The Discovery Call Questions That Matter

A bad discovery call is forty minutes of you explaining your services.

A good one is forty minutes of them explaining their business, and you leaving with enough detail to write a proposal they recognise themselves in.

The difference is entirely in the questions.

What are you doing now, and what has it produced

Start here because it tells you three things at once: their budget, their sophistication, and what has already failed.

Somebody running paid ads with no tracking is a different conversation from somebody with three years of data. Somebody who has been through two agencies has specific scar tissue, and you need to know where it is before you propose something that touches it.

The follow-up matters more than the question: what did that produce. Numbers, not impressions.

What happens if nothing changes

This is the question that separates a real prospect from a curious one.

If the answer is "we keep going as we are, it's fine", there is no deal. There is no urgency, and no amount of persuasion creates it.

If the answer is "we lose the lease", "we have to let people go", or "my partner wants to close the division", you have a real timeline and a real budget.

Nobody buys marketing because it would be nice. They buy it because a number is going the wrong way and they have run out of ideas.

Who else is involved in this decision

Ask it early and ask it plainly.

A deal that goes to a partner, a board, or a spouse who was not on the call is a deal that gets re-presented by somebody who is worse at presenting it than you are.

Knowing that up front changes the proposal. You write it so the person on the call can forward it and have it survive, which means it has to make sense without you in the room.

What does a win look like in 90 days

Not twelve months. Ninety days.

Because the twelve month answer is aspirational and the ninety day answer is what they will actually judge you on. Those two are often not the same thing, and the gap is where client relationships break.

If the ninety day expectation is unrealistic, the call is the place to fix it. Not month four, which is the reason the first 90 days with a new agency ends badly so often.

What have you tried that you would not try again

This surfaces the landmines.

"We did a rebrand and it was a disaster." "We had someone do SEO and nothing happened." "We tried video and the team hated it."

Every one of those is a thing to either avoid or explicitly address. Proposing the exact approach that burned them two years ago, without acknowledging it, loses a deal you had won.

What are you measuring

A prospect who cannot answer this has a bigger problem than their marketing, and a bigger opportunity.

Across the businesses we work with, the ones that grow fastest are the ones that can tell you their cost per lead and their close rate without looking. The ones that cannot are usually spending money they cannot account for, which is the subject of marketing metrics that actually matter.

If they are not measuring anything, the first month of work is instrumentation, and that has to be in the proposal or they will think month one did nothing.

What to do with the last five minutes

Summarise what you heard, out loud, and get them to correct you.

"So the problem is leads are coming in but they are not qualified, you have tried two agencies, you need this working before the end of the quarter, and your partner needs to sign off. Have I got that right?"

They will correct one thing. That correction is usually the most important sentence of the call.

Then say exactly when the proposal lands and what will be in it.

The ones to walk away from

A prospect who will not give you numbers. A prospect whose answer to "what happens if nothing changes" is nothing. A prospect who spends the call negotiating price before they have told you the problem.

Saying no to those is not lost revenue. It is capacity, which is the whole argument in how to say no to a project.