A Paramus medical device distributor showed us three agency proposals last month. Two included a discovery questionnaire. Neither questionnaire asked who their buyers were, what the sales cycle looked like, or how leads moved from form-fill to closed contract. Both proposals quoted $18,000 for a “modern responsive redesign.”
The third opened with 10 questions about the sales process. No design mockups in the pitch. They asked about average deal size, the title of who submits the contact form, what the sales team does in the first 48 hours after a lead arrives, and what kinds of leads waste sales-team time. That agency quoted $24,000. The client picked the third one. Right call.
The line between a brochure and a system
A brochure looks at your site as a thing that should look good. A system looks at your site as a thing that should convert the right strangers into the right meetings for the right salesperson. The work product can look identical from the outside — same colors, same layout, similar copy. The difference shows up in the leads the sales team gets six months later.
If your designer’s discovery doesn’t include your sales process, you’re paying $18,000 to $40,000 for a brochure. It might be a beautiful brochure. It won’t change the pipeline.
The 10 questions a good designer asks
- Who is the buyer? Title, role, what they’re responsible for, what they get fired for.
- What does a great lead look like vs. a wasted lead? Specific. By industry, by deal size, by buying stage.
- What’s the average sales cycle from first contact to closed contract? Two weeks or eight months changes everything about the site.
- What does the salesperson do in the first 24 hours after a form submits? Hand off, call, email, demo, quote — different answers need different intake.
- What kinds of objections come up in sales calls? The site can answer the top three before the prospect ever calls.
- What’s the average contract size? A $3,000 deal and a $300,000 deal need entirely different funnels.
- What competitors do prospects compare you against? Differentiation can’t be invented in the design phase. It has to come from real comparisons.
- What do you wish prospects already knew when they get on a call? The site’s job is to do that pre-qualification.
- How do you currently measure if marketing is working? If they can’t tell you, the new site won’t fix that.
- What three pages on your current site drive the most pipeline? Behavior data, not opinions about which pages look nicest.
Red flags during the pitch
If discovery is one 45-minute call followed by “we’ll send the proposal next week,” that’s not discovery. That’s an estimate based on a quick scan and a gut feel. Real discovery for a B2B site takes 4 to 8 hours of structured conversation across at least two sessions, plus a written discovery document the client signs off on before any design begins.
If the agency shows you their portfolio first and your strategy second, the strategy is the afterthought. If they answer “what makes us different” with words like “beautiful,” “modern,” or “user-focused,” they’re pitching aesthetics. If they answer with “we work backwards from your sales pipeline,” they’re pitching a system.
Strategy vs decoration — how to spot it on the deliverable
Three signs a deliverable has strategy underneath. First: the homepage hero answers a specific question for a specific buyer, not “We are a leading provider of solutions.” Second: the calls to action are different on different pages because different visitors need different next steps. Third: there’s at least one page on the site that exists to disqualify the wrong prospects — bad-fit visitors should bounce, not fill out the form.
Decoration looks confident. Strategy looks specific. If you can’t tell who the page is talking to in the first three seconds, that’s decoration.
How AJD handles this
Our discovery is two structured sessions totaling about 5 hours. Session one is the 10 questions above plus a walk-through of your CRM with whoever runs sales. Session two is what we heard, what we propose, and where we disagree with you — that disagreement matters, because if we never push back, we’re not thinking. Discovery is $1,800 standalone, applied against the build if you proceed. Four prospects have done just the discovery and taken it elsewhere. Fine — the document is the deliverable.
Whether you work with us or not, before you sign any web design contract, ask the agency to walk you through their discovery questionnaire. If it doesn’t cover your sales process in real depth, you’re buying decoration. Get a second proposal from someone who asks the harder questions.
Book Free 15-Minute Discovery Call — we’ll ask the 10 questions, you’ll see how they land, and you’ll know within 15 minutes whether your current agency was doing strategy or decoration.
