Preparing for a discovery call: A 7-item checklist

If a discovery call is on your calendar in the next few weeks, the seven items below convert thirty minutes into a real decision instead of another tour. A first conversation with an agency typically becomes a “who we are, what we might need” tour. Thirty minutes is short; when both sides arrive unprepared, the tour ends with introductions and the real decisions slide into the next sprint. When you arrive prepared, the same thirty minutes produces clear answers about scope, team fit, and the next step. This post walks through the seven items we recommend you bring to a discovery call, with us or with anyone else. They turn thirty minutes into the value of sixty.

The first three items are about you: the past 12 months’ core metrics, the past 12 months’ rough budget, and your strongest and weakest channel. The next three are about the project: the backlog of pending problems, the alternatives you have already tried, and your in-house team’s capacity. The seventh is about fit: your budget envelope and timeline. At the end of the list we share what the partner side (us) should bring, because preparation in only one direction collapses back into a tour.

Some items may be commercially sensitive. Signing a mutual NDA before the call is standard; we return a signed NDA within 24 hours when you ask. Without an NDA, bracket-level numbers (for example, “annual marketing budget in the 100-300k TL range”) are usually enough.

1) The past 12 months’ core target metrics

“We want to grow” is the most common opening line on a discovery call and the least useful one. Until you can name the metric you want to grow, the right partner stays unclear. A performance team, a data team, or a product team — only the metric you intend to lift decides which one fits.

The ideal format is four quarter-by-quarter numbers from the past 12 months plus a target for this year. Which metrics matter depends on your business, but for most B2B and B2C teams the five headings below cover it.

• Revenue: Absolute revenue or MRR/ARR if relevant. Quarter-on-quarter curve.
• Demand metric: MQL count (B2B), paid customer acquisition (B2C), app installs (mobile).
• Unit economics: CAC (per channel where possible), LTV, payback period.
• Retention: Customer retention at 3, 6, and 12 months, or net dollar retention.
• Channel attribution: Share of organic, paid search, paid social, email, direct, and referral.

The numbers do not need to be exact; even saying “around 1.2m TL ARR, last quarter grew 18 percent, average CAC near 1,500 TL” makes a real difference. A five-row table (metric, last year, last quarter, this-year target) is enough. Even if you do not share it during the call, having it in front of you lets every recommendation stand on real ground. Without it, the conversation drifts into “what is typical in your sector” — a useless generalization.

2) The past 12 months’ rough budget

The second item makes the size of the budget discussable. Many teams keep the budget hidden for good reason (competitive information). But for the partner side, building a proposal without an order-of-magnitude number is impossible. A 50,000 TL monthly operation and a 500,000 TL engagement require completely different team shapes. When you do not share the budget, we recommend the wrong team; the lost thirty minutes do not come back.

Bracket-level numbers are enough. The breakdown below is workable for most teams.

• Marketing budget (annual): 100-300k TL / 300k-1m TL / 1-3m TL / 3m+ TL.
• Software and tools (monthly): Which tools (CDP, MAP, analytics, experimentation), rough monthly total.
• External team / agency spend (annual): Combined annual share of current partners.
• In-house team cost (headcount is enough): How many people across marketing, product, and engineering.

Keep three things in mind. First, the larger the budget, the wider the solution set; the tighter the budget, the sharper the focus. Second, “bracket-level” means “no names, ranges only” — that is already below the NDA threshold. Third, expect proposals at 20-30 percent of the budget; anything outside that range wastes both sides’ time. Hiding the budget to “test” the partner usually backfires.

3) Your strongest and weakest channel

The third item clarifies the shape of your channel portfolio. When we ask “which channel brings in the most customers,” the most common answer is “it is all mixed.” It is not. In most teams one of three or four channels carries 60 percent or more, and one channel keeps consuming budget without returning anything. Those two channels decide where the call should focus.

How to identify them objectively:

• Strongest: The channel with the lowest CAC plus the highest LTV/payback combination. Whatever your attribution model — first-touch, last-touch, multi-touch — if it ranks at the top under all three, that channel is genuinely strong.
• Weakest: A channel where the per-channel cost exceeds the outcome, or CAC payback runs past 18 months. “Weakest” does not mean “cancel”; it means “this channel does not work in its current shape and needs to be redesigned or scaled down.”

The value on the call: do you want to “double down” on the strong channel, or “rebuild” the weak one? Those two paths need different teams and different budget splits. The first is a performance optimization engagement (experimentation, attribution refinement, audit). The second is a strategic reset (channel selection, content architecture, attribution rebuild). Naming which path you intend to take turns the call productive in fifteen minutes. We describe how we run this analysis in continuous engagements on our strategy and insights page.

4) The backlog of pending problems

From the fourth item we move to the project side. Every team has 3-5 ignored items — blockers that sit on the to-do list but no one has owned long enough to close. Writing them out before the call produces the practical part of the conversation.

We recommend three lines per item:

• Situation: What is happening now, who is affected, how many people or customers.
• Tried: What has been attempted so far, how much time and money went in.
• Impact: What changes when it is solved; what happens in six months if it is not.

A worked example: “Our MAP is Klaviyo, half our email triggers misfire. Three weeks ago support ran two sessions with us, no fix. We cannot send roughly 800 abandoned-cart emails per week; estimated impact is around 150k TL of lost revenue per quarter.” In those three lines we can already tell which partner fits: someone with deep Klaviyo familiarity, or someone who looks at the broader architecture.

Do not stretch the list past 3-5 items. If there are fewer, gather from marketing, product, engineering, customer success. Each team’s list looks different; the items to focus on are at the priority intersection.

5) Alternatives already tried

The fifth item is the one most useful to us. If you have tried to solve the same problem before — your own team, another agency, a freelancer, an internal hackathon — and do not say so, we end up recommending the same solution. Two months later both sides hit a familiar disappointment.

What is worth writing down:

• Vendor trials: Which tools or platforms did you evaluate, how long, why did they end (price, performance, team fit).
• Previous partners: Which agencies or freelancers, how long, what you took away from leaving.
• Internal attempts: Approaches your own team tried (for example, “three months ago we tried to build our own attribution model, engineering capacity ran out”).
• What did not work and why: The most critical detail. Replace “vendor X had slow customer support” with “vendor X’s identity resolution did not match our event schema; we left after three weeks of debugging.” Cause-and-effect, not impressions.

The effect is large: in five minutes we learn which paths are closed, and the remaining 25 minutes look at options that have not been tried. In calls without this list, the most common feedback a month later is “we already tried that.” Sharing it upfront keeps us from reaching for a slide that starts at zero.

6) Your in-house team’s capacity

The sixth item makes “who does what” explicit before the call starts. The same scope takes very different shapes depending on whether the partner owns the work or fills gaps. Without knowing who is on your team, we cannot model the right engagement.

Bring to the call:

• Headcount and roles: Marketing, product, data, engineering — how many, at what seniority.
• Skill map: Who can use which tools (for example, “one person on the data team can write dbt, but does not have capacity for a warehouse migration”).
• Time capacity: How many total hours per week the team can dedicate to this engagement (be honest, not “all of it”).
• Decision-maker: Who signs the contract, who can change scope, who releases budget. (We will address this further below.)

When the in-house team is strong, the engagement takes the shape of “filling gaps” — we bring depth in a specific area, the team runs the operation. When capacity is low or a critical role is missing, the partner owns the work end-to-end. Different team shape, different contract, different price curve. Without this distinction in the first ten minutes, the next twenty drift onto the wrong topic.

7) Budget envelope and timeline

The seventh and final item opens the fit window. After the previous six, the question is “in what window do we want to solve this.” Two numbers matter:

• Budget envelope: The total range available for this engagement. Not annual — the entire project. (“200-400k TL across 3 months,” for example.)
• Timeline: Target start date (for example, early Q3 2026) and the desired first delivery date (first dashboard six weeks in, for example).

Both should be realistic. Without the budget-timeline pair, scope stays in the air: “do everything in six weeks for 50k TL” and “spread it over the year, build a wide team for 1m TL” sit at opposite ends of dozens of shapes. If the budget needs an NDA, say so; the bracket is still enough. If the timeline is flexible, even “Q3 is ideal, we can push to Q4” changes the proposal.

What we (beynart) bring: six documents

We said preparation has to run in both directions. When we arrive at the call, we bring six things:

• One-page firm overview: Who we are, which sectors we work in, a summary of the past 12 months.
• Similar engagement examples: 2-3 anonymized cases (sector, scope, duration, outcome).
• Pricing brackets: The price curves of our typical engagement models (advisory, ownership, hybrid). Detail comes under NDA.
• Team availability: Which roles are open this quarter, which are on a waiting list.
• Process map: A one-pager showing discovery → diagnostic → proposal → kick-off.
• The 12-point partnership checklist: A PDF you can use independently of us, our B2B custom software partnership checklist. It complements the seven items in this post; that checklist is “how to choose a partner,” this post is “how to prepare for the discovery call with one.”

We put these six on the table at the start of the call. If we do not get your seven items in return, the call slides back into a one-sided introduction; that is why we take this list seriously.

Next step

Seven items look like a lot, but for most of them the answer already exists on your team — it just has not been pulled together. A 60-90 minute prep session doubles the value of a 30-minute discovery call. We share a downloadable template on the B2B custom software partnership checklist page. The 12-point checklist is for evaluating a partner; the seven items in this post are for the discovery call itself.

If you want to gather the seven items and run a discovery call with us, get in touch. We send a mutual NDA and a calendar slot within 24 hours; from there, making the most of the same 30 minutes is the work we share.