 Hey, what's up everyone? Right now we're going to go ahead and talk about discovery sessions And I want to give a few tips on how to run a successful discovery session with your clients and potential clients My name is Jeffrey. I'm the founder of lightbox digital or a custom website design and development company And right now we're going to go over discovery sessions and how These can be done to help you in your business and help you give more value to your clients What a discovery session is this is the time that you take with your client in a meeting in order to get to know them better To get to know who they are what their goals are who are their customers and clients and how you can help them So let me go ahead and show you how I run my discovery sessions and give you some tips to help you to facilitate And run your own discovery sessions now the first one is to be prepared You want to make sure you take the time out to do your research You want to go ahead and take the time out to write out your questions Take the time to learn about the client check out their social media check out their website Check out their whole online presence You want to get as much information about them before you come into the meeting The next one too is to be able to prepare by setting up and scheduling a meeting now these take time If it's a small client this could take about an hour if it's a medium-sized client It could take a few hours and then if you get a really big client these could kind of these could take a couple days But let's go ahead and focus on the smaller client right now Just for time sake and just to get used to actually facilitating one of these discovery sessions Now first you want to go ahead and explain to your client What you are doing and what the purpose of it is before you schedule a call because you are scheduled a call That's going to take quite a bit of time. Let them know why and what to expect from it You know, I let the I let our clients know What's we're going to go ahead and schedule a discovery session in this call? We're going to get to know you better. I'm going to get to know your goals What you're trying to accomplish We're also going to get to know your customers and your clients better as well And I want to figure out what problems that you have in pain points that you are going through that way We could help try to find a solution So I let them know that before the call. So that way they're prepared as well for that time period Keep in mind. They might be really busy. And then when we start the Discovery session, I like to start it off again the same thing I like to set the atmosphere and the tone and I like to set expectations from the very beginning so that way they know this is this is our objective and what they're and What to expect from this because I'm about to start firing off tons of questions Now one key component to doing a discovery session is taking notes Make sure you got a good notebook ready and you got several pens on hand You're going to write lots of notes and you want to stay in the state of note taking What it does is when you're constantly writing notes in the session You're constantly listening by writing notes You're forcing yourself to listen because you're trying to write down everything I don't know about how you are but I know me I always want to go ahead and start talking. I always want to go ahead and start Sharing advice and giving solutions right away But I have to refrain from that in the Discovery session because the whole Art to it is to be able to ask the right questions and to be able to listen to find the right answers The answers are going to always come directly. They're going to be in between other questions They're going to come out in different areas You have to listen and the best way to do that is to take as many notes as possible Also, you have all these notes because afterwards we're going to be using these notes when we start to look at writing a When we start to look at writing a proposal for the project and we start to figure out a solution to give to the client Now in my note taking I have a system that I use and I do three columns now on one column is All the answers that I get is just all my general notes and when I ask a question I'm writing my answers in the first column when the client says anything that stands out I'm just writing everything constantly in first column My second column are the highlights that I hear from the client when they say something about themselves that stand out For example, we just I was just on Discovery call with a client and he mentioned, you know He wants his business to remain family-based So I put family based in there and anytime he says anything that or the client says anything that stands out I put in that second column and I call that column my branding column because at the end of it We're going to have a list of elements that describes a client which essentially is their brand Now the third column that I do is the problems column Any time a client in the discovery session mentions a problem any difficulty any challenge I list all those problems inside the problem column and keep this in mind. I'm constantly listening for the problems I'm trying to learn what the problems are that the client is facing because that's where I'm going to be most effective So now we've asked all the questions We wrote all the notes down and the session is over or at least the questioning and and the discovery part is over So what I like to do now after we have everything down is I like to recap with the client I like to review and go through everything with the client that column that we have for branding I like to read it all out to the client like to let them know This is these are the highlights that I heard from you when you spoke about yourself and who you are This is your brand and this is where we should focus on for your positioning How we need to focus and present you on your website and on all your online channels your social media Etc. Then we also list out the problems and we go through the problems and let the client know These are the problems that I heard you talk about. These are your pain points These are the areas we want to focus on finding a solution and fixing So now we're at the end of the call now it's time to talk about the budget and talk about the numbers I do not give a quote and I advise not to give a quote at this stage Do not commit to a number or do not try to figure out a number with a client What we want to do is we want to fill them out We want to find out what kind of a budget they have and what we could work with I first give them a number I first tell the client that So, you know, usually a project at about this size will start off at about this amount Then I ask them are you okay with this kind of a number is this in the range that you're looking at? Of course, we could always add more on to it. You know, this is just a starting point and If this is where you hear back from them. This is where you hear back like, you know, they'll tell you Yeah, that's okay It's what we're looking at but they also might tell you that's a lot more than what we're looking for You know, that's way out of our budget and this is the time when you establish that budget This is when I ask a client. Okay, no problem. We could always scale it back a little bit What kind of a budget were you looking at working with? You know, what do you have to invest into your project? And then you hear from your client what they have and what they can do Now you have a good idea of what to work with and from here Please refrain do not give a cost yet Save this for your proposal that'll come after Because before you give a number you really want to take a look at what they need and what you're offering to do for them That takes a little bit of time and don't only just refrain from giving them a quote on the call Also refrain from giving them the full solution. You know, this is what I like to do with a client I don't like to tell them we could do this do this and do this and the discovery call Because I want to take time and I really want to see what I can do to help them I really want to take time to do a little bit more research. So I tell the client I'm like, look at this has been a great call. We got a lot of great information I feel like we really got a chance to know each other I got a chance to know you your customers and you know problems that we need to fix and solve for you What I'm going to do is I'm going to take time. I'm going to review all of our notes I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit more research and put together a proposal for you And now we're ready for the next stage and the next stage is going to be writing her proposal for the client Now we have pages full of notes. We know what the client is looking for We know what they need now We know what kind of a solution we could give to the client and how we can actually help the client and we know Their budget so we have all we needed now to go ahead and give her proposal to the client and start the project So I hope this helps it took me quite a bit of time and practice to learn how to facilitate One of these effectively actually I didn't learn how to do one of these in my first couple years My experience was I just listened to the client the client told me this is what they wanted and I went ahead and did it By actually taking time to do this discovery and find out the real problems the client has You know and keep this in mind. You can only Prescribe a solution once you diagnose the problem You have to find out the problem first before you could give the actual solution to it and by doing that You're able to do something that is more effective for the client There's something about when you take on a job for a client and you do the work and that it produces Results and you see it helping the client's business and that's what we're in the business of we're in the business of helping other businesses Well, I hope this helps out a lot if you like this and this found to be useful This is a new channel. It'll really help if you go ahead and subscribe like it Comment on it. Let me know if you have any questions if you would like to hear about something else This is new channel again. I expect this video quality to be getting a whole lot better coming up soon I'm about to go ahead and get a new camera and do all the cool YouTube stuff Well, that's it for today. Thank you very much You