What Happens During a Discovery Call?

by Jul 26, 2022Blog

When a business asks Sajid, our founder, to hop on a discovery call with him, he is usually thoughtful and careful. He wants to qualify you so that we only get on calls with the right people and don’t waste both of our time. Some businesses use the discovery call not actually to do any discovery – they’re just there to pitch their sale. But here at marketANDgrow, our discovery call is exactly what it sounds like. In fact, we see our discovery call as synonymous with a due diligence call. We really want to use the hour on the call to assess each other equally, and see if we are the right fit for each other – both ways. 

We are extremely transparent about what we look for in a client, we even have a blog about it titled, “Who do we choose to work with?” We are not in the business of taking your money and running your ads like a machine; we look into your business holistically because we want to engage in a long-term relationship that will set you up for success.

Before the call

Our process is designed with the intention of getting a good sense of who is coming into our business, and filtering out who isn’t really sure what they want or what they should be doing. The fact of the matter is that Sajid is only one person, and his capacity is 10 clients at a time. Since our focus is on good results and customer service, it’s important to Sajid that he doesn’t bite off more than he can chew. Perhaps in the future when Sajid onboards another person who can help manage more clients the ceiling will be higher, but for now there is a cap of 10. 

Before you schedule a call, you will be asked to complete an intake form. It will consist of nine questions. When doing a market survey, Sajid clicked around on a few other agencies’ websites and saw that they don’t generally ask for any information before the call. To him, it seemed like other places have a low bar to set up a discovery call since they don’t ask any specific questions. Sajid just knows he wants to come to all of his discovery calls prepared with as much helpful information as he can. Sajid believes in doing the right things; this questionnaire is designed to give him an honest understanding of if he can help you, if he cannot help you, or if you aren’t ready for help from us yet. 

Below, you will find a screenshot of the questions you will be asked to fill out.

This is really a due diligence process. While we sincerely hope that if you go through the effort to fill this out that Sajid will get on a call with you, it’s not a guarantee. He only has 24 hours in the day, so there really isn’t time in his schedule for you to “just pick his brain.” When you make the appointment, you will notice that you can’t schedule anything within the next 6 days, this is so that Sajid has time to really delve into these questions so that the discovery call can really be focused on how we can personally help you. Hasty decisions lead to false promises. 

If you’re looking at the questionnaire and are having some second thoughts, we advise you to take a look at our blog titled, “How Do I Choose the Right Google Ads Agency?” This blog delves into questions like:

  • How do I know if my business should work with a Google Ads Agency/Expert? 
  • How do I begin my search for a Google Ads Agency right? 

This could be a good resource in discovering not only if a Google Ads agency is right for you, but also what kinds of questions are good to ask us during our conversation. On the flip side of this, after going to that blog, make sure to continue reading with our blog titled, “The Challenges of Learning or Running Google Marketing (Ads) By Yourself.” If you read both blogs, you will come to understand fully if a Google Ads agency is right for you, and the task that is in front of you if you decide to go it alone. 

We believe that these questions have value in them even if we don’t decide to follow through with a call. Sometimes running a business can catch up with you, and we believe that these questions will force you to look at the state of your business from a more objective perspective, which will help you diagnose any problems there might be. The process of gathering data could be really informative to you, and having data to look at will help keep you in the right mindset. 

After you submit the questionnaire with your intended meeting time, you will receive a personalized email from Sajid with a confirmation or a reason for denial.

During the call

Assuming we decide to proceed with the call, the first thing Sajid will do is recap what he’s seen. He will let you explain the problem and why you’re coming to him if you want to elaborate on your answer to the questionnaire. 

Sajid will then share his insights. He’s straightforward about what he sees, and he will let you know exactly what marketANDgrow can help you with. This call will also be used to talk about pricing. 

Be prepared to answer these two questions during the discovery call: 

  • How available are you? 
  • How often can you hop on a call with us? 

Sajid is the kind of person who likes to talk instead of sending an email. We need to know that you have room in your schedule for a meeting up to two times a month where we sync up on your business’s numbers and needs. As we get to know each other better, those meetings will most likely eventually reduce to once a month. The person running your marketing needs to be in close contact with you, the business owner, in order to keep your goals in focus. As we said, we’re not here to mindlessly run your ads and take your money. 

Lastly, we will make sure to answer every one of your questions and talk about your concerns. There is absolutely no pressure in this call. We just want to know what you are trying to accomplish and how we can help you reach that goal.

What we’re looking for in the call

Sajid has learned and adjusted from some bad experiences in the past. The reason for the questionnaire and then the hour-long call is to try to set expectations and minimize friction points. We’ll let you know if your business is beyond our expertise. For example, Sajid doesn’t know anything about cryptocurrency, so he wouldn’t be able to help you scale a business like that. There are some other businesses we don’t touch that we talk about in our “Who do we choose to work with?” blog.

We are looking for people who are open-minded and collaborative: know-it-alls are not fun to be in business with because of the way marketANDgrow operates. We don’t need someone to say they know everything and they just want us to follow directions and they’ll pay us. 

We seek people with realistic expectations of their own limits. Think of it this way, imagine someone opens a restaurant and decides not to hire anyone: no hosts, no servers, no chefs – they’re just going to do everything themselves. You would probably tell them they’re crazy or they should expect to have only one table in their restaurant. This is like a business that sets out to do it all, both their marketing and the overall goals they set out to achieve. The learning curve on marketing is a lot, and you might think you can do it at night or on the weekends. But, it will only end up pulling you in too many directions, which is why 80% of businesses don’t make it to year five. 

When it comes to numbers, we ask you before the call about your marketing budget. That is important to us because if you don’t have a set marketing budget, it shows us that marketing isn’t a priority to you. In our blog, The Importance of Marketing, one of our guests Brahma Mishra talked about how 10-12% of your revenue or projected revenue should go towards your marketing. We need to know that we’re a priority to your business. Also, if you’re only spending $600 a month, you don’t need us to run your marketing – that’s overkill.

We also look at other numbers in your business if you have them, such as your Google Ads dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Merchant Center, Google Search Console, etc. We’ll look at things like your click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rates. 

And finally, we are looking for businesses that fit our ideal client list. One of our asks is that you’re willing to experiment. Sajid had a client once that would bring in customers to sell a $1,000 spa machine, and then he would just let them go. Sajid suggested offering them the gel that goes with the spa machine alongside it at a discounted price at checkout. Then, he could also offer a continuity plan to them to keep getting the gel every month. The client was simply leaving money at the table by not cross-selling. He was fearful and didn’t want to experiment like that, and Sajid knew that he wasn’t the client for him.

After the call

At the end of the call, you will receive an email with a recap of everything you talked about. Assuming you decided to proceed with each other, you will be sent a time-bound offer in that email that will let Sajid know that you want to start the process with him. 

We hope you found this blog to be informative and potentially clear up any hesitations you had about scheduling a call. Now that you know what will happen and what everything will look like, you can click this link if you ultimately decided to schedule a call with us

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