Professional servicesCase study3 min read
Professional services: qualifying before the discovery call
Half of a firm's discovery calls end in “not a fit”. The assistant establishes that before the calendar invite goes out.
The business in this scenario: An eleven-person compliance consultancy selling three fixed engagement tiers
In short
Discovery calls were doing the qualifying, at partner rates. The firm put an assistant on its site that establishes budget, scope, timeline and decision-making authority in conversation, writes a summary the partner reads before joining the call, and reports which campaigns produced the engagements that actually signed.
The most expensive thing a firm gives away is an hour
A discovery call costs a partner an hour, plus the preparation, plus the context-switch on either side of it. Firms accept that cost because the call is where you find out whether an enquiry is real.
The trouble is that a large share of those calls end in some version of not a fit. Wrong budget, wrong scope, wrong timing, or the person on the call cannot sign anything and never could. The qualifying work is genuine and necessary — it is just being done in the most expensive room in the business, by the most expensive person in it, after a calendar invite has already been honoured on both sides.
A firm this size is not short of enquiries. It is short of partner hours, and spending them establishing facts that could have been established in writing a week earlier.
And the good enquiries queue behind the bad ones
Because everything arrives in one inbox in arrival order, a serious enquiry from a firm with a Q1 audit deadline sits behind three speculative ones. Whoever replies fastest wins, and reply speed is a function of who happens to be between meetings.
The third problem is attribution, and in professional services it is unusually slippery. Content, conference appearances, referrals and paid campaigns all get credit in the retelling, and the retelling is all there is. An engagement that started with a whitepaper eighteen months ago and closed through a referral gets recorded as a referral — and the whitepaper budget gets cut.
The qualifying work is genuine. It is just being done in the most expensive room in the business, by the most expensive person in it.
What gets set up
The assistant crawls the site and interviews a director: services, sectors, how the firm works, and — the useful part — who it does not work with. A firm that can articulate its disqualifiers gets much better triage out of this than one that cannot.
The three packages go in as records: price, engagement length, delivery model and tier, each marked Available, Limited or Retired. Capability documents follow.
One line of code on the existing site. Nothing re-platformed, nothing rebuilt.
What a person does
- Let it read your practiceIt crawls your site and interviews you — services, sectors, how you work, who you do not work with.
- Add your packages and collateralTiers, price points, engagement lengths, delivery model and capability documents.
- Paste one line of codeIt goes live on the site you already have. Nothing to re-platform.
What the system does from then on, unattended
- Answers on price, engagement length, delivery model and tier from your own package records.
- Establishes budget, scope, timeline and decision-maker in conversation, before anyone books a call.
- Scores the enquiry and writes the AI summary a partner can scan before joining the call.
- Routes it into the pipeline, assigned to the right person, with a follow-up date.
- Reports direct and influenced attribution, so the campaign that started the relationship is credited even when a referral closed it.
Ten to seven on a Wednesday evening
The kind of enquiry that used to become a calendar invite and then a disappointment — or, just as often, a calendar invite and then a signature. The difference is that now the firm knows which before anybody books anything.
- Visitor: Do you take on compliance work for a 40-person firm?
- Assistant: We do — that sits in our Managed tier, typically a six-month engagement. Is this driven by an upcoming audit, or an ongoing requirement?
- Visitor: An audit in Q1. We'd need to start within a month.
- Assistant: That is workable. Are you the person who signs off the engagement, or should I make sure somebody else is on the call?
- 40-person firm
- Q1 audit deadline
- Start within a month
- Decision-maker confirmed
The partner reads a four-line summary before the call, not during it.
What the partner sees the next morning
Four facts, established in four exchanges: the size of the firm, the deadline driving the work, the required start date, and whether the person typing can sign. That is most of a discovery call, and it happened at ten to seven in the evening without anybody being interrupted.
The enquiry arrives scored Hot, with an AI summary the partner reads before joining the call rather than during it. The call itself changes character — it stops being a qualification exercise and becomes a conversation about the work, which is the conversation that actually sells professional services.
Enquiries that do not qualify still get a courteous, accurate answer and land in the pipeline at a lower tier, where they can be nurtured rather than ignored. Nobody's hour was spent finding that out.
The shape of the change
Stated as behaviour, so it can be checked.
- A partner qualifies on the call, at partner rates.Budget, scope, timeline and authority arrive already established.
- Enquiries are worked in arrival order.Hot enquiries surface at the top of the board.
- The evening enquiry waits until morning.It is answered at 6:50pm, in the enquirer's language.
- Attribution is anecdote.Direct and influenced attribution per campaign, against won revenue.
What to watch once it is running
The ratio in the second line is the one to watch. It is the fastest honest signal about whether the firm's marketing is attracting the right enquiries at all.
- Price range, tier spread and average engagement length across your packages.
- Ratio of Hot to Nurture — whether the marketing is bringing the right enquiries at all.
- Cost per qualified lead by channel, and revenue from engagements that closed.
- Pipeline stage ageing, so nothing sits at Contacted for three weeks unnoticed.
- Line of code to install
- 1Line of code to install
- Guided setup, start to live
- ~5 minGuided setup, start to live
- Languages, right-to-left included
- 30+Languages, right-to-left included
- Answering, including 2am
- 24/7Answering, including 2am
Product facts, checkable in the app. Not outcome claims.
Questions this industry always asks
- Will it commit us to a price?
- It repeats the package records you maintain. Keep a tier at Limited or Retired and that is what it says — and anything outside your packages it collects as a question rather than improvising.
- Can it tell who is a decision-maker?
- It asks, the way a good associate would, and the answer lands in the lead summary alongside budget, scope and timeline.
Keep reading
- E-commerceE-commerce: the pre-purchase question that decides the cartShoppers abandon over one unanswered question about sizing, stock or shipping. Nobody was awake to answer it.
- Your industryNot on the list? Then name the record and the rest followsConGreeto was not built for five industries. It is a model you define — name your record, name your fields, and the assistant, pipeline and dashboards build themselves around it.
- Real estateReal estate: the 11pm property enquiry, answered at 11pmBuyers browse listings at night and message three agencies at once. The one that answers first gets the viewing.
Your visitors are already asking these questions.
One line of code, about five minutes of setup, and something is there to answer them.