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The Agency Hour
How to Sell and Deliver Paid Discovery
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The purpose of a digital roadmap session is to get clear about what it is we're building with the client, why we're building it, and what success looks like. So why are we doing this? What are we doing? And what does success look like? That's the purpose of a digital roadmap session. I always pitch this by saying, look, at the end of the digital roadmap session, you are going to have a digital roadmap workbook filled in with all of your answers. It's basically a strategy document. You can then take, if we decide that we don't want to work together, which is probably going to happen, I'm probably going to decide I don't want to work with you because I don't like doing implementation very much because it's a pain in the ass. Then you can take this strategy book and go give it to someone else, another agency. I can refer you on and say, here we've done all the hard work. The agency now knows exactly what they need to build, right? This is the hard work in any project, is figuring out the why, what, who, where, how, right? So that's what we do in the in the roadmap session.
SPEAKER_01If you have a vision for the agency you want to build, then we want to help you build it. Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, brought to you by Agency Mavericks.
SPEAKER_03Troy Dean here. Welcome. Welcome to another live stream here in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group. This, of course, is the Agency Hour podcast that we live stream here. Coming up on today's show, we're going to talk about paid discovery, how to get paid to pitch, in other words, how to get paid to think and how to get paid to pitch. We're also going to talk about why I sound like a drag queen, and it might not be what you expect. And uh we're also going to talk about my jacket. My lovely little jacket here that I've got. So, by the way, if you're listening to this podcast and you're not in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group, you won't know what I'm talking about because you're not looking at the video. So you should definitely come and join the Digital Mavericks Facebook group and check out my lovely jacket with our logo on the front. We're going to talk about that. I don't know why we're going to talk about that, but we're going to talk about that. And to help me do all of this is my good friend, my co-host, coach at Agency Mavericks, and my brother from Another Mother. Please welcome Pete Crispy Butterperry.
SPEAKER_00Never gets old. That little that little intro thing never gets old.
SPEAKER_03Never. That's great.
SPEAKER_00How are you feeling right, man? I'm feeling well. How are you feeling? You sound like a drag queen.
SPEAKER_03I do, and well, I could lie and say that I've been up all night drinking whiskey, listening to uh jazz, or I could tell you the truth, which is I don't have COVID. Oscar does. Oscar has COVID. I think I just yeah, he's uh he's okay. He's doing pretty well, actually. Uh we've avoided it for two years, you know. And I when he got his positive test, I had that mind. I felt bad. I'm like, and I apologize, I said sorry to him. I said, dude, I'm so sorry I couldn't protect you from COVID. And uh because, you know, it's interesting. We've been he's four, he's almost five, but we've been talking to him for the last two years about why we can't go to the playground. Not for the last two years, but during the last two years, there have been plenty of times where we can't go to the playground. We can't go swimming at the local swimming pool, we can't go hang out with the friends, you can't go to Kindi, we can't go to the birthday parties, this has been cancelled, that's being cancelled because of COVID. So he knows that COVID is not a good thing, right? And then he gets it.
SPEAKER_00It's actually his norm.
SPEAKER_03That's right. And then he's the first one in the family to get it. So I felt bad. I'm like, listen, man, I just don't want you to feel bad that you've got it. There's nothing wrong with getting COVID. It doesn't, you know, mean anything. It's just like a cold, you know. But I've felt bad because I couldn't protect him from it because you know, the kin half the kindy's got it right now, and you know, that variant's just going crazy, and half the people I know actually have it. But what's interesting is no one else in the family's got it. No one else in the household here has got it. We're doing tests. I've just got a good old-fashioned change of season man flu in Melbourne. I've just got a really bad cold, really. Um, I don't have COVID. Um, and we were supposed to be flying to the Sunshine Coast for a holiday this Saturday. Well, that's had to be pushed back a few days because we're not allowed to leave the house. So in Australia, if someone you live with gets COVID, no one's allowed to leave the house for seven days. In fact, technically, Oscar is supposed to be in his bedroom for seven days, right? Not he's not supposed to come out unless he needs to go to the bathroom. Well, try keeping a four and a half year old in their bedroom for half an hour, let alone seven days. Yeah, yeah. So we're just trying to keep our distance from him and we're not wrestling or cuddling or anything. But um, and then so hopefully we'll come out of this on Sunday, and then we can fly to the Sunshine Coast on Tuesday and resume our holiday a few days late. So there you go. That's why I sound like a drag queen. And it's every chance I could lose my voice during this episode, which could be interesting.
SPEAKER_00That's why I'm here.
SPEAKER_03That's why you were here.
SPEAKER_00I wish I'd gone. I would have worn my jacket. We should look like uh you've got you've got one of these two. Yeah, it would look like Maverick and Goose.
SPEAKER_03Maverick and well, hey, who's Maverick and who's goose? Come on now. I mean Maverick. It depends on the day of the week.
SPEAKER_00I'm clearly goose.
SPEAKER_03It depends on the day of the week, doesn't it, hey? Um couple of couple of things. Oh, so the jacket, by the way, is uh the reason we have these jackets. Uh here's the jacket here. It's got the agency Mavericks plane on the front, right? This is a uh what do they call these? It's weatherproof, but what do they call it? It's like a bomber certain. Yeah, like a bomber jacket, but the actual material is a certain type of material that uh is is waterproof. The reason we have these jackets is because in September last year, we ran a competition internally, and there's something in this for any of you listening who have a team, we ran a competition last year to book a certain number of calls with our clients. Uh, we call them clarity calls, and a clarity call is just a 15-minute call where we sit down with a client and figure out if we're a good fit to actually help them with any of our in any of our coaching programs. So we're kind of interviewing them, they're interviewing us, we kind of get a feel for each other. And if we do feel like we're a good fit, then we put them through to a longer discovery call. And we ran a competition to book a certain number of calls in September last year. I think it was 80 calls for the month, and I think we needed to book 20 a week. So it was like you can't, we can't just do 60 in the last week. We need to do an average of 20 a week and get to 80 for the month. And we did it. We got there was a bronze, there were prizes for bronze, silver, and gold. The prizes were if we got to bronze, but I can't remember what the numbers were, but if we got a bronze medal, everyone got uh a pair of Ug boots, which are I'm wearing right now. They are the standard issue work from home safety boot. Work from home safety boot, I call them. Uh they're a you know, wool, sheep wool, skin, um, sheep wool, uh sheepskin wool, ug boot. Now, of course, the Filipinos didn't take the Ugg boots because they have no need for them because it never really gets cold enough over there. So they got a voucher to spend. If we got a gold medal, everyone got the Ugg boots and a pair of ray-bands, of course, to look like maverick. And if we got plat uh a gold medal, sorry, that was silver. If we got a gold medal, everyone got the Ug boots, the uh Ray Bans and swag. And that's why we got the jackets. So we smashed it. We smashed our goal, which was fantastic. We gamified it, and it's what what I learned through that process is when you gamify it and get the whole team on board playing a game and competing with each other or competing as a team, that you find really creative ways to achieve what it is you said you were going to achieve. So we found opportunities everywhere in this business to reach out to clients and book in a call that we otherwise wouldn't have found if we weren't playing that game and we weren't incentivized to achieve the numbers and get the prizes. There you go. Emily's wearing her rug boots right now in New Zealand. Uh, so that's uh why we have the jackets. Now, the other thing that I wanted to talk about was the ridiculous ring the bell channel in our in our Mavericks slack. Again, I'm not going to uh out anyone, um, but we have wins and success everywhere. One of our Mavericks just had their biggest month ever. Uh, 8k over over budget, 8 grand more than they expected. Increased monthly recurring by 7.5. Just let that sit in for a second. Increased monthly recurring revenue by an additional seven and a half thousand dollars per month. That's over 85 grand a year in new recurring revenue. And uh just dropped a statement of work for a $35,000 project and a $65,000 project. This particular Maverick says I need to sell minus twelve hundred dollars next month to break even. So April, they're already ahead by twelve hundred dollars because of what they sold in March. Yeah, absolutely on fire. Um, so just wanted to share that with you guys. Uh all right. So today we're gonna dive into do a bit of a deep dive into paid discovery and how to sell paid discovery. What is let's just let's just recap some definitions here. What the hell is discovery, Pete? As the way the way that you understand it. What is the point of discovery? How does it work? And and and what and what do you do?
SPEAKER_00Discovery, okay, well, that's a lot of questions. Which one do you want me to answer?
SPEAKER_03Well, you know, take pick a number. I'm not fasting.
SPEAKER_00So discovery is basically some people call it a road mapping session, some people call it a strategy session. It's basically assuming assuming you're doing a project, say a website, um, it's basically the session that you do beforehand to get to the bottom of what this project is really all about. So if whether it's for branding or website or SEO or whatever, obviously you have to have some sort of meeting ahead of time to um, you know, know what the project is. Discovery, the way we do it, is a little bit um deeper than that. You know, we I don't want to give away your thunder here, but we got dive into all kinds of things in their business that are seem like at the first glance to the client, anyway, that maybe they have nothing to do with building a website. Um, and that's because we don't just build websites, we're websites are a commodity. So we have to dive a little bit deeper and uh you know, ask ask more questions, go wide, go deep. It's the evolution of what what we used to do is go wide, go deep. Um so yeah, all that stuff.
SPEAKER_03And and so what's the problem with you know the I we we had we had someone join Mavericks last year, and on the first call that I connected with him, he said I'm I've been through a he'd been through a coaching program for web designers, right? I don't know which one it was. I didn't want to know. Um, and he said I've been taught to do about four or five free discovery sessions before I uh pitch my proposal.
SPEAKER_02That's crazy. Right. That's crazy.
SPEAKER_00I'm like, I don't free is a four-letter word. That's you don't you don't use that word, nobody uses that word.
SPEAKER_02No, and so I'm like, dude, how's that working out for you?
SPEAKER_03And he's like, well, you know, it's taking it's a lot of time and a lot of effort, and you know, um the problem with free, the problem with discovery is one, for you as an agency owner, there's no the people don't ex people don't want to pay for it, right? So there's no money in it. And what happens is you typically get on the phone or you meet up with someone. Uh we had another Maverick recently who was dealing with a client and they said, uh, they had a quick phone call and they said, Look, this sounds great. You sound like you really know what you're doing. We'd love you to drive out and meet the team, right? And um before we sign off so that we can really, you know, connect. It was gonna be a three and a half hour round trip, right? In so like an hour and three quarters each way and travel, plus the time you're gonna spend there. I coached her and said, No, like charge them for that. If you're gonna say, Yeah, look, happy to come out. Once you hire me, happy to come out and we'll meet the team and we'll do a digital road mapping session and we'll put everything on the table. I'm not I'm busy. I don't have time. Your GP doesn't drive out to your house and diagnose the rash that you've got on your inner thigh for free, right? You pay a locum. If you want the doctor to come to your house, you pay more than if you go and see them. Right? So people's expectations, first of all, are that they don't want to pay for discovery. And we're gonna talk about why we don't call it discovery for that reason. We'll talk about that in a little minute. But the other problem is when someone wants to pick your brain or you do free discovery for them, there's no skin in the game for them, right? So what typically happens is they don't value what it is we've talked about, they don't value your advice, they don't believe it, they don't, they're not gonna put it into action. And then they might learn some stuff and they go and they go, well, that was kind of helpful. But, you know, I don't know, send me a proposal, you send a proposal and they get sticker shock and they're like, What? You're gonna charge me $12,000 for a website? That's fucking ridiculous. I can get it on fiber or upwork for $599. And in the meantime, you've wasted your time, they don't value the conversation, and you know, everybody loses. They don't get the outcome, you don't get paid. So that's the problem that we want to fix using paid discovery. And we I also want to walk you through how this fits into your sales process, right? Because paid discovery in in our world is a product that you can sell someone before they're ready to make a bigger commitment, right? So think about dating. This is coffee before we go out for dinner, right? Make sense, excuse me. Now, I'm also gonna share my screen at some point because I'm gonna show you some of the assets that we've built. And no, you can't have them. These are assets that we've built that we give our paying clients.
SPEAKER_00So before you ask, some of you can. If you're a maverick, if you're a maverick, you can.
SPEAKER_03If you're a maverick, you can have them. Um, we may at some point package this up and sell it as a separate product if there's a desire for it. If you guys tell us that you would like this as a separate product and a separate training, then we may package it up and uh make it available. But I want to just give you an idea of the concept, right? And some of the things that you need to run successful paid discovery, because the biggest pushback that we get from clients that we work with and we start to have this conversation with is they say, Well, no one's gonna pay for discovery, right? And so the uh the idea is uh if people don't want to pay for discovery, there's two things you need to do. One, stop calling it discovery, and two, make it so valuable that people will pay for it. So that's why we don't call it discovery. That's why I call it a digital roadmap session. You can call it whatever you want, you can call it strategy workshop. Again, people don't really want to pay for a strategy workshop. Um, you call it whatever you want, but make it valuable enough that it's a no-brainer for the client to pay for it. Now, the what I will say is this we have Mavericks who are selling paid discovery from the and I'll show you our sales process in a moment in a fancy flow chart. So again, if you're listening to this as a podcast, please come and join the digital Mavericks Facebook group, right? Because you then you'll be able to see what we're we're sharing here on the video. I'm gonna show you where this fits into your sales process. We have Mavericks who sell paid discovery from the first phone call in their sales process. They sell paid discovery, and then they have about an 85% close rate from paid discovery to larger project. Yeah. Right. So it's also a way of shortening your sales cycle and actually getting a commercial relationship going with the client quicker because you're not asking for $15,000 for a website. You might be asking for $2,500 for a digital roadmap. And I'll walk you through what the deliverable is and how to make that valuable. Once they've invested two and a half grand for a digital roadmap, it's then it's not as big a stretch for them to make a serious investment in building out the project. And you're clearly the right person to do it because once you've done a digital roadmap session, you know more about their business than anyone, including them, because you've helped them think through this and you've helped them answer questions, you've helped them have realizations, right? Interesting comment here from James Murgatroyd. The truth is most are already paying for discovery, it's just part of a larger offering. That's right. What typically happens is people hire you to do a project, and the first thing you do is you do discovery, right, as part of that larger project. So so there's that that model or the model where you basically do free discovery and then pitch a proposal and try and get the larger project, which is where a lot of people sit as well. What we're what we're suggesting here is that you take discovery like a slice of cake. You take discovery, you slice it out of the bigger project, and you sell it as a separate product. All right, that's the concept that we're talking about here. It's gonna help your sales process, it's gonna build trust with your clients quicker. You can also codify this and delegate it to a team member in the future, which is what Adam Silverman has done in Mavericks. His team now run paid discovery, right? He doesn't do it, his team do it. Yeah, right. So shall we shall we have a look at uh what are you gonna show them? Well, I think I'm gonna show them I think I'm gonna show the sales process first so that we can see where this fits in in the actual sales, um, the overarching sales process, right? So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna share my screen and I'm just gonna walk you through the high level of our here we go, share screen. And where is it? Window. There we go. Here it is. All right, ladies and gentlemen, here it is on the screen. If you're listening to this as a podcast, this is gonna be very entertaining radio for you right now because you won't be able to see what we're looking at. So come and join the Digital Mavericks Facebook group and come and hang out with us. What you're looking at here is a very simple flow chart, which is the Mavericks sales system. This is the sales process that we teach everyone in Sales Accelerator and Mavericks Club. And I'll walk you through very high level, right? What happens is someone puts their hand up and expresses interest in what it is you're doing. And there are a multi-there are a multitude of ways, a myriad of channels that people can do that through. They can leave a comment in a Facebook group that you uh on one of your responses. They can reach out to you in Messenger, they can pick up the phone and call you, they can email you from your contact form on your website, they can see you at a networking event. Anyone who expresses interest in what it is that you do, okay? The very first thing we do is we pre-qualify them. We have a series of questions that we ask very quickly just to make sure they're not a lunatic and make sure that, you know, we think that they might be a good fit for us to work together. For example, someone says to me, Oh, I work for SportsBet 365. We're a big gambling company, I would say, that's great. I'm not the droid you're looking for. I'm sorry I can't help you. I don't work with anyone in the gambling industry. Um, if someone says, Hey, I'm a nonprofit and I work in the mental health space, I'm like, oh, I'm all ears. Let's talk. We might be a good fit. So it's just a very quick pre-qualification process. Then the first real touch point that we have with someone is what we call a triage call. It's a quick 15-minute call. You can really get these down to, you know, seven or 10 minutes. Yeah. Just to find out if you we can actually help them, right? So we ask a few more questions, we try and qualify their budget a little bit, make sure that they are the main decision maker and make sure that they've got a need that we can actually help them with, right? If someone comes to me and says, well, you know, so we're you're a nonprofit, you're in the mental health space, you're doing really great work. It turns out that you've got a great website, it's converting really well. You just need someone to run YouTube ads for you and ramp up the traffic that you're getting to your website. I'm probably not the droid you're looking for because I don't run PPC campaigns for clients. So now we've had that quick 10-minute phone call. I go, great. I can probably refer you on to someone that can help you, but I I can't help you. If they make it through the triage call, and I think there's a genuine fit here that we can help them, we put them through to a deeper, what we call a strategy call or a growth plan, right? And in between those two calls, we send them some homework. And the homework is designed to do two things to allow them to self-assess how much work they need to do, and also to position us as the trusted authority, right?
SPEAKER_00That's the key.
SPEAKER_03And we've, by the way, we've got a 100% strike rate of people turning up to a growth plan or a strategy call having done their homework. So everyone who turns up to a strategy call with us, they've done their homework and they say, This is one of the most useful exercises I've done in recent history. This has been really eye opening and I've got a lot of work to do. We go, great, we can help you with that. Excuse me. Then we have the strategy call, and usually on the strategy call, the I'll close into one of our programs, or we'll schedule a follow-up call with them a couple of days later just to talk about logistics and get them on boarded, or we'll decide that we're not a good fit and we'll part ways as friends, right? Uh if they don't make a decision on that call, we put them into a simple anti-follow-up sequence and then they either win, they're not a good fit, or it's not now, and we put them into follow-up. So that's it at a high level, very high level. Let me explain where paid discovery fits in. Paid discovery, you can sell paid discovery. I would suggest, by the way, if this is a new concept for you, that you sell paid discovery on the second call, on the strategy call. As I said, we do have Mavericks that are selling paid discovery straight off a triage call, largely because they're impatient and they've just dialed it in. They've just got their value proposition right. The leads that are coming in are good quality leads, they're from referrals, they don't need to have a second call. So you don't want the you don't want the second call to get in the way of closing someone into paid discovery. If someone is giving you all the right buying signals on that first triage call, you could just sell them paid discovery on that first call. But if you've never done this before, I would suggest that you do the triage call, you get them into a second call, and then you sell the paid discovery off that second call. If paid discovery, let me explain when I think you should sell paid discovery. You should sell in in what instance you should sell paid discovery. I think you should sell paid discovery. There's a couple of clues I look for that tell me, ah, I think you're right for a digital roadmap session. One is I've never done this before. They want me to build some really complex membership website and plug it into some really weird e-commerce thing and have a whole bunch of automations, go off and talk to other third-party things. And there are too many variables for me to actually figure out how much this is going to cost, right? So at that point, I would want to do some paid discovery because I want to dive deeper and really do a technical audit and a technical analysis of what is required. The other instance, so so if I'm not really sure how what how much work is involved and therefore how to quote it or how to how to uh price it, then I want to do a paid discovery. The other instance, which is more common, is if they don't know what they're doing, which is really common, right? So they want to build a membership website and they've never had one before. They want to do e-commerce and they've never done e-commerce before. In that case, I want to do paid discovery because I want them to understand all the moving parts that are involved. And I want to make sure we answer all of the questions before we pick up the crayons and the code editors and start building stuff. I want to make sure that we've got a very, very clear plan of attack before we start building anything, right? It's literally like having a drawing from a draftsman before we get on site and start laying the foundations and pouring the concrete. So that they're the situations where I think you should sell paid discovery and I think you should sell it off that second call. And paid discovery is typically, you know, I like to kind of think about it of uh somewhere between around 10 to 20 percent of the overarching price of the project. So if we think this is gonna be a $20,000 website, we might pitch it at $1,500 to $2.5k for paid discovery. That's kind of makes sense. You've got to know your numbers and you've got to understand what it costs you to deliver a paid discovery session, and you've got to make sure it's profitable.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_03Any questions so far, Pete?
SPEAKER_00Have I no, no? Um, I know Adam sells it after the triage call, but his situation's a little bit different the way he the way he positions it. But I I agree that it should be because you want to know the B A N T before you before you sell on anything, right? You know the whole purpose of selling the strategy call is to parlay that into a bigger project. So if they're not right for the bigger project, then don't bother doing the discovery session.
SPEAKER_03Correct. That's right. And uh just to clarify, the BANT uh framework is a great qualification framework. It's budget, authority, need, and timeline, right? So you you just authority means are they the decision maker? Do they have a realistic budget? Do they have a need you can actually help them with? And is their timeline now or you know, next year? Um, so that's the purpose of the triage call, really. Uh, a couple of questions here. Adam Nowak, are you saying no to gambling because of personal reasons or legalities of the sector? I'm saying no to gambling because uh I not for personal reasons, I have no personal history with gambling or any family history with gambling. I've seen gambling destroy lives in Victoria. We are the problem gambling capital of the world per head of population where I live. That's no exaggeration. I'm not making that up. I used to gig, I used to play live music in a casino here in Melbourne uh for, I don't know, 18 months, two years. I was there probably two or three times a month, and I would just watch these people, they were there every time I was there, they were there pouring money into these poker machines, and gambling has just destroyed families here in Victoria. And the poker machines are designed to only ever pay out 15%, sorry, uh 85% of what they take. So you put $100 into a into a poker machine, on average, you're only ever going to get $85 back. The math just doesn't make sense, right? But there's all this psychology built into a poker machine that gives you quick wins and keep you hooked in. So I just don't think that that kind of gambling is good for society. So I don't want to be a part of it. I would rather work with people who are doing good things in the world, and I don't think gambling institutes are doing good things in the world. Um, so I hope that answers that question.
SPEAKER_00I agree. I don't do anything, anything that I would consider a vice. We don't want anything that we would consider a vice, except porn. We do a lot of porn.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, porn, of course. Everyone does porn. I mean, there's lots of money in porn, and you know, um uh there's a lot to lots to lots to learn from the porn industry in terms of user experience. Yes. Um now uh the um yes, there we go. Well done, Stuart George. Yes, another fellow Muso and ex-Adelaide. Yep, gambling's always been a hard no for us too. That's right. And also, poker machines put most of us musos out of business uh back in the day. So um so where do you stop the call and start the paid session? That's a great question, James. Well, I I don't do discovery on the on the strategy call. We we so the you've got the sales script, you'll know this. The purpose of the strategy call is just to ask them lots of questions so that they can identify that they need help. Let me walk you through some of the things we do. In fact, let me ask you this would you like to see the three assets that I've built that we've built here? I can't take all the credit for this because Kat, well, one, brainstorming this with the coaches has been incredibly helpful, but then also Kat Townsend from thegoodalliance.org. Big shout out to Kat Townsend from TheGoodAlliance, who is our IP, our information designer, and takes our intellectual property and turns it into beautiful graphic assets and digital assets. She has built three assets that we use as part of a digital roadmap session. Would you like to see them? Let me know in the comments. Wow, Rochelle Perry, one of my long-term clients, now writes gay porn. Wow, look at that. Fantastic. That's a uh a growth industry, someone says. I wonder if that's because of COVID. I wonder if it's a growth industry because of COVID. Um, okay, so let me just come over to Canva.
SPEAKER_00I think James was doing a little play on words.
SPEAKER_03All right, yes, people want to see the assets. Here we go. Wow, it descended pretty quickly then, didn't it? Um let's have a look at the this one here. Let's have a look at this one here. Do, do, do. Okay, there are three assets that we use when running a digital roadmap session. Now, let me just let me just pre-frame this before I show you, before I share my screen. The purpose of a digital roadmap session is to get clear about what it is we're building with the client, why we're building it, and what success looks like. Right? So why are we doing this? What are we doing, and what does success look like? That's the purpose of a digital roadmap session. I always pre-I always pitch this by saying, look, at the end of the digital roadmap session, you are going to have a digital roadmap workbook filled in with all of your answers. It's basically a strategy document. You can then take, if we decide that we don't want to work together, which is probably going to happen, I'm probably going to decide I don't want to work with you because I don't like doing implementation very much because it's a pain in the ass. Then you can take this strategy book and go give it to someone else, another agency. I can refer you on and say, here we've done all the hard work. The agency now knows exactly what they need to build, right? This is the hard work in any project, is figuring out the why, what, who, where, how, right? So that's what we do in the in the roadmap session. There are three assets that I like to use. And this is doesn't matter if you're doing it on Zoom. I used to do this in person. Uh now, of course, these days we're doing a lot of this on Zoom. And it's great if you can get confident doing this on Zoom because then you open yourself up to a global audience, right? And you can have clients anywhere around the world. So the first thing, the first asset that we have is our slide deck. And the slide deck is simply it just gives some, it just gives people somewhere to rest their eyes while we're talking and thinking. And it also shows them some examples of what we're looking for, right? So they can go, what are we supposed to be doing here with the customer persona? And they look at the slide and go, oh, yeah, right, that's right, cool, got it. Okay.
SPEAKER_00So also this will give them a sense that you've done this before.
SPEAKER_03Correct.
SPEAKER_00That's right. This isn't your first rodeo.
SPEAKER_03That's right. Um, I'm just gonna walk you through, I'm not gonna show you all of these, but what I do want to show you is that these are white labeled assets, right? So you just drop your business name here. Uh, you know, you can stick your own logo on it, whatever. And then we've just got a, you know, some simple uh slides here, a welcome slide, you know, about me. You go through the agenda, uh, you know, let's get started. Then this these slides here point to blank worksheets, which I'll show you in a second. These slides here talk to blank worksheets. So you just have this up on the screen, and you as a facilitator talk about this concept and teach, and then they have their own workbook where they start to fill it in, right? And we talk about again. So, hey, we're gonna talk about the vision. These are the questions that we need to answer. When you give them the exercise to go work in groups or start working their workbook, you leave these slides up because they're like, What are we supposed to be doing again? Why does your business exist? And they can look at the screen and go, why does this business exist? What greater purpose are we trying to make in the world, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh, so the the slide deck is a combination of these kind of templated slides that show them what they should be doing in their workbook and then prompts and questions that they should be thinking about to fill in the workbook, right? And here we go, there's a worksheet of a customer persona, blah, blah, blah. Right. So, again, I'm not going to go through every single one of these, uh, but that's the slide deck. That's what the slide deck looks like. It's pretty straightforward, and then there's a thanks screen, the end. Okay. Now, in addition to that, we have a facilitator workbook. And the facilitator workbook, again, is the branding is all consistent, it's all white labeled. You stick your own stuff on it. The facilitator workbook, can you guys see the facilitator work? Yes, you can. The facilitator workbook is your workbook. This is the workbook that you as the facilitator have. I usually have this on my iPad. And once people are in the room, when people come in the room, this is the, you know, the first slide is up on the screen, and I have this on my iPad, and everyone sits down and they do their little chit-chat and they talk about who won the sport on the weekend and blah, blah, blah. And then you flick the welcome slide up, and here's your script. Hey, welcome everyone. Thanks for uh for being here. You explain any housekeeping, then you go around the room and ask everyone to state their name, position in the company, and what they hope to get out of the workshop, right? So here's your script. This basically tells you what to say. It's paint by numbers, right? These slides, these pages in your workbook match the slides. Got it? Um, then we talk about the concepts, we go through the agenda. This is the business overview. So the slide is that yellow slide I showed you before. Uh, you then talk them through this, you teach, right? And then they fill it in. Okay. Here's an example. So you can actually walk them through an example. You go, so an example of a vision might be we imagine a world where everyone has the awareness and skills to support others with mental health challenges. That's that's an example of a vision. The mission is to get mindfulness taught every primary school in Australia. That's the mission. That's an example of a mission. Our job today, ladies and gentlemen, is to write and articulate the mission for our. This is a fictitious company called Mindscape, by the way. Um so these are examples that you use to teach. And then the people in the work, your client in the workshop, they actually fill in their own workbook, which I'll show you in a second. So these slides are all here in your facilitator. These are all pages in your facilitator workbook. Okay, got it. Excellent. Now the participant workbook is very, very similar to the facilitator workbook, right? It's just blank. All these worksheets here are blank, and during the workshop, they get to fill them in. Now, I'm a bit this work, this whole digital roadmap for me is kind of built around my sweet spot, which is user experience, customer experience, right? Uh I'm trying to understand the questions that I'm trying to answer in a digital roadmap session are if I go to my facilitator workbook, the questions I'm trying to answer, which is the agenda, are the overview of the business. Like, who are you guys? What do you do? Who do you do it for? Why are you here? The project brief, like what are we actually trying to build? Is it a new website, a membership website? We're adding e-commerce to our existing website. What are we trying to actually do? And then the project resources are our customer persona, our customer journey map, our site map, and our user flow. That's that's typically for a website, right? So they're the questions that I'm trying to answer. And the participant workbook has all these beautiful worksheets that they can fill in to workshop and brainstorm these answers. And so by the end of the workshop, they are super clear about exactly what they're trying to do, who they're doing it for, what the customer journey looks like, the other things that they need to consider. We've got a site map mapped out, we've got some user flows mapped out for new users and returning visitors, and we have a next steps page of who said they're going to do what by when, right? Now, I know I just gave this to you from the fire hose and it was very quick, but the point is once this is way more valuable than just selling paid strategy because there are deliverables. They have this participant workbook that they have they get at the end of it, right? My suggestion to my clients is someone client side fills this in. You can all fill it in, but at the end of it, we need to collate all of your uh thoughts and ideas into one master workbook. And there's some really cool things you can do, like you can use post-it notes if you're doing this physically in a room. We've done this before at Mavcon. You use post-it notes in the room and you get people to vote and you get people to move stuff around on post-it notes, and it becomes really interactive. You take a bunch of photos, and then someone is responsible for collating all of that stuff into one master workbook at the end. And that's what the client ends up with is basically their digital strategy in a workbook with their goals mapped out, uh, the purpose of what they're doing, who they're doing it for, and what their next action steps are. And the next action steps will be too much for them to do because there's a skills gap or they don't have the resources or the time to do it. So it's logical for them then to hire you to do it with them or for them, which is how you then transition into going from paid discovery into a larger project.
SPEAKER_00Traditionally, I always did it as part of the project. Right. But the problem with that was sometimes you discovered that the project needs to be more than you originally thought the project was going to be. That's right. Right. Right. That's that's an unconceptional way to do this.
SPEAKER_03It's awkward, isn't it? It's like it's like getting into an Uber, putting your address. This has happened to me recently. Putting the address in the Uber, getting in with your mate, and then going to the Uber driver. Oh, by the way, dude, I've just got to drop him off on the way. Right. The Uber driver pulled over and said, Open your app and add his address as a destination in the app and it will recalculate the total, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Pulled over and I'm like, dude, just keep driving. He's like, No, no, no, no, no. Pull over, add that his address as a destination, and it will recalculate and then we can start again. Because how many times you get halfway through a project with a client and you go, Oh shit, they're expecting you know a membership area where people can log in and see their past orders. And I haven't scoped that out, and that's going to cost more, and then it's a very awkward conversation, right?
SPEAKER_00Is this part of a process on a course you're offering? Something like a sales course, perhaps. So this is something we give our Mavericks members as part of their membership, they can have that. So if you're in Mavericks, raise your hand and Slack and we'll get this to you. Um maybe we just dump it in the the general channel so everybody can see it at once. Um, but you know, we're always we're always looking for things to create courses around or or yeah, you know. So if you're you know if you're interested in something like that, Adam, if there's enough interest in something like that, we would certainly not leave you hanging.
SPEAKER_03Totally. If this is if you guys are listening to this, or for those of you who have seen it in the group, by the way, again, if you're listening to this as a podcast, please come and join the Digital Mavericks Facebook group so you can see these beautiful assets that we've been talking about. Uh, and you can you can, you know, it's amazing. Modern technology, you're probably listening to this podcast on your phone. You can join the Facebook group on your phone. It's amazing. You know, the other thing you can do is you can call your mom from the same device and listen to this podcast and join the Facebook group all on the same walk, right? It's incredible, amazing modern technology. Um so if you are in, if you would like this as a formal training and a uh process-driven course with all the assets, let us know and we will put something together for you. Facebook user says, My God, I love it. I have 20 sheets of butcher paper I now have to collate after our full day of paid discovery on Tuesday. There we go. Uh Sheila Heard's laughing. By the way, congratulations, Sheila Heard, for joining Mavericks Club. Sheila Heard, you are a rock star. It's been about an 18-month to two-year on-ramp for uh Sheila, who's been through a bunch of our programs to then eventually pull the trigger and join Mavericks Club, which is amazing. It's so awesome. I just cannot wait to start working with you and Mike. I'm super excited. Peter Wright says, love this. Need to implement this immediately. Keen to get my hands on those assets. Well, Peter, we should have a conversation. You are in sales accelerator. We should probably have a conversation, my friend. Um, yes, offering this as a precursor to a full project, James Megatroid. I'll tell you the other thing that happens, and I didn't realize this. When you start offering this as a precursor to a full project, you generally can charge more for the full project. So you might slice out paid discovery at $2.50, and then the 12k project becomes an $18,000 project because A, you actually know what's involved, and B, your positioning and your authority is through the roof. Exactly. Um I went to a another comment here from anonymous Facebook user. I went to a four-hour long discovery meeting yesterday and forgot to take notes. Oh my gosh, I'm I feel your pain. Um, I really am sorry that you're having that experience. Your client should be taking the notes, by the way.
SPEAKER_00If you show up and do a discovery process with a professional looking slide deck and PDFs that you can fill out or write and print it out that you can write in a workbook, the the old what's the old adage? The way you do something is the way you do everything. At least that's the that's the implication. So now they know what level you work at. Because I promise you, they've never had this done before. Like they've had websites before, but they didn't have this process.
SPEAKER_03So that's right. Because it elevates you big time. There's a really interesting point. I just want to park you for a second. If they had done this in the past, they wouldn't be talking to you right now because they wouldn't have a problem with their website or the strategy, it would be working. But they it's not working because they haven't done this before, and it's not working because they haven't done this before, and that's why they're talking to you, right? Um, Eloy uh Hunter Bruckhoff was the one who went to a four-hour long discovery meeting. Yes, and I forgot to take notes. Eloy, come on, my friend, start taking notes. Use notability on the iPad, yes. So, Stuart, you know what I like to do is I actually have these participant workbooks as PDFs on my iPad with notability, my friend. And I have my Apple pencil, and I can just walk around the room with the workbook open and I can show them how to fill it in on the iPad, and they think you're a genius. They're like, Oh my god, you invented the internet, right?
SPEAKER_00Um Adam Adam, let's have uh Emily. If you're listening, can you have Dioza reach out to Adam and and talk to him about what we have to offer as far as different programs?
SPEAKER_03Um Rory Rory says, uh if they had uh no, Rory says, uh that's right, if they'd done this in the past, they wouldn't have this problem exactly. And also, um I get it, I get it. So Rory was Rory was trying to make notes in click up, but he was leaving notes in the in the chat here. So he's basically parroting what you've been saying, Pete.
SPEAKER_00But instead of leaving those notes in the case, did I say that or did he say that?
SPEAKER_03That's genius.
SPEAKER_00Um that's pretty funny.
SPEAKER_03If my client walked out with a thing, they would pay double for sure. Yes, Rory Flynn. Correct. They would pay double. That's it's hilarious. This is uh turning into a variety show. Um genius, excellent. There we go. So what questions do you guys have? What questions do you guys have about implementing this? Uh I so yes, anonymous Facebook user. Who is that bloody anonymous Facebook user? Is that is that Rory Flynn? Um whoever it is.
SPEAKER_00Rory's showing up.
SPEAKER_03So if you want to if you want a power move for this, right? Take your iPhone or a if it's going to be a long discovery session, then just grab one of those little Zoom recorders, right? Stick it in the middle of the table, record the entire session, have it transcribed, right? Might cost you a couple of hundred bucks to have a two or three hour workshop transcribed, and then have someone go through it and pull out all the nuggets to make sure you didn't miss anything. Write up a one-page executive summary of the transcript, send that back to the client a few days after the workshop. They'll think you're a magician. And on the day, you don't have to take notes. You just get to perform, lean into the client, listen to them, facilitate the conversation, uh, record it all, have it transcribed, have someone, you know, have a team member write up a one-page summary of the transcription to pull out all the gold nuggets, and that's a power move. It's a bit of work involved, but it's uh, you know, it's that's the kind of work that no one else does, right? There you go, Sheila. If you have an Android, Google Recorder transcribes while recording. There you go. Fantastic. Uh good, good, good. All right. What questions do you have about implementation of this or the sales process? What questions do you have? This has been good. This has been fun.
SPEAKER_00What's the best way to base your price for paid discovery? I mean, you said earlier that you like to think of it as about 10% of what the project's gonna be, but of course we don't really know what the project's gonna be yet.
SPEAKER_03So yeah, I mean, it's it's I have a gut, I have a gut feel, right? I like I kind of know that a project is gonna be in a range of like maybe you know, 10 to 20, right? So I'm kind of wanting to pitch 1500 for a paid discovery. Um and based on that, uh the the other thing that you need to know is what does it cost you to deliver a paid discovery session? Now, to completely blow your mind and give you massive FOMO, we have an entire template, project template set up in ClickUp for running these paid discovery sessions with all of the things that you need to do before the paid discovery session, on the day of the paid discovery session, the day after the paid discovery session, um, the week after the paid discovery session, how to transition the paid discovery into a full project. So that's all in a checklist in ClickUp, which then includes these assets that we've shown you today. Um, so you need to know how much it costs you to deliver paid discovery, right? And it needs to be profitable. So, and you need to factor in your time or the person who's running the paid discovery. So, you know, the the kind of rule of thumb to start is about 10 to 15% of what you think the project is going to be, charge that in paid discovery. And Chris asked a very good question. Can you offer the price of the discovery come off the project if they go ahead? You can, if you want to sweeten the pot a little bit, you can say, hey, look, if we make this investment of $1,500 in this uh digital roadmap session, if you then go ahead with the project, I'll give you a credit of $1,500 against the project, or I'll give you a credit of half. So I'll credit $750 against the project, right? That might be enough to sweeten the pot as well. Uh, question here from Rory. Any advantage to pitching a summary of what you do to entice them to a high value session, like a sneak peek of your session. Uh, I wouldn't no, Rory says, or keep it mysterious. I would keep it mysterious, dude. Yep, I would keep it mysterious. Yeah. You know, the reason you join the platinum club is to get into the platinum room, to get behind the platinum door into the platinum room, right? If you if you open the platinum door and go in, you might go, well, you know what? I actually don't want to be a member here. That's actually not that exciting. So I would keep it mysterious. That would be my advice there. Uh and James says the Zoom H4N is a great option to record. Yes, it is. I've got one of them myself. It's a very good option. Any other questions about selling this, implementing it? By the way, just a future uh pace here. We have Mavericks who are selling these and their team members are running them, and then the team members are upselling into the larger project. Right? So that's where you can end up. You can codify this thing. I mean, we've done a lot of the heavy lifting for you. You can codify this product so that your team members can run it. Yeah. Uh Adam's got a good question. Following up on what you've suggested with the executive summary delivered to a client, is there anything else you'd ever send them? I feel like clients love things they can hold in their hands. And last time I've done a website audit, I created a 30-page PowerPoint like the one you showed. I printed it out and had it bound on a ring binder and delivered it. Yeah, sure. Totally. You can do that. You can take the uh you can take their workbook, their master workbook, and put that into a into a binder. Uh, you could um, you know, there's a bunch of things you could do. I what you want to make sure that you do is you have a follow-up call after the digital road mapping session, the digital road mapping workshop, have a follow-up call booked in for a week after to follow up, answer any questions, and then basically ask them. So, what do you want to do? It's a great plan we came up with. What do you want to do? Do you want to just sit on it or do you want to action it? You know, we want to action it. Great. Would you like my help? Yes, brilliant. Uh, let's go. It's gonna cost this much, and this is how we get started, right? What's a good length, says Rory? Is there a concentration drop-off? Uh, I've run full day workshops like this before and they're hard work. I would I wouldn't do any more than four hours now, and I would have one break, at least one break in the middle of those four hours. So about an hour and about 90 minutes, and then have like a 15-minute break, then do another 90 minutes, and then have another 15-minute break, and then you've got 15 minutes of fluff at the start for your intro. You've got 15 minutes of fluff at the end for questions. There's your four hours. That's what I that's what I would do. Um all right, this is good. I feel like there's some I feel like this has been this has been valuable. What's been most valuable for you guys out of uh this episode of the agency hour? What has been most valuable for you guys? Let us know in the comments. And while you're doing that, for those of you who are listening to this podcast, I have a favor to ask. Can you please go to where do we where do they leave reviews these days, Max? Is it is it is it Apple? I mean, you can't leave reviews on Spotify, right? Can you just go to wherever you listen to this podcast and give us a rating or a review or find out where you can do that for us? And also, uh, if you're on the phone, just grab whatever you're listening to now, if it's Spotify or Apple Podcast or whatever it is, just grab the share link, right? And copy the link to this episode and share it with anyone you know who is in the web design digital marketing space that you think might benefit from this. Yeah. That is how we uh that is how we get in front of a larger audience, and that is how we help more people. And so we're asking you to help us grow our listenership here because we love doing this and we want to keep doing it, and we will keep doing it. We just want to help more people and impact more people.
SPEAKER_00Uh, Adam has another good question. So, at what stage would you send a proposal? Because it almost feels like after you've done one of these, you don't really need a proposal. They're hopefully already sold, and you just need to send an invoice. You're right. See what you send is a statement of work. Yes.
SPEAKER_03That's right. You're starting to get it, Adam.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_03That's right. So this replaces the proposal, dude. And and what we do is we send a um on the follow-up call after this session, we would send them a statement of work. So we do a follow-up call after the digital roadmap session, ask them the qu any clarifying questions. Hey, this is all a great plan. And what aha moments did you guys have? Where are you at? What do you want to do? Do you want my help? Great. I'm going to send you a statement of work and uh we get started. And then there's a whole other conversation about how you productize the deliverables of this, and it also depends on what it is you're delivering. Um, and that's another conversation for another time. So, yeah, this really does replace the proposal. We send them a statement of work after this, uh, which is really just a way of formalizing what we've already agreed on during the digital roadmap session. I'm going to give you four words, too, that are going to help you close a client from a digital roadmap session into a larger project at a higher price point. If you get on a follow-up call and basically recap what you've talked about during the digital roadmap session and say, does this all sound like a good plan? And they're like, Yep. Say, what do you want to do? And they and they're backing out and they're going, Well, we're not sure yet. We've got to think about it, and there's we uh we've got to talk to some other agencies and blah, blah, blah. I learnt this from here. We go, Max Jeff Gott, thank you very much. I learnt this from reading Gap Selling by Keenan. If you've spent four hours with a client in a digital robot workshop and you know their business intimately, the four words are, I'm confused. You said, right? I'm confused. You said that you guys wanted to launch this website to serve this particular client and help them out in this way and generate this revenue. It's all here in the document. What what what have I missed? Help me understand this. What have I missed? And then you just shut up and let them explain it. I'm confused. You said you you I'm confused. You said you wanted to buy an electric car. You've come down to the dealership, you've taken it for a test drive, you've said it's the best car you've ever driven. I'm confused. What what's going on? What do you want to do? And then you watch them squirm and try and explain their way out of it. Right? It's not manipulative, it's just the facts. You said that you wanted to do this. I'm can I'm confused. You said you wanted to do this. What did I miss a meeting? Did you guys have a meeting without me while I wasn't there? What's going on? I'm confused. Help me understand, right? Uh, and if you really want to power this up, read Gap Selling by Keenan. It's amazing, it's an incredible book. All right, this has been fun. I fear that I fear that Goldie is is uh bashing the shit out of the rest of my family.
SPEAKER_00I could hear her at one point.
SPEAKER_03I could hear the terrorist. She's beating the shit out of the rest of my family out there. So I might need to go and uh dive in and help out. Um, this has been fun, Pete. It's been good.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, this will be my last one for at least for about a month, though.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's right. The time zones have changed. Time zones changed, yeah. And uh, and you know, Pete's old now, so he tends to fall asleep at about seven o'clock at night. So uh we're gonna let him off the hook. So having said that, we are gonna start bringing on some extra guests into the agency hour, and we're also gonna start bringing in the other coaches. I have it's really interesting because you when we had this conversation on Tuesday about the time zone chain, I've had four emails since Tuesday of people wanting to be your guest on the podcast. Just completely randomly. So we are gonna bring on some guests uh on the podcast. Let me know. Let us know who you would like to see on the agency or who you would like to hear. If there's a particular guest that you would like us to bring on, let us know who they are and we will do our best to reach out to them and get them. Uh and uh we will start bringing on some some guests and the other coaches and uh keep this conversation going because uh this is the most fun I have during the week, that's for sure. And uh, Pete, again, thanks for being a part of it. Thanks for being uh the wingman here, brother. Appreciate you. And um James Muratroid says Hormosy. I'll do my best to get hormosey on the show. Yeah, good luck. That'll be fun. Yeah, yeah. All right, gang. This is 57 minutes. We are out of here. We will see you. I'll see you again next week. No, actually, I won't. I'm taking a couple of weeks off. What am I talking about? We're actually having a couple of weeks off because I'm going on holiday. So we'll be back in a few weeks with or without Pete. We'll be back here in a few weeks on the agency hour. Until then, uh, enjoy. And if you want to have a chat with us about working with us, just leave a comment here or reach out to our team at support at agencymavericks.com and we'll have a conversation about the products and the programs that we have that can help you. All right. Take care. Thank you guys. Take care.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour Podcast. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcast, Audible, and wherever you'd like to listen. You can catch all of the agency hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash agencymaverics. Or you can get involved. Check out our free Digital Mavericks Facebook group, where we broadcast these episodes love for our community every week, along with a ton of free trade. We'll see you there.