How many times have you sent in a proposal to a prospective client, only to get ghosted for the next few weeks? I’ve been there, and I can relate — it’s not a great feeling. The cost of all those meetings and the time spent on developing a proposal could have been spent working on your current business or upselling current clients. And when your prospect finally does respond, they say “we don’t have the budget right now” or “we’ll get back to you at a later date.” You’re frustrated, disappointed, and left wondering why they didn’t make that clear before you spent countless hours on the proposal.

For marketing agencies, this scenario plays out far too often. Your prospect has gotten cold feet for a variety of reasons — one of which is they don’t yet trust that you can solve their problems.

So, how do you overcome this challenge?

How might you prove to this prospect that you can deliver real value to their business?

That’s where the discovery session comes in.

What is a Discovery Session?

A discovery session is a smaller-scope, lower-priced, introductory service for your agency clients. Discovery sessions go by many other names: road-mapping projects, growth plans, client audits, and strategy sessions. By offering this service, you can immediately identify and disqualify prospects with an unrealistic timeline or those without a budget. This process is done by getting answers to specific questions. These answers help you understand whether or not the challenges they have are challenges you can actually solve.

In fields where professionals must be certified or licensed to dispense advice, they generally use some form of a discovery session. Financial advisors refer to their discovery process as “determining a client’s personal and financial goals, needs, and priorities.” In the medical field, the discovery process is known as the SLCT (pronounced “select”) discovery process. The acronym stands for the four tactics used during the discovery process: Scribing, Laddering, Checking, and Triaging. Research has found SLCT to be associated with reduced patient anxiety and increased satisfaction. This is exactly how you want clients to feel when they work with you.

The SLCT process is a good benchmark for how agencies should run a discovery process. Here are the four tactics in more detail:

• Scribing — writing down top-of-mind concerns

• Laddering — elaborating on top-of-mind concerns

• Checking — answering a questionnaire to stimulate additional disclosure of goals, concerns, priorities and questions

• Triaging — creating a summary report summarizing findings

How Does Your Agency Benefit?

• Enables early go/no-go decisions. As an industry, we allocate too much time creating proposals for prospects who are unsure of their next step. A discovery session explicitly states that the first step in working together is a paid project. This ensures you’re not spending countless hours trying to woo someone who has no urgency to move forward.

• Easier to sell. Because discovery sessions have a fixed scope and price, they tend to be easier to explain and sell.

• Brings up budget early. Since the first step is a paid project, discovery sessions allow you to have a budget discussion sooner than later. Clients have been trained to assume that the first step in working with a marketing agency is to receive a proposal. This is your first opportunity to show that you are different than other agencies. Once you inform them that your first step is a paid project, they must decide on budget allocation.

• Leads to future projects. A discovery session is similar to a first dance. Based on the first dance, you both get to decide whether you want a second dance. The discovery session outlines future work that must be done to achieve desired outcomes for your prospect. If they found value in the discovery session, chances are good that they’ll work with you on a larger project.

How Does Your Client Benefit?

• Minimizes risk. Prospects get cold feet because working together can be a risky proposition. They are worried about the risk of the marketing investment, the risk of working on something new, and the risk of working with someone new. The discovery process is designed to minimize risk by offering a smaller-scope, lower-priced offering.

• Cost-effective. I’m going to stick with my dancing and dating analogies. Many times, when we get in front of a prospect, our offers are analogous to getting that first dance and saying “Wanna get married?” The answer is always “no” for a simpler reason: no one wants to marry a stranger. They don’t know you. The discovery session is an offer for a prospect to get to know you better.

• Walks clients through your process. Having a process inspires confidence in working with you. It signals that you’ve solved similar problems for people like them in the past. Walking through your process provides comfort and ensures that you have a well-thought plan to solve their pain.

Learn More

If you want to hear more about discovery sessions, then check out my recent appearance on the Leaders of Consulting Podcast. If you’re interested in creating a profitable discovery session for your agency, check out my Agency Coaching program.