Using paid discovery to get better clients

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Hello and welcome to today’s webinar on using paid discovery to get better clients. I’m Chip Griffin. I’m the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance. I’m looking forward to a very productive session with you today. we’ll do a few housekeeping items, but first let me tell you a little bit about what we’ll be talking about over the course of the next 30 to 40 minutes or so.

And so the let’s see if I get the slides to advance correctly. There we go. so we’re going to go over what paid discovery is. I’ll explain the idea behind it. I’ll talk about the benefits of it on a wide range of fronts, not just on purely getting better clients, but making sure that you’re. Pricing effectively, that you’re getting scope correct, that you are, generating as much profit as possible while delivering the best results for the clients.

We’ll talk about some specific examples of things that agencies do for paid discovery. We’ll talk about how you create and price your packages so that they are doing what you intend them to do. And finally, I’ll offer a handful of tips that I’ve seen work well when it comes to implementing paid discovery as one of your growth tactics in your agency.

Before we go into the actual substance, I do want to go over a handful of housekeeping items. If you are registered for this and you are watching this, well, you’ll also be getting a copy of the recording as well as the slide deck. being available to you. we have a full library of all the webinars on the SAGA website.

If you just go to the resources tab and click on webinars, you can see all of the previous webinars that we have done. if you there, you have a question that you’d like to ask in the course of today’s session, just use the Q and a function at the bottom of the screen. I’ll hold them and take them all at the end of the main presentation.

If you have questions that I don’t get to, or feedback that you’d like to share, maybe suggestions for future webinar topics. Feel free to email me anytime chip at small agency growth. com. And you can find all sorts of additional resource resources on the small agency growth. com website. Finally, if you’re tweeting about today’s session, I’d love it if you would use the hashtag agency leadership.

So it’s easy to find and accumulate. All of that commentary. So with that, without further ado, we will jump into the topic at hand. And so as we think about, paid discovery and we think about how you can use it for an agency, we need to start by defining, right? So And paid discovery is not a term that you would typically use directly with a client.

It’s a, it’s a term that you use internally for planning purposes. And we all know that in the course of working with prospects, we have to put together proposals and that proposal process is usually a series of conversations between us and the prospect to understand what their challenge is, understand what the opportunities are, try to figure out what they really need.

And because we’re usually not getting paid for this, we usually try to accelerate this process as much as possible in order to get to the signature on the dotted line. After all, we all want to be paid for our work. And frequently you will hear folks in the agency community say, I don’t give away my advice for free.

And that’s why I say very little during the sales and prospecting process and instead hold it all back for when they are a client. The problem with this approach is that it really doesn’t give either side the opportunity to learn each other well. And from your perspective as an agency leader, it doesn’t give you the opportunity to really dig in and figure out what the challenges truly are. It doesn’t allow you to put together an effective scope for that project, for that retainer, for whatever work you’re going to be doing for that client. And so you’re sort of guessing. You’re, you’re basing it on the experience you’ve had with similar clients in the past. You’re basing it on, you know, maybe a couple of Half hour hour long conversations when we’re back to being more in person, maybe you had a lunch or a coffee to supplement it, but it’s still not as meaningful as deep as an actual engagement with that client.

Now, of course, if you go to the prospect and you say, look, I want you to pay me to put together a proposal. You’re probably going to get laughed out of the room because they’re sitting there saying, well, that’s part of the sales process. That’s your cost of doing business. And to an extent they’re right.

And so when you’re thinking about paid discovery, what you have to do, and we’ll talk about this when you’re creating your offering later on in today’s webinar, you have to come up with something that’s meaningful and useful and valuable to that client, regardless of what the outcome is, whether they say yes or no to your subsequent proposal.

And so we’ll talk about how you find that right balance in there and how you, you scope your initial paid discovery engagement so that it does do the right things for both parties, because ultimately that’s what you need in order to be successful in going forward. But at the end of the day, paid discovery, make sure that you’re getting compensated for the time it takes to learn about.

The prospect to learn about the client, to dig into their challenges, to start looking at some real data, to start working with them so that you can understand, are they going to be the kind of client that’s going to require a lot of TLC? Do they ask for lots of revisions to things? You learn about those things that you really need to factor into your pricing in the future.

So for all of those reasons, paid discovery can be a very beneficial process. And at the end of the day, if you implement it as part of your agency’s toolkit, I think you’re going to be very pleased with the results. Let’s go ahead now and let’s talk about some specific examples of the kinds of things that agencies do that I would consider paid discovery.

And some of them may be things that you already do. Oftentimes you’ll do them as part of your initial engagement with a client. So you’ll put together a proposal. It says you’re, you’re going to put together a media campaign or a social media marketing campaign or a website or whatever. And that first step is almost always information gathering.

It’s the discovery process. And so what I’m advocating for is taking that out of the first engagement and instead making it the first engagement. And so the way that some agencies do this is they will do it through an audit. This is probably by far the most popular offering that agencies use as a paid discovery.

Frankly, a lot of times they use it as a free discovery, but I think that’s a mistake because you generally get what you pay for. And so if You’re an agency and you’re doing audits for free, you’re really still just taking a very surface level examination of that client. Oftentimes this is done with software that may look at search engine rankings or PPC data or those kinds of things.

So digital agencies tend to use these free audits a lot. And they’re really more of a lead magnet tool in that case, as opposed to paid discovery. And I think that you should be using it for paid discovery. You should be charging for those audits that you do. Now, whether you call it an auditor or not is something we can talk about later.

I’m generally, I’m on the fence about audits. Some clients in some spaces, depending upon the work you’re doing, they may react just fine to it. Others sort of view it as, you know, more of a critical process as opposed to a thought building process results oriented process. So you need to think about your target market and figure out whether you call it an audit or whether you call it something else.

For example, I do something very similar in my own business right now. It’s called the agency business checkup. And what it is, is it’s about a six or eight week process where I work with an agency to dig in and figure out, you know, how, what is the health of their agency? So it’s effectively an audit, but I call it a checkup instead.

It sounds a little bit more friendly. Obviously, we’re all in marketing and communications and those sorts of things. So we’re thinking about the words that we use, and you should be thinking about that when you’re putting together your paid discovery offering. So audits are one of those things that can be useful and one of the reasons why they’re so valuable is because audits generally involve gathering large amounts of information.

And as you’re gathering information, it helps you put together a much more effective scope for the work that you’re going to do. If you know what resources. So if you’re going in and you’re running a media campaign, you want to know what they already have for media lists. You want to know what they’ve run for press releases and press availabilities and other media activities.

If they’re, if you’re going in to build a website, you want to know, what’s the shape of their current infrastructure. Do they have a lot of material that’s going to be easy to migrate or not? Are you starting from scratch or do you actually have something that you can work with if you’re working on PPC or SEO, you want to dig as deep in as you can to what they’re already targeting for search terms and audiences and those kinds of things so that you can figure out what your ability is going to be to produce the results that they want.

That helps you, first of all, make sure that you’re making the right selection for the offering that you’re giving to the client, but it also makes sure that you’re getting the right value for it. Because if you see the opportunity for huge gains in the work that you’re providing, then you can charge more of a premium than if you look and you realize that all you can do is, you know, make some difference around the edges.

So those are important things to consider and they’re great things to do as part of an audit. process. Now, it doesn’t have to be just in the digital space. a lot of times, you know, in the past, these have been done where you’ll go into a business and you’ll look at their whole public relations department and you’ll look at their structure and how they’re doing things and the allocation of tasks.

And so that’s something that PR agencies have historically used, not really as paid discovery, but again, as one of their offerings. But it’s a great thing to do upfront because you get to know a bunch of the team, at the prospect at the client as well. And those are the kinds of things that will help you figure out if it’s a good fit client.

And if so, what work you should be doing for them. So then the other thing that you can be doing as paid discovery is a strategic plan. And so my co host on the agency leadership podcast, Gini Dietrich has for years done a two day paid discovery process with clients. At least it was two days prior to the current pandemic and all of the challenges that that’s created.

But she would bring several of her team members and herself on site for a two day process where they would go very intensively with the client. They would sit down. They would talk to team members. They would look at data. They would have conversations. And at the end of that, they would produce a strategic plan.

And that strategic plan is something that the client could implement themselves or it’s something that her agency could implement for them. And those are the kinds of things that you want to be doing when you’re thinking about a strategic planning process. You want to be gathering the information and making the recommendations.

And we’ll talk later about the importance of making sure that whatever you’re putting together, whether it’s an audit or a strategic plan, is something that’s portable. It’s something that the client needs to be able to take advantage of themselves or take to another agency and get work done. And I’ll talk more in detail about why that’s important as part of this process, because I know that some of you have just hesitated and said, well, now wait a minute, why would I want to be doing someone else’s work for them?

But remember, you’re getting paid. Right. That’s why this is a paid discovery process. This means that you’re not wasting a lot of time doing this information gathering, asking questions, throwing out strategic ideas as part of the prospecting process. But instead now it’s part of an engagement that you’re being compensated for.

So that’s a key difference. So audits and strategic plans are really the two biggest things that you can use for paid discovery. There are obviously other things that you can do. A lot of it will depend upon The work that you’re doing for a client, but it’s the idea is that you’re taking that initial step to start building the relationship with the client to start getting to know them to start having them get to know you and once you’ve done that you’re in a much better position to propose and implement the work that you want to do in a larger scale further down the road.

All right, so. Let’s talk about some of the benefits of paid discovery and why this is such a useful thing and why it should be the tip of your spear when it comes to reaching out to prospects. The first one is obviously pricing and I’ve already touched on this a little bit. The more information that you can get, the better idea you have as to how to price appropriately.

And part of that means that you’ve scoped it right. You know exactly what the work is that you’re going to be doing. And you have a much better sense of how much time it’s going to take because you know, really where the client stands today, you know, how they work, at least to some degree, you, you, you know, whether you have to put in more of a premium for a pain per dollar ratio as my old business partner liked to call it to make sure that if they’re difficult to work with that you’re pricing it with a premium in there to account for that if they they require a lot of revisions or if they reschedule a lot of meetings or generally are are cumbersome to work with you can price that in.

But it also gives you the information so that you can implement value pricing effectively. And if you go back to the webinar a few weeks ago where I talked about the different pricing models and the different approaches, you know that I have concerns about value pricing largely because agencies try to implement it without the appropriate level of knowledge.

And if you go through some sort of an audit or strategic planning or other paid discovery process, you’re in a much better position to understand the value that your work will bring. And once you know that, you can price more effectively, more competitively. So then, and by the way, you can also explain to the client better the results that they’re likely to get for that pricing, right?

So ROI, the king of everything that, that clients are concerned about today. Would be shocked if you’ve had a conversation with a prospect in the last year or two where they haven’t brought up ROI in some fashion for the work that you’re doing it always is part of the budget process. It’s always part of the decision making process when hiring an outside agency.

The second benefit and this one is obviously critical because. You know that what my core belief is that you need to run your agency for profitability. You need to use that as your benchmark, not top line revenues, but profits, because that’s what you can put in your pocket. That’s what you can reinvest in the business.

That’s what you can reinvest in yourself. So you want to have profits. The way you have profits is getting that scoping correct. In other words, estimating the work it’s going to take properly, getting the price right, and that leads to the profits that you want to have. And paid discovery really helps you with the ammunition you need in order to be able to do that.

So if you’re pricing effectively and scoping effectively, that’s naturally leading to profits. But it also leads to profits because it helps you find the best fit clients. And we’ll talk about that in a minute, but you want to always circle your process around how you get profitable clients that you can produce good results for great results for, in fact, and that’s something that paid discovery makes easier to do.

The third benefit of paid discovery that I want to talk about is client satisfaction and retention. And the reason why paid discovery helps with this is somewhat obvious and somewhat less obvious. The obvious is that because you have dug in and you’re now able to to put together a more intelligent proposal for your larger, longer term work.

You’re more likely to select things and package them up and price them in such a way that you know you can produce outstanding results. And clients want to see those results. If you, if you’re putting together a proposal that’s driving you in that direction, your odds of having a satisfied customer are much higher.

Conversely, if you throw out proposals blind with relatively little information. And I’ve seen this over and over again with agencies. I’ve been in agencies where we’ve done this, where we’ve thrown out proposals with very little information, but lots of specificity in the proposal, because we thought that after an hour or two of knowledge and some online research, we just had it nailed.

And look, sometimes you do, right? And so if you’ve been in that position, you’ve said, well, look, I’ve tried it. It worked. Well, maybe it did. I mean, you know, as they say, you know, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Certainly, you can have those situations where you are correct. But that doesn’t mean that it’s what you should be doing.

What you should be doing is trying to make sure that you’re really tailoring your proposals to get those results in a way that you’ve got the right level of knowledge. It also helps with satisfaction and retention, though, to use paid discovery, because what you’ve started to do is you’ve started building that relationship between the client and the team much earlier on.

And so by introducing your team to them and them, you’re, you’re building it before you’ve even committed to these bigger chunks of work, these higher ticket items. And so the more that you’ve built that relationship and you figured out, okay, how do, how does this client tick? How can we make sure that they’re happy?

That’s all leading to improved client satisfaction because with every engagement that you’re doing for a client, you need to make sure that in the early weeks you’re getting quick wins. That you’re doing things to execute on their behalf where they’re seeing results. And so by its very nature, paid discovery is a short term process.

We’ll talk later about how short it should be, but it’s a short term process. So they’re obviously going to see quick results from that. But then it sets you up to put together a proposal where you know what those other quick, quick wins are, because as part of the paid discovery, you should be looking for the low hanging fruit for the things where your agency can step in and in a week or two or three can make a real difference, not necessarily in achieving the final result, but at least in moving the ball forward and allowing the client to see progress.

So for all of those reasons, client satisfaction and retention are key things that can be helped with paid discovery. A surprising area where paid discovery can really help is in team morale. And one of the reasons why it helps with team morale is because it allows you to figure out which clients are difficult to work with, and as important, which clients are too difficult to work with.

And so if you figure that out on a two week short term paid discovery process, That’s a lot less painful for your team and you can decide, I’m out. I don’t want to do this work. It’s not a good fit. My agency and that prospect don’t belong together for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a personality clash.

Maybe it’s a values clash. Maybe it’s just that, you know, you’re out of sync in expectations for whatever reason. And all of that helps with team morale. And since team is so important to the success of any agency, because as much as we always want to say we aren’t, I’m out. We are selling time. That’s what we do.

We don’t sell it explicitly in most cases, and we shouldn’t sell it explicitly, but that’s what we’re doing. And that time comes from talented individuals that we put together as part of our team. And so keeping our team happy is key to success. And part of that is making sure that you’re working with the right clients, the clients that treat your team with respect, that give the information that’s needed for them to do their jobs effectively.

And those are things that you can always uncover. much more easily by having a paid discovery process rather than the old fashioned, let’s just put together, put together a proposal blind type process. Finally, the paid discovery process is designed to help you match up with ideal clients. Because you should view the paid discovery process as, The client evaluating you, but also you evaluating the client for the same reasons that we’ve talked about in terms of working with your team and what it means for morale and those kinds of things, you really want to make sure that the things that brought that client into the, into your process to begin with the things that made you excited about the possibility of working with them, they held true.

And that window of time that you have during paid discovery allows you to learn a lot and figure out if you can get the results, if they’re the kind of people that you want to be working with, if you can do it profitably, if you can do it in such a way that it makes sense for them financially as well.

And so finding ideal clients is so important to the success of agencies. Because you start with the importance of generating your core profit, but you also want to make sure that you have the right client roster. And you always want to be looking at your client roster with a critical eye to make sure that you have the right clients in the right seats on the bus, just like you do with your team.

And if you have someone who’s a prospect, who’s not a good fit, the sooner you can move them along, the better. If you can move them along after a paid discovery process, all the better. Sometimes we still don’t discover them. Sometimes we still have clients that we need to part ways with. In fact, I was just talking with a client the other day who had a situation where they were working with another agency and a client, and, the client was, had decided that they were done with the agency.

The agency had decided they were done with them. And because there were three parties, it was, you know, sort of like the girlfriend, boyfriend thing. And so one says, Oh, well, you know, don’t worry about, you know, You know, hurting his feelings by breaking up because he was going to do it anyway. Right? So same sort of thing.

And so you always want to make sure that, that you can part ways with prospects, with clients as early as possible, as friendly as possible, because you never know what the future holds, find your ideal clients, use the paid discovery process to drive you towards getting those ideal clients into your pipeline and onto your roster.

So how do we create and price these paid discovery plans? So the first thing is, and you know how much I hate rules of thumb and all that, but in general, most paid discovery processes are going to be somewhere 10, 15 to 20%, somewhere in that general neighborhood of the total cost of the engagement that you’re envisioning.

So if you’re putting together, you know, a I don’t know, a 50,000 website. Well, then your discovery process is probably going to be somewhere, roughly 10k. Could be a little bit less, could be a little bit more. It kind of depends on what exactly, is part of your paid discovery process. Because obviously it also has to be, proportional to the work that you’re doing, but you want it to be something where it’s a meaningful enough number that it’s not something where someone will just, you know, say, sure, I’ll do it with no intention of moving forward.

It should be something that reflects the future budget opportunity, right? If you’re typically an agency that puts together a million dollar proposals, well, you don’t want to charge a thousand dollars for your paid discovery process, because that’s not really going to help you get the information that you need.

It’s not really testing. the qualification of that client to work with you. So you want it to be a meaningful enough number that they’re making a real decision to engage with you. At the same time, you want it to be a low enough number that it’s not something that’s going to cause them a lot of, hemming and hawing and process.

You want them to move expeditiously to agree to the paid discovery process. So it’s a balance. And it’s one of those things where you’re probably going to have to play with that pricing a little bit over time. Yeah. And one of the things that you may find is that whatever the space is that you’re working with, there may be certain dollar figures that are easier to get through.

So for example, in some corporations, it’s, it’s much easier to get through a project under 10K than over. So in those cases, you would always want to make sure that you’re pricing your paid discovery comfortably under that number so that they don’t have to go through as rigorous a process. Right. So think about those things and think about how you price it in terms of your target audience, what they’re likely to be able to approve with relatively little discussion with relatively little consideration, but enough that they’re signaling that this is a serious endeavor on their part.

You also want to make sure that the paid discovery process involves them. So I’m not a fan of the paid discovery process where it’s, you know, you just give us your URL and, and, your credit card will do an SEO or PPC audit. Can you do it? Sure. Theoretically, you can produce a nice little document that way.

But those highly automated processes don’t really give you all of the benefits of paid discovery doesn’t give you that chance to build the relationship and to really dig into what the client is looking for. And in general, I work with agencies that are higher touch, lower volume. Now, if you are a digital agency that is high or low touch, high volume, well, that’s a little bit different and paid discovery is going to look.

fairly different for you. So this presentation is really about, agencies that are engaged in a much higher touch operation. And so you want to make sure that you’re getting that level of interactivity with the client’s team. And in particular, you want to make sure that you’re getting exposure to, a range of people within that client as part of paid discovery.

You want to be in contact with the key decision makers. If it’s a small business, you absolutely want to make sure you get contact with the owner or CEO or whomever. If it’s a large corporation, okay, that’s probably not realistic, but you do want the relevant VP or something like that as part of your process.

But you also want to make sure that you’re engaging with the folks who are going to be your day to day contacts. And so use paid discovery to learn who the, who those people are, involve them in the process, but get to know them because that’s all part of your process. process of figuring out all the information that you can as part of discovery so that you can apply it to your proposal and to your future work.

You want to make sure that your paid discovery program is also showcasing your team’s capabilities. So make sure that what you’re putting together is something that allows you to put your best foot forward. It really should showcase your expertise. It should allow your team to shine by sharing their insights, by, by showing that they know the right questions to ask.

Because a lot of times prospects are as impressed if not more so by the questions you ask as by the advice that you give. So think about the smart questions that you can be asking as part of this paid discovery process. You want to make sure that you’re getting all of the information that you need for a future proposal.

So make sure that the paid discovery process is giving you that you would want to go through all this and then realize, Oh, geez, I, I don’t have everything that I need. So you want to make sure that you’re gathering all of that. And so as part of putting this together, you need to have a repeatable process.

And a repeatable process is so important when it comes to paid discovery for two reasons. One is it makes sure that you get the results that you need. It makes sure that you’re asking the right questions, getting the right information to move the ball forward. But the repeatable process also allows you to do this time efficiently.

Because you want to make sure that this is not a process that spirals out of control. It needs to be tightly focused. You need to make sure that the client understands that you have a defined process that you use for it. You want to make sure that it’s customizable, but not truly bespoke for each individual engagement.

This should be much more productized. The consultative if you want to think about it that way, right? This is something where you’ve got your process. You should be refining it over time. You’re certainly going to learn things. If you’ve never done paid discovery, those first few are all going to be great learning experiences and you’ll find improvements to make along the way the questions and and resources that you’re looking for going into that first one, they’re going to shift. They’re going to change. You’re going to learn what they have easy access to and what they don’t. And as you start to see patterns, as you’ve done more of these paid discoveries, you’ll be in a better position to get the information that you need and really take advantage of the paid discovery process for all that it is worth.

You want to keep it simple from a pricing perspective. So I’ve seen some paid discovery opportunities that agencies offer where it gets very complicated and you’ve got almost a matrix to figure out, you know, what the cost is, but you should be very transparent with it and should be very simple. You can have some, some flexibility in paid discovery.

So, you know, for example, when I do my agency business checkup, I do have, a few things in there that will cause increases that the two being more than one owner. Right, because as soon as you start dealing with partners in a business, it becomes more complex to work through all the details and gather all the information and the meetings tend to last longer and that sort of thing.

And the second is the number of employees. So as agencies get larger, and even within the small agency community, we have some that are smaller, some, you know, Five employees or less, some may have, you know, 20 or 30 and the number of employees does have an impact on the process that I use because it involves talking to various aspects of the team.

And once you get into layers of management, which you typically would at 15 or 20 employees that you don’t have it at, you know, three or four or five, well, those are important drivers of cost. And so those are what I use as levers in my current business, which while not an agency, it’s a similar process.

You need to think about the same sorts of things. Are there. Aspects of your audit, your strategic planning or whatever discovery process you’re using that can be easily identified as drivers of additional time and therefore cost. If so, work those in, but keep it as simple as possible because the more complex it gets, the harder it is for the prospect to say yes.

And the idea is to make it as easy as possible for the right people to say yes to your paid discovery so you can get in there Get the information you need and figure out what that bigger opportunity is that exists and how you can effectively sell it. And finally, make sure that your paid discovery process that you’re putting together speaks to your ideal client.

This is not something typically where you want to see it as a direct moneymaker, although you should never lose money on a paid discovery process. You don’t want to really be in the business of doing them at all. scale at volume in all likelihood where folks are just taking the paid discovery process and then not moving on to the next step, then the next tier of work with your agency.

You really want to make sure that they’re linked. Otherwise, what you’re doing is you’re selling just a productized service that’s a standalone. And that may be fine. That may be a good additional revenue opportunity for your business, but but it’s not paid discovery. And what we’re talking about today is really how you put together a package that is the stepping stone to further future work.

So make sure that you’re really speaking to the ideal client that you think is likely to go from that paid discovery process on to additional work with your agency. All right. So how, how do you want to implement this? So a few things that I think you need to keep in mind here, and I touched on this first bit a little bit earlier in today’s presentation, make sure that what you’re putting together for paid discovery is truly valuable to the prospect.

As a standalone, it needs to be something that at the end of the day, either the content they’ve gathered in the sessions that you’re doing or the final product that you’re producing for them and delivering to them is something that they can use to improve their business themselves, that they can implement the steps you’ve put together themselves, or that they could hire another agency if they chose to do so. And so the reason why this is important is because you want to make sure that as part of the sales process for this paid discovery that you’re able to show them that this is very, very low risk. There’s never no risk, but it’s very low risk on their part to take part in it because they’re going to get something valuable at the end.

They’re not paying you for the simply putting together a proposal. They’re paying you for something that they can take advantage of that they can use themselves. The reality is that most clients are not going to do it themselves. And most often, they’re not going to take it to another agency. Most often, they’re going to decide to work with you.

And so then it becomes your choice whether you want to work with them. So when you’re putting it together, as you’re, as you’re thinking about it, make sure that it has that value. Make sure that They will see that value when it’s delivered to them. Don’t hold things back. I don’t treat this like you would a proposal where you say, okay, I’ll tell you what the secret sauce is, but not until you become a client.

Remember, they’re paying you now. So deliver for them. It will pay off for you. If you do that, you also want to make sure that, you’re taking advantage of this process. If you go through paid discovery and you never find a prospect that you decide to take a pass on and say, look, we’re not actually the right fit to move ahead with a retainer or building a website or putting together a media campaign or whatever.

If you never come across those in your paid discovery projects, then you’re either not doing enough of them. Or you’re not designing them correctly because you should be able to weed out some bad fit clients as part of your paid discovery process. Oftentimes it’s clients that just, they’re not mature enough.

I don’t mean that they’re immature. I’m not speaking of it in those terms, but mature enough as far as a business or in the work that they’re doing to match up with what you provide. And sometimes you can’t spot that from the outside. Sometimes it really does take digging in as part of this discovery process to realize.

That, you know, they’re not at the same stage that you like to see your clients at to have true success. It might be that, that as you get in there, you figure out that the only way you can make a difference is by, proposing a budget that’s well out of their reach. And so, you know, there I’ve talked with agencies where they’ve done these paid discovery processes and realize as part of that, that the client spent all of their available budget on the paid discovery process.

And if that’s the case, obviously you don’t want to be proposing additional work because they’re not ready for it. Now that paid discovery process was still valuable because you’ve learned more. You’ve built a relationship. You were compensated for it. You generated a profit. So it’s not a waste of time.

And there may be a point in time in the future where they are ready. Where they do have more budget, where they’ve grown enough that they can work with you. Same thing for those businesses that were not mature enough for you today. They may be in a year or two. And because they’ve already started to build that relationship as part of paid discovery, you’re in a better position to win the business when the time is right.

So make sure that you’re taking advantage of this as a true screening opportunity and that you’re not going into it with the idea that you’re always going to propose additional work for everyone that goes through the program. You want to make sure that you’re taking advantage of everything that you learn to continuously improve the system.

Again, you don’t want to be completely bespoke. You don’t want to, you know, come up with a brand new process every time, but you should look for those opportunities for continuous improvement because you’re going to be learning so much throughout this. You may even decide to make some adjustments as to how you’re positioning the paid discovery process as you learn more.

And keep in mind, the other nice thing about paid discovery is that this is basically market research for you as well. So you think about it, not just in terms of what you’re learning about that individual prospect, but you’re gathering information that you can use because if you’re really well focused as an agency, and you know who your ideal client is, the more of these paid discovery projects that you do, the more you learn about people who might be good, clients for you, but you also are learning information that helps you do better work for your existing clients because as you see what everyone else is doing in the space and you understand more about the tactics that are working and that aren’t, you’re able to build your own knowledge.

Because we’re all biased to some degree by our own experience. And so we all know what has worked for us in the past. We know what has worked for our previous clients in the past. But the more we do with paid discovery, the more we’re expanding our horizons, seeing more of what’s out there, understanding it, and being in a better position to use that information to our advantage, both for sales.

And for client service and delivery. And then finally, my tip would be that you take your paid discovery process and package it up well, show it on your website, be clear about what your offer is. You may even want to publish your pricing. I’m generally a fan of transparent pricing, but even if you decide that that’s a step too far, you still want to speak very clearly on your website to what your paid discovery offer is.

And by the way, you should probably only have one paid discovery offer because you want to keep it simple. You want to drive everybody to this one thing. Now, you don’t necessarily have to drive every prospect through the paid discovery. There will be times where you can skip over that and go straight to being a client.

But I would say that That greater than 90 percent of the time, you probably ought to, to err on the side of getting them into the paid discovery project first, even if it looks like they’re willing to commit to a bigger number, because remember, paid discovery is not just about them evaluating you, it’s about you evaluating them, and as exciting as the opportunity may seem to be, without paid discovery, you’re not really taking advantage of the opportunity to do that screening, to make sure that it really is someone you want to work with, and to make sure that your pricing and scoping is actually worthy.

That will bring us to, the conclusion of the main presentation today. we talked about what paid discovery is. We talked about the benefits of it. We talked about how you create your first paid discovery package. some examples of things that other folks have done. and then of course a few final tips that I just shared with you.

So hopefully this has been a useful presentation and you’ve got some ideas as to how you can use paid discovery for your own agency. I hope that you will take advantage of it and find the opportunity to Tie everything up with a bow. I always like to finish up these webinars this way. You know that, and so it’s, it’s an opportunity for you to learn more about your prospects, it’s an opportunity to find better fit clients and drive profitability.

So I hope that you have taken good advantage of that and you’ll go out and use paid discovery effectively for your own agency in the future. So, with that I will do my best here to see if I can pop over to my other screen here and see if anyone has any questions that they would like answered today.

as I said, the q and a function at the bottom of the screen allows you to ask those questions. And let’s see, I don’t see any questions at the moment. So I’ve either done a great job of covering it or my audio is turned off and people are just staring at me wondering why I’m not, no I’m just joking because nobody said anything in the chat and generally speaking, on those occasions where I forget to turn on the microphone, someone at least is kind enough to tell me that in the chat or they just drop off.

And I don’t see zero participants. So that’s a pretty good indication. That’s not the case, but in any case, if there are no questions, you can certainly feel free to send more confidential questions to chip@sagaimpact.com. I’m always happy to take them. And, I look forward to seeing you all back here on a future SAGA webinar very soon.