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Back When I Was a Baby Coach…

Back when I started coaching in 2017, I was really trying to figure out how to sell my expertise. (This is what all agencies do, btw. They sell expertise. Check out David C Baker’s phenomenal book, The Business of Expertise to wrap you head around this concept.)

As I tried to get better at that task, I paid a lot of attention to the folks that were really prominent in the internet marketing & online space. This was the hey-day of “my system will make you rich” thinking, and the magical conversion device of the moment was “the one call close”.

Trying to master this mythical one call beast, I used to force a decision about alignment. Somewhere in the last third of a call, I would say something that I thought was really clever, like, "By this point, you already know if you want to work with me or not." I would say some things about understanding the prospect’s problems and how I've literally faced the same issues (and more!) Shockingly, it worked more often than it didn’t.

Over time, as I landed more and more clients, I realized that pushing for alignment that early in the relationship was just wrong-headed. Inevitably, the people who would agree with the alignment were the people who were the most desperate. 

They were most often looking for a kind of coaching that I did not offer - the follow my system to be successful kind. They did respect my insight, they understood my experience and what I could offer. But there was a critical issue that I wasn’t smart enough to consider… Are we a good fit?

Performative Discovery

My thinking, at the time, was that if they said “yes” to my offer, they were a good fit. As far as “good fit” definitions go, that is about 317th on the list. Good fit comes from actual alignment, not expertise & insight-driven pressure sales. Eventhough I made sales, my ability to develop alignment was poor. There were a couple of elements of a discovery call that I had right:

1. Being able to articulate a deep understanding of your prospects' experience

2. Being able to normalize their position so they could see a path forward

3. Being able to ascertain if they had the budget to work with me

What I didn't realize at the time was that this was entirely performative. I wasn't doing any real discovery. I had a set of questions that I wanted answers to:

• Where are you going?

• What's your time frame?

• How big of a problem is this?

• What do you think is your biggest roadblock

Blah, blah, blah.

All of that was a performance. I was looking for specific words and specific circumstances so that I could credibly say that I understood them and credibly say, "I'm the best solution for you."

What I didn't understand was that the discovery call isn't a performance or a checklist. It's an exploration. I think the term discovery is a little bit off because you aren't discovering something, you are exposing something and simply agreeing (or not agreeing) to talk more.

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If Your Discovery Call Is Ice Cold, You Aren’t Ready

Again, back in those baby coach days, I rarely knew anything about the people I was on about to Zoom with. I didn't put in enough work to really review their circumstances from the outside.

Now, for most small agencies, you can't really tell a lot from the outside. I wouldn't know if they had case studies or what their website looked like, and often I didn't really understand the services that they offered.

Equally bad, those people that were coming to me didn't really understand anything about me. At best, they had read some of my content or seen comments that I made in a Facebook group. but they didn't really know anything about me, the programs that I offered, the way that I worked, the people I help best, the outcomes…all that stuff that we talk about when we talk about Vibes, Vision & Values. Strangely enough, when I was running agencies, it was really obvious to me that providing a good understanding of my agency was helpful in prospects deciding whether or not to chat with us. Somehow when I started coaching, I forgot about that.

I'm sure you can see the tension here. Low VVV, limited understanding of the client (low Return on Understanding), and performative discovery means that I was signing clients that didn't fit. They didn't fit from an attitude standpoint, they didn't fit from a budget standpoint, they didn't fit from a realistic, pragmatic, values-driven standpoint.

It Took Me More Than A Year Of This 1 Call BS To Get Myself Right

I had just had two clients churn. They weren't churning because they weren't getting results or they didn't appreciate what I could help them with…they were turning because we weren't aligned financially. I was charging more than their business could sustain.

As I looked back over the previous quarter, every single client that churned churned for that reason. The mismatch between the fees I was charging and the scale of their business was unignorable. this was a function of me not really understanding their business. They could afford me in the short run, but I didn't have a real sense of their capacity for growth, their process efficiency, their ability to hire, or their ability to manage. So I made a surface-level connection that wasn't sustainable.

At one of my previous agencies, we were pitching the world's best-known footwear brand. That was a relationship two years in the making. We understood so much about that business:

• We understood the fact that they were trendsetters, but they were also subject to being displaced by other trends.

• We understood that they were vertically integrated manufacturers and could move really quickly, but their market identity didn't do that.

• We understood in a very deep way their cost of acquisition for digital and for in-store and for direct vs. wholesale.

• We understood so much about the arena in which they worked - their competitive sets, their channel choices, their sales outlets.

• We also understood a ton about the people that we were working with - what they valued, what helped them be better at their jobs, what things helped them shine.

They also knew a TON about us. They had deep data on

• The data behind our case studies

• The people that would work on their account

• The processes that we would use to manage their campaigns

• The reporting that we would deliver on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis

• The way we would interface with their creative department

• The way that we would interface on their behalf with advertising platforms

• They understood what it was like to be on a client meeting because they joined us on one

• They understood what it was like to get a quarterly business review from us because we gave them one based on the data that their previous agency had shared

Obviously, this scale of the engagement between a large agency and the largest footwear brand in the world is different than an $800,000/yr agency and an agency coach. So, you might think that fit is more important in one than the other.

When we landed that footwear business, it almost didn't matter if my agency was successful or not. Our client wasn't going to go out of business. They knew that, but still, they did pre-vetting and pre-fitting and pre-understanding before they entered into a contract.

Since this was such a big opportunity and a big risk for our agency (we had to hire staff just for them…), we were more than happy to go through that process. Every time they asked to understand or experience something about working with us, we got to experience what it was like to work with them. The more we did that, the more confident we became in our ability to both service this account & help them thrive. We had a deep understanding of what they needed & we could clearly match it up to what we could deliver.

A 2-year courtship is extreme, but this was the big company/big agency version of VVV + V and ROU IRL.

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If I Were to Start an Agency Today, I Would 100% Focus on VVV & Discovery To Create Right Fit Clients ASAP

We may have exhausted the number of times that I can refer to Vibes, Visions, and Values in a calendar year. It's a good thing that the calendar is about to flip. If I were to start an agency today, as soon as I had any stability, I would focus on understanding what my Vibes, Vision, and Values are. I would practice on how to express it, how to share it, how to repurpose it, how to reconfigure it, how to make it more unique and uniquely relevant to the audience that I want to serve.

In addition, as soon as I had enough stability, I would focus all of my efforts on doing quality discovery calls because it's in that discovery call where you both share your expertise and sharpen your understanding of prospect problems. Those two things feed into your vibes, vision, and values and they get expressed through sales, customer onboarding, and client retention. It is these two front-end pieces, vibes, vision, and value, and discovery that actually set the tone and create the circumstances that allow for a vibrant and healthy agency-client relationship to evolve.

That’s why we’ve launched SalesOS Discovery Lab (and SalesOS DiscoveryLab Pro)- because it is more important than ever that your discovery calls AREN’T PERFORMATIVE and create real value and understanding.

Those minutes that you share with a prospect during discovery are mapping out:

1. If you are going to move into a sales process…

2. What the most important topics in that process are…

3. Where your expertise best compensates for the prospect’s weaknesses…

4. What the target benefit for both parties is likely to be…

5. An agreement on the shape and kind of transformation that can be realized together…

That’s a ton to establish in a short call…that’s why your discovery call needs to be sharp, insightful, warm, full of trust & full of opportunity. Give Discovery Lab or Discovery Lab Pro a spin (and if you jump into Discovery Lab Pro, you’ll get 3 months of SalesOS Call Lab Pro for free, too…a good deal, IMHO).

Stop Winging It (and Start Winning It) in 2026 Is Happening!

We just got our 20th registration this morning - so sometime in early January (I am thinking one of these days - Jan 6/7/8th) - we will be running a 90 minute live workshop focusing on the following topics:

There will be a recording (and probably a fun bonus or two) for all registered attendees (even if you can’t make it…). Register here & your inbox will be full of updates soon!

Happy Holidays!

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