Running a discovery call with a new prospect

Running a discovery call with a new prospect is the point where a reply to your email becomes, or fails to become, a project. It is also where many freelancers go wrong in one of two ways. They treat it as a sales pitch and talk too much, or they treat it as a free consultation and hand over a plan with nothing agreed. A good call sits between the two. You are there to understand the business, decide whether you can help, and agree what happens next.

What the call is for

A discovery call has three jobs. First, learn what the business wants the website to do. Second, check that the project is one you can deliver well and that the budget is in the right region. Third, leave both sides clear about the next step. Notice that none of these is “win the work on the call”. If you come away with a clear picture and an agreed next step, the call has done its job, even if the answer is that you are not the right fit.

Keep it short. Twenty to thirty minutes is enough for a small local business, and a tight call shows respect for someone who is probably running a van or a shop floor while talking to you.

Prepare for ten minutes

You can ask better questions if you have looked at the business first. Before the call, open their current website on your phone and on a laptop. Check how fast it loads, whether it works on a small screen, whether the contact details and any booking or enquiry form actually work, and what the site is built on. If they only have a Facebook or Instagram page, note what a customer can and cannot do from there.

Write down two or three specific observations, not a list of faults. You are not going to recite them. They simply stop you asking questions the website already answers, and they let you say, when it is useful, “I noticed the enquiry form seems to go nowhere” rather than a vague “your site could be better”. Our checklist in a website audit checklist for local business sites covers what is worth looking at.

Questions worth asking

Start with the business, not the website. A joiner in Lancaster and a dentist in Guildford need very different things from a site, and you cannot scope either until you know what a good month looks like for them.

1. What does the business do, and who are the best customers? Let them describe it in their own words. You will reuse the language.
2. Where does work come from now? Word of mouth, Google, a directory, social media. This tells you what the site must support.
3. What is the website not doing that you would like it to do? This is the question that surfaces the real problem, which is often not the one they emailed about.
4. What would make this a success a year from now? You want something concrete, such as more enquiries or fewer phone calls for the same question.
5. Who decides, and who supplies the content? Delays on most projects come from missing text and photos, and from a second decision-maker who appears late.
6. Is there a budget in mind, and a date it matters by? Asking plainly saves both sides a wasted proposal.

Then stop and listen. If you are speaking for more than a third of the call, you are pitching.

Qualify without making it feel like a test

You are also deciding whether to work with them. Warning signs are usually mundane: no clear owner of the decision, a budget far from the scope described, a wish to change the brief halfway through the call, or an expectation that the first draft will be free. None of these is disqualifying on its own, but they tell you how to write the scope. If you want the longer version of that thinking, see scope creep in web design.

It is fine to say, kindly, that a project is not a fit. A short, honest answer protects your time, and it sometimes leads to a referral later.

End with a next step and a date

Do not end with “I'll send something over”. Say what you will send, by when, and what you need from them. For example: a short written proposal with a fixed price by Friday, once they have confirmed which pages they need. Then send a three-line recap by email the same day, covering what you heard, what you will do, and what happens next. That recap doubles as the start of your paper trail, and it catches misunderstandings while they are cheap to fix. When you reach the proposal stage, the pricing notes in fixed price or hourly for web design work may help.

Where the call starts earlier than you think

The calls that go best tend to follow an email that was specific in the first place. If your first message pointed out something real about the prospect's site, the call begins from a shared fact instead of a cold introduction. Patchscout is built around that: our system audits the website behind each business you find, drafts the outreach email from the real findings, and keeps the replies and follow-ups in a simple pipeline, so you walk into the call already knowing what their site does and does not do.

Whichever way you find your prospects, prepare for ten minutes, ask about the business before the website, and leave with a date. Do that consistently and discovery calls become the most predictable part of your sales process.