to sign off on them before you start sourcing experts. This prevents the painful situation where you run 15 calls and then your partner says "but did you ask about X?" and you have to start over.

Step 2: Scope Your Call Program

How Many Calls Do You Actually Need?

Both as an investor and as a consultant, it is not uncommon to do more than 20 expert calls in a single project, and in many cases much more. That tracks with what we see across hundreds of CDD projects. But "more than 20" is a wide range, so here's a more practical framework:

• Quick thesis check (pre-LOI): 5–8 calls. You're just trying to decide if this deal is worth pursuing seriously.
• Standard CDD: 15–25 calls. This is the sweet spot for most mid-market deals. Enough to triangulate across perspectives without drowning in data.
• Deep CDD (complex market, multi-segment, or platform with bolt-on thesis): 30–50+ calls. You're covering multiple customer segments, geographies, or adjacencies.

The honest truth: the right number of calls isn't a formula. It's when you start hearing the same things from new experts. That's called "saturation" and it means you've covered the ground. If call #18 is telling you the exact same thing as calls #12, #14, and #16, you're probably done on that topic.

What Types of Experts Do You Need?

This is where most people go wrong. They request "industry experts" and get a grab bag of semi-relevant profiles. Instead, think about expert types as segments with distinct perspectives:

1. Customers of the target company — current and former. These are the most valuable and the hardest to source. They can tell you what the sales process was like, whether the product delivers, and whether they'd switch.
2. Competitors — current and former executives at competing companies. They'll give you the view the target won't: where the target is weak, where they're winning deals, what the market really looks like.
3. Industry operators — people who've worked in the same sector at a senior level. They understand the value chain, market dynamics, and where things are headed.
4. Channel partners / suppliers — distributors, resellers, or suppliers who interact with the target. They see things the target doesn't always share.
5. Former employees of the target — proceed carefully here (compliance matters), but former employees can offer perspective on culture, operations, and leadership.

Be sure to interview all key stakeholders, including customers, competitors, and suppliers. Make one call per industry facet. In practice, you'll weight these differently based on what your key questions are. If your deal thesis hinges on customer retention, load up on customer calls. If it's about market growth, you need more industry operators.

Sequencing Matters

Don't run all your calls in parallel. There's an order that works:

1. Weeks 1–2: Industry experts first. These calls build your foundational understanding of the market. They're easier to source and less sensitive. Use them to get smart before you talk to customers and competitors.
2. Week 2–3: Competitors and channel partners. Now that you understand the landscape, you can ask sharper questions about how the target compares.
3. Week 3–4: Customers. Save these for when you're already knowledgeable enough to have a real conversation. Customers can tell when you don't understand their world, and they'll give you less if they think you're wasting their time.
4. Week 4+: Follow-up calls. Go back to the best experts from earlier rounds to pressure-test what you've heard from other segments.

Step 3: Source Your Experts

As a consultant, activate expert networks at the start of each due diligence project, often reaching out to 4–5 of them at once. Although it can be tedious to keep them all updated, different expert networks always come up with different experts — the more networks you engage, the larger the pool of available experts you can choose from.

Using multiple providers — at least three — for every project is standard practice among experienced practitioners. Here's why: no single network has a monopoly on the right experts for your deal. GLG might find a great former customer, while AlphaSights surfaces a competitor exec, and a smaller network finds a niche operator nobody else has.

What actually matters when evaluating expert profiles:

• Recency of experience: Someone who left the industry 5 years ago has stale information. You want experts whose experience is current or within the last 1–2 years.
• Specificity of experience: "Worked in healthcare" is not useful. "Ran procurement at a 200-bed hospital system that evaluated the target's product" is useful.
• Seniority match: For market-level questions, you want senior people. For operational detail, sometimes a mid-level person who actually used the product every day is better.
• Potential bias: A former employee who was fired has a different perspective than one who left voluntarily. Neither is wrong, but you need to know which you're getting.

The tracking problem: The problem with working with multiple networks is that they all have different approaches and back-ends, meaning you have to manually go through the names and résumés of each expert to check for overlap. Many practitioners do this through a simple Excel spreadsheet where they note down the name, résumé, and which network provided the expert. Unglamorous? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. You do not want to pay two different networks for the same expert, and you don't want to accidentally schedule someone who has a conflict.

Step 4: Write Discussion Guides That Actually Work

A discussion guide is not a list of 40 questions you read aloud. That's an interrogation, and experts hate it. A discussion guide is a structured outline that keeps your conversation on track while leaving room for the expert to tell you things you didn't know to ask about.

Here's the structure that works:

Opening (2–3 minutes)

• Brief intro: who you are, what you're looking at (without disclosing the target if that's not appropriate), what you're hoping to learn.
• Ask the expert to walk through their background in 60 seconds. This confirms they're actually relevant and helps you calibrate their perspective.

Core Questions (35–40 minutes)

• Organize into 3–4 topic blocks, not 20 individual questions.
• Start broad, then narrow. "How do you see this market evolving over the next 3–5 years?" before "What do you think about [Target]'s pricing strategy?"
• Build in follow-up prompts: "Can you give me a specific example?" and "What would you say to someone who disagrees with that?"
• Develop a comprehensive list of questions that will help you maximize time during your discussion. Use historical data — past experiences and conversations will help you develop strong investment hypotheses.

Closing (5 minutes)

• "What haven't I asked about that I should have?" — This is the single most valuable question in any expert call. Experts know things you don't know to ask about.
• "Who else should I be talking to?" — Snowball sourcing is real. The best experts know other great experts.

Tailor the guide per expert type. Your discussion guide for a customer should be completely different from your guide for a competitor or an industry expert. The questions are different, the sensitivity is different, and the information you're after is different. If you're using one generic guide for all 25 calls, you're leaving value on the table.

A Note on Leading Questions

This is the most common mistake in expert calls: asking questions that contain the answer you want to hear. "Would you agree that the market is growing at 10–15%?" is a leading question. "How would you characterize the market growth rate?" is not. PE firms must be aware of potential biases in expert opinions and cross-verify information. But you also need to be aware of the bias you're introducing through your own questions. If you're on your 15th call and you've already formed a view, it's very easy to start asking questions that confirm what you already believe. Fight that instinct.

Step 5: Run the Calls

A phone or video call is typically conducted lasting 30–60 minutes, where the PE professional can ask targeted questions. Most CDD calls are 45–60 minutes. Here's how to make that time count:

Before the Call

• Re-read the expert's profile. Know their background so you don't waste the first 10 minutes asking things that are on their LinkedIn.
• Review your notes from prior calls on the same topic. What's unresolved? What did a previous expert say that you want to test?
• Mark 2–3 "must-ask" questions on your guide. If the call goes sideways, at least get these answered.

During the Call

• Listen more than you talk. You're paying for their knowledge, not to hear yourself speak. A good ratio is 70/30 — they talk 70% of the time.
• Take notes in real time, but don't transcribe. Write down the key insights, surprising data points, and direct quotes. You'll forget the nuance if you wait until after.
• Don't be afraid of silence. After an expert answers, pause for a beat. They'll often add the most valuable information in the follow-up sentence.
• Redirect politely when needed. Since you have limited time, touch on all topics that you want. If your expert is going off the path you want, you can subtly redirect them to the subject.
• Push back respectfully. If an expert says something that contradicts what you've heard elsewhere, tell them. "Interesting — I've heard a different view on that. Some people say [X]. What's your reaction?" This is where you get the most honest, useful information.

After Each Call

• Spend 10 minutes immediately after the call writing a brief summary: 3–5 key takeaways, anything that surprised you, and any follow-up needed.
• Rate the call quality (was the expert relevant? knowledgeable? candid?) — this helps when you're synthesizing later and need to weight perspectives.
• Update your tracker: mark the call as completed, note key themes covered.

Step 6: Synthesize Your Findings

This is where most teams fall down. Expert calls are among the most valuable assets in a fund's diligence process, yet they are often underutilized or disorganized. You run 20+ calls, generate hundreds of pages of notes, and then... what?

Here's a synthesis methodology that actually works:

1. Build a Call Matrix

Create a spreadsheet with your key CDD questions as columns and each expert as a row. For each cell, capture the expert's core view in 1–2 sentences. When you fill this in across 20 calls, patterns become immediately visible:

• Where do experts converge? If 15 out of 20 experts say the market is growing 8–12%, that's a strong signal.
• Where do they diverge? If half say the target has great customer retention and half say they're losing share, that's a flag to investigate further.
• Where are the gaps? If nobody could speak to a particular question, you need more calls or a different type of expert.

2. Weight Expert Credibility

Not all experts are equal. A current customer who's used the product for 3 years is more credible on product quality than an industry analyst who's never touched it. A competitor's VP of Sales is more credible on win/loss dynamics than a retired industry consultant. When views conflict, your weighting determines which signal you follow.

3. Identify the "So What"

For each key question, write a synthesis paragraph that answers: "Based on N expert interviews, what do we believe is true, and how confident are we?" This is the hard part. It's not a summary — it's a judgment call. You have to combine multiple imperfect perspectives into a directional view that your investment committee can act on.

4. Flag What Needs More Work

Good synthesis doesn't just tell you what you've learned. It tells you what you still don't know. Maybe customers love the product but nobody could quantify switching costs. Maybe the market is clearly growing but nobody agrees on what happens when a specific regulation changes. These gaps should go into your diligence report as open items, not get swept under the rug.

Step 7: Deliver Something Your IC Can Actually Use

Your investment committee doesn't want to read transcripts. They want to know: should we do this deal, and at what price?

A due diligence report is a document that outlines the findings and analysis conducted during the due diligence process. Creating a report is extremely important as it acts like a detailed map that helps stakeholders understand the ins and outs of a business. A proper commercial due diligence report should be comprehensive and contain details about the target's operations, financial health, market position, and competitive positioning.

In practice, the expert call findings feed into the CDD report. But the format that works best for IC consumption is:

1. Executive summary (1 page): The 5 key findings from your expert program, in plain language.
2. Detailed findings by theme (5–10 pages): One section per key question, with your synthesized view supported by specific expert perspectives. Don't attribute by name — use descriptions like "a former VP of Sales at a direct competitor" or "a customer with 4 years of experience using the product."
3. Risk flags and open items (1–2 pages): What your expert program surfaced that needs attention.
4. Expert program overview (appendix): How many calls you ran, what types of experts, from which networks. This builds confidence in the rigor of the work.

Common Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake 1: Starting Calls Before You Have a Framework

If you don't know what you need to learn, you'll run 10 calls and realize half of them were wasted on the wrong topics. Do the scoping work first.

Mistake 2: Using One Discussion Guide for Every Expert Type

A customer and a competitor have completely different information. Write separate guides.

Mistake 3: Confirmation Bias

While valuable, expert calls should be one of many tools in the due diligence process, not the sole source of information. And within your call program, actively seek out experts who might disagree with your thesis. The calls that challenge your view are the most valuable ones you'll have.

Mistake 4: Not Synthesizing Until the End

If you wait until you've finished all 25 calls to start synthesis, you've lost the opportunity to adjust your program mid-stream. Synthesize weekly. If you spot gaps or contradictions after call #10, you can redirect the remaining calls to resolve them.

Mistake 5: Treating Expert Opinions as Facts

An expert who says "the market is growing 15%" is giving you their estimate, not a fact. Always triangulate across multiple experts and cross-reference with secondary data where possible. One expert's view is an anecdote. Ten experts' views are a pattern. But even patterns can be wrong if your expert selection was biased.

Mistake 6: Not Tracking Your Spend

Expert calls add up fast. With multiple networks and 30+ calls, you can easily blow through your research budget without realizing it. Track every call, every cost, and reconcile against your budget weekly.

A Realistic Timeline

Here's what a CDD expert call program actually looks like on a calendar for a standard mid-market deal:

That's roughly 3–4 weeks for a full program. It's tight, and it's a lot of work. Private equity firms and consultancies can choose to outsource specific stages of the commercial due diligence — such as the survey, expert interview programme, or analysis phases — in order to overcome the challenges associated with a tight timeline. Most providers offer high turnaround and flexible solutions to collaborate with clients and work with their internal deadlines.

The Honest Question: Should You Do This Yourself?

Running a 25-call expert program on a live deal is a significant time commitment. Between sourcing, scheduling, prepping, running calls, taking notes, and synthesizing, you're looking at 60–80 hours of work for the person running the program. If you're an associate or VP who also has financial modeling, management meetings, and other diligence workstreams running in parallel, that's a real problem.

There are a few options:

• Do it yourself using expert networks. Maximum control, maximum time commitment, and you're paying per call with no guarantee of quality. This works if you have the bandwidth and have done it before.
• Hire a consulting firm to run the full CDD. They'll handle the expert program as part of a broader engagement. Expensive, but comprehensive. Makes sense for complex or large-ticket deals.
• Use a done-for-you primary research firm. Brief them on your key questions and let them handle sourcing, calls, and synthesis. You get the output without the 80 hours of work. This is what we do at Woozle, but there are other firms that offer similar services.

Some providers prioritize speed and scale, while others focus on vetted operators who can validate or challenge an investment thesis. The right model depends on deal complexity and internal bandwidth. High-volume platforms work for quick assessments; bespoke networks perform best when details, nuance, and downside risk matter.

The right answer depends on your team's bandwidth, the deal timeline, and how much you trust your own ability to run the program well. There's no shame in outsourcing — the goal is getting the best answer for your IC, not proving you can schedule 25 phone calls.

Final Thought

The difference between a mediocre expert call program and a great one isn't the number of calls or the brand of expert network. It's the rigor of your scoping, the quality of your questions, and the discipline of your synthesis. Expert calls will remain a top source of insights for due diligence work, as it is the quickest way to gain a deep understanding of an industry — as an investor, you need to understand the business you buy just as well as the people who are working in it.

Do the preparation work. Ask questions you're genuinely curious about, not just questions that confirm what you want to hear. And take the synthesis as seriously as the calls themselves. That's how you turn 25 conversations into a conviction you can stand behind in front of your investment committee.