The Discovery Call Is a Diagnostic, Not a Sales Pitch 

The discovery call has a design problem.

It is positioned — by the CRM tools, the freelance advice columns, the business development frameworks — as the beginning of a sales process. Your job is to understand the client’s needs, present your capabilities, and move them toward a decision.

That framing produces a specific kind of client relationship: one where you sold yourself into an engagement, the client bought what you sold, and neither of you found out until later whether the actual work was going to go well.

I use the discovery call differently. I use it as a diagnostic. My job is not to close. My job is to find out whether this engagement is likely to produce good work and whether I want to be part of producing it. Those are not the same goal as making a sale, and optimizing for them produces different questions.

What a diagnostic conversation looks like

A diagnostic call is structured around three categories of information: the content problem as the client describes it, the content problem as it actually is, and the client’s capacity to engage with the solution.

The content problem as described is what the client tells you when you ask “what are you trying to accomplish?” Most clients can answer this. They want more traffic, more leads, more brand awareness, a blog that publishes consistently. These are the surface goals.

The content problem as it actually is requires a different set of questions. Why hasn’t this worked before? What happened with the last content person or agency? What does success look like, specifically — and who in the organization decides whether that success has been achieved? These questions often reveal that the stated goal is downstream of a different problem: a product positioning issue, an internal alignment problem, a leadership team that hasn’t agreed on what the content is supposed to do.

Managing content client relationships sustainably means only entering relationships where you can actually solve the problem — not the problem as stated, but the problem as it actually is. If the real problem is executive alignment and the client thinks they need a blog, you cannot write your way out of that gap.

The question nobody asks

The single most useful question in a discovery call is also the one most practitioners skip: what happened with the last content person or agency?

The answer is almost always informative. A client who says “they weren’t strategic enough” is describing something different than a client who says “they didn’t listen to feedback.” A client who says “we outgrew them” is describing something different than a client who says “there were communication problems.”

The patterns in how clients describe past relationships tell you about the client as a client. Not whether they’re good or bad — that framing isn’t useful — but whether the way they work is compatible with the way you work.

A client who fired three content agencies in two years is not necessarily a difficult client. But they are a client who requires very specific clarity about what went wrong each time before you can assess whether you’ll be engagement number four or number seven.

What you’re listening for

Beyond the specific answers, you’re listening for three things.

First: does the client understand that content is a process with a timeline? The client who expects results in thirty days has a different expectation calibration problem than the one who says “we’ve been patient and nothing has worked.” Both are solvable, but they require different conversations at the start.

Second: is there a clear decision-maker? The engagement where three people have approval authority but no one has final authority is a specific kind of expensive. Find out who says yes before you build an approval process that assumes someone does.

Third: does the client treat your expertise as something they’re buying, or something they’re managing? The client who says “I just need someone to execute” is telling you something about whether they want strategic input or word count. That’s worth knowing upfront.

The close that isn’t

At the end of a diagnostic discovery call, if everything you’ve learned suggests this engagement can produce good work, you tell the client that — specifically. What you heard that tells you this is a solvable problem. What you’d do about it. What a successful engagement looks like from your end.

If what you’ve learned suggests this engagement can’t produce good work, you say that too. With specificity, without judgment, and usually with a suggestion of what they actually need — which might be you, might not be, but is always more useful than a polite decline.

The close that isn’t a close is the most useful thing you can do in a discovery call. It demonstrates exactly the kind of honest, strategic thinking the client is theoretically paying for. And it filters for the clients who want that, which are the only clients worth taking.

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Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative, an editorial strategy consultancy based in Austin, Texas. He spent fourteen years as a flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity and has written for Tor.com, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and the Austin Chronicle.

For inquiries:
jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · Book a discovery call