Kit 08: paid discovery
Paid Discovery and Assessment Kit
Turn discovery from something you give away into a fixed-price assessment a client pays for, and build the next phase into the first.
This kit turns discovery from something you give away into something a client pays for. It is for founders and bid leads at consultancies, agencies, IT services firms and managed service providers who do the most senior thinking in a deal, working out what the client actually needs, before anyone has signed anything. Given away, that thinking is priced at nothing, and the findings are free to take to a competitor.
The method is a fixed-price assessment, sized, priced and sold as a product in its own right. An assessment sizing sheet turns the scope into days and a price. A fixed-price proposal template sells it. A report and readout skeleton, shown on an invented client, makes sure the client ends with something worth what they paid, even if they stop there. The scope is fixed tightly enough to deliver at the margin you need.
An assessment earns its keep when it leads somewhere, so the kit builds the next step into the first. A business case builder works out net present value, internal rate of return and payback from first principles, so the client can take your recommendation to their own board with numbers they can check. The engagement ladder lays out each phase so that it prices the next one, whether the next one is a project or a recurring service. A diagnostic-to-delivery conversion tracker shows how many of your assessments become delivery work, and how quickly.
It is written from how I sold and ran assessments at DevOpsGroup, from my notes and my recollection, and every figure in it is invented and yours to change.
What you will get
Who it is for
Questions
- Should discovery be free or paid?
- Paid. Free discovery prices your most senior thinking at nothing and bets on winning the work it reveals. A client who will pay for a well-scoped assessment is telling you how they will value the rest. A short scoping call stays free; that is selling, not discovery.
- How do you price a fixed-price assessment?
- From its size. The sizing sheet turns the scope into days by grade, prices them from your rate card at the margin you need, and fixes the price, so the client buys a defined deliverable rather than open-ended time.
- What is the engagement ladder?
- A sequence of phases, from assessment to delivery and on to a recurring service, in which each phase ends with a priced proposal for the next. It makes the next step concrete while the findings are still fresh.
- What consulting pricing strategy does the kit teach?
- Charge for discovery. The kit prices the first step of an engagement as a fixed-price assessment sized from its scope, and builds each later phase so that it prices the next one, whether that is a project or a recurring service. Every phase then carries its own margin, so a profitable build cannot hide a diagnosis that cost more than it billed.