Relying on your discovery call notes for buyer insights is a mistake most consultants don’t know they’re making.
A consultant doing mid-six figures came to me last year with a problem.
His vision for the business had shifted. He wanted to refine his ideal client profile so he could build a demand generation plan around it. His marketing channels were working. He just didn’t know who he was supposed to be reaching.
We worked through the Client Avatar exercise. It turned out some of his existing clients were already ideal. He wanted more of them.
So I asked him this:
“Why did these clients hire you?”
He couldn’t answer. He knew what he had delivered, but couldn’t clearly articulate the problem they were solving and *why* it mattered when they signed.
This is when most consultants discover they’ve never done customer research. They’ve done sales discovery – confirming what they already think a prospect needs at a project level.
That’s a different exercise. Discovery shows you what they said when they were buying. Customer research shows you why they bought.
So I gave him a short set of questions to ask his existing clients. Not a survey. Not a sales call. A 30-minute conversation, no agenda.
Three of the questions, adapted from a longer list Ryan Paul Gibson shared at one of my growth summits:
👉 What was the problem you wanted to solve when you decided to hire me?
👉 What were you doing to solve it before you hired me?
👉 What was the tipping point that made you start looking?
The questions surface what the buyer was thinking before they bought. The language they used internally. The decision they were actually making.
This is the difference between a delivery-led consultant and a growth-led one.
Delivery-led consultants know their work. Growth-led consultants know their buyer’s words about why the work matters.
You can’t generate demand for an outcome you can’t describe in your client’s own language.
Talk to five of your past ideal clients this month. Not as a discovery call but as research.
You’ll find the words that make demand generation work – and realize that they were never going to come from industry reports or your own assumptions.
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Ready to add $100k-$500k revenue to your consulting business in 12 months or less without burning out? Schedule a call and let me show you how.
