What to bring to a discovery call

A discovery call is not a sales call where you listen to us. It is a call where we try to understand how your business works today, and what the system ought to do. The quality of the quote at the end depends almost entirely on the quality of what gets gathered in it.

You do not need to arrive with a specification. You need to arrive with answers to five things.

How enquiries reach you today

From where, across how many channels, and what happens to an enquiry from the moment it lands. If the answer involves more than two places, that is itself part of the problem.

Where the work is kept right now

A spreadsheet, a notebook, a WhatsApp group, somebody's head. There is no embarrassing answer here, and each one means something different for what needs building.

Who touches what

How many people work in the system, and what each of them needs to see and do. Even if the answer is one person, say so, because a system for one person looks different from a system for a team.

What annoys you most

The repeating task you put off every week, or the thing that goes wrong most often. That is usually the first improvement worth building, and the one that pays for itself quickest.

A budget range, even a very rough one

This is the least comfortable part and the call is less useful without it. A budget does not dictate the price, it dictates the scope. Without a range the quote is a guess, and a guess gets repriced later, usually upward.

What you do not need to bring: technology decisions. Which database, which language, which hosting provider. That is our job, and a supplier who needs you to decide it up front is telling you something.

What comes out of the call

Not a quote on the spot. What comes out is a description of the solution: what the system does, which parts it is made of, and what sits outside the scope. A number follows once the scope is agreed, because until then there is nothing to attach it to.

If you get a price at the end of a first call without the scope being written down, it is worth asking what it is based on. Sometimes the answer is good. Sometimes that price is going to move.

A quote follows the call, and we wrote about what one should look like in how the price of a website is decided.

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