How to Conduct Successful Discovery Calls for Your Agency

You’ve got the campaigns, flows, and bot ideas, but nothing’s moving the needle. Sound familiar? In order to grow your chatbot marketing agency, one of the first steps is to create successful discovery calls. But how? 

Building cool Messenger bots with high converting, active conversations is one of the most important steps in building a successful chatbot marketing agency. And to do this, you can use many of the ManyChat features to help you take your prospecting to the next level. 

To conduct successful discovery calls, use this step-by-step guide to get your Messenger bot working for you and take your agency to the next level. 

First Steps to Building Your Chabot Agency

You may be a whizz at building a bot, but do you know how to build an agency? These steps can help set you up for success. 

1. Pick a niche.
2. Find prospective clients.
3. Qualify prospects. 
4. Educate those prospects on the benefits of chatbots for their business.
5. Package your services.
6. Price your services.
7. Conduct successful discovery calls.
8. Create demo bots.
9. Create comprehensive proposals.
10. Get the prospect to say “Yes!”
11. Create a win-win agreement outlining the services you will deliver.
12. Invoice and track expenses.
13. Onboard the client.
14. Create project management systems.
15. Fulfill the services you promised in a timely manner.
16. Assign success parameters or KPI’s.
17. Track successful conversions through your bot.
18. Report STATS regularly to your client.
19. Continue iteration of the bot for retention of the client.
20. All the while, continue prospecting for new clients and do all of the above repeatedly.
21. Hire contractors or employees to help you grow.
22. Productize your services for duplication of success for additional clients.

Any of these steps seem challenging? You’re not alone. A poll posted in the ManyChat Facebook Group asking which of the above 22 steps people struggled with most revealed these top two:

1. Packaging your services.
2. Conducting successful discovery calls.

Since we can’t productize a service we can’t sell, let’s start with discovery calls.

How to Conduct Successful Discovery Calls 

To grow your chatbot marketing agency, you’ve got to find the right prospects. 

Manage your expectations

If you start every discovery call with the expectation that you NEED to make a sale, not only will you be disappointed if that doesn’t happen, you will also have that tone and mindset throughout the call.

Expect only discovery. In other words, use this time and attention to discover if bots will benefit this business and if you are the person to build the bot.

When you conduct a discovery call with this mindset, your close rate will actually go up because the prospect will see that you are not trying to sell, but that you are trying to truly help. 

This also helps if a prospect seems to be price shopping. If the prospect asks, “How much would you charge to build me a bot?”—You’ve never heard that before, right?! ?)—you can reply honestly with: “I don’t know, because I don’t know anything about the type of bot I might build for you, or even if a bot is what you need.”

Use the 2X Rule

When talking to prospects about chatbots, ASK twice the number of questions about their current marketing and business struggles than you tell cool facts about bots. 

These questions will allow you to discover areas in their business that could be improved upon with conversational marketing and a chatbot.

Here are some sample questions to start off the conversation, then let the prospect’s answers guide you from there.

Listen, Apply, and Reply

When you LISTEN to the answers given by your prospect, you will discover that most of their marketing difficulties can be solved with a bot. Then you can APPLY your analysis, and REPLY with your cool bot knowledge. When you do this, the prospect sells themselves on the opportunity and benefits of you building a bot for them.

Solidify and Reaffirm

Now, all that is left is to solidify their belief that bots are the answer to their marketing worries, and the price of your services will not be an issue. Asking questions like, “Do you see how Messenger Marketing could help you increase conversions?” will get the affirmations you need to talk about how you would provide that service for your prospect, and what you would charge.

With a little time and use of these discovery call tools, you’ll soon see your chatbot agency start to grow. 

Need help with your discovery call or agency growth? Check out the ManyChat Community on Facebook. If you don’t have a Pro account, Sign up for a ManyChat Pro account today to turn prospectives into clients.

About the Author

Mary Kathryn Johnson, Owner of Messenger Funnels, has been nicknamed the “ChatBotMom” by her Messenger Marketing community, and her innovative use of chatbots has helped her agency clients sell millions in products, services, and online courses, with one client making $1M in just 99 days exclusively from the Messenger Funnel Mary built. Her client successes were sited in The Definitive Chatbot Guide by Entrepreneur.com as examples of how to successfully use chatbots to grow revenue, and she is the host of the My Chatbot Life podcast.

A main goal of Mary’s is to help ManyChat Agency Partners and Experts put their bots to work which is why she created the 90-day Mastermind. The final meeting of this mastermind will be held at Conversations 2019 on Agency Day. You can get your tickets here.