What Does Client Discovery Mean?
Client Discovery (more affectionately known as The Client Disco) is how we refer to Sales at UpBuild. We choose to call it a ‘discovery’ because our goal in communicating with prospects is to find out whether we’re going to have a mutual fit, rather than one-sidedly pushing our services no matter the situation, needs, or joint capabilities.
The Discovery
During our initial 30-minute discovery call, we ask a number of questions that allow us to better gauge whether an engagement will be successful and identify any roadblocks to see if there’s a way around them or if they could be potential deal breakers.
We also like to use this time to learn more about the organization itself, so that we can take that information and distill it for the rest of the UpBuild team for our client vote.
What does your ideal partner bring to the table?
This is our favorite question that we ask every prospect. We’ve found that this simple query gives us the deepest insight into what a prospect’s true needs are and how they best work with an agency.
Rather than just enabling a prospect to mentally check a box for enlisting technical marketing services, it helps them do a little bit of introspection toward other KPIs that might be more subjective but nonetheless add tremendous value to their day-to-day. It simultaneously allows us to dive deeper into the root of what keeps our prospects up at night. It all works together to build understanding and set expectations upfront.
Are there any upcoming site changes?
We can roll with the punches as well as the next guy but in order for us to put together an Engagement Plan that suits our prospects’ plans over the coming months during our engagement, it’s essential for us to know what’s in store. This allows us to plug in to support the larger organization’s marketing initiatives.
As it happens, much to our delight, we’re often brought on board as a direct result of a catalyst such as during the beginning stages of a new site design. With ample experience in this realm, this format allows us to usher in the new site under ideal conditions for setting it up for SEO success.
What are your development resources like?
Technical SEO means that there’s more often than not going to require some dev work, whether it’s site speed improvements, robots.txt updates, etc. It’s actually a requirement for us that our clients have development resources, whether in-house or agency, to actually be able to implement our recommendations. It’s simply not going to sit with us or allow us to live up to our “Pride” core value to hand off a list of prioritized recommendations that we know our client never had the resources to implement in the first place.
If this does end up being a sticking point, we’re more than happy to tap into our industry network and make recommendations for dev shops that might best suit a client’s needs or lend some insight into how to go about the search.
Always Be…?
We find it a little amusing that everyone involved in the Client Discovery process has zero background in sales, but it’s actually grown to be a point of pride that it hasn’t seemed to hinder our growing Discovery team and roster of clients.
On the contrary, we’ve been able to tailor the Discovery process to our strengths and have identified that there’s actually ample benefit for prospective clients in actually talking to people who know the work and do the work. It lends to a great foundation for trust that we are going to steer a prospect in the right direction – whether it’s ultimately with UpBuild or another agency better suited for their needs.
We like efficiency and are all about eliminating the middleman in a lot of what we do. For example, in our engagements, new clients are assigned a Senior Marketing Strategist that serves as the account manager and the person doing the day-to-day work. We’ve found that this eliminates an unnecessary layer that can bog down actual work getting done. We’ve built the Discovery Process to mirror that streamlined format.
That’s not to say we aren’t working on leveling up our skills in this arena, which is simply the UpBuild way. With bi-weekly Sales Mastermind Meetings, we have digested knowledge across podcasts, ebooks, audiobooks, and articles to learn more about how other companies do sales and figure out what of these strategies we’d want to incorporate. Some info we leave, some we take. We are constantly working to improve our prospects’ experience through the entire funnel. Seeing this side of the business allows us to take our own insights and apply them to our clients’ websites and sales funnels, particularly for those B2B clients with similar, longer lead cycles.
Just like we are constantly working to make our current clients’ lives better, we want to ensure we’re making ourselves accessible to those organizations that have a need for what we do best. It is our hope that having this more holistic understanding makes us better marketers as a whole and more empathetic to our clients’ needs.
