freelance copywriter, B2B mostly. SaaS landing pages, email sequences, case studies. I've done maybe 150 discovery calls at this point and the pattern is always the same. client gets on the call and says something like ""we need better copy on our homepage, the messaging isn't resonating."" you ask them who their customer is and they describe one persona. you look at the homepage and it's clearly written for a different persona entirely. the copy isn't bad, it's aimed at the wrong person. but the client doesn't frame it that way because they're too close to it. the job on a discovery call isn't to take the brief at face value. it's to figure out the actual problem underneath the stated problem. sometimes they say ""our emails aren't converting"" and the real issue is they're emailing people who were never qualified leads in the first place. that's not a copy problem, that's a list problem. I record every discovery call. not secretly, I tell them at the start. but I don't go back and listen to the whole recording. what I do is right after we hang up, while the conversation is still in my head, I dictate the 4-5 things that actually matter into willow voice. who they think their customer is, what their customer actually cares about (usually different from what the client thinks), where the real disconnect is, and what I think the project actually needs to accomplish. the transcript becomes the skeleton of my brief. the brief I send back is usually different from what they asked for. not wildly different, but reframed. instead of ""new homepage copy"" it might be ""homepage rewrite focused on [specific persona] with emphasis on [specific pain point] because that's who's actually buying."" when I frame it that way and point to things they said on the call as evidence, they almost always agree. the clients who push back on the reframe are usually the ones you don't want anyway. what's your discovery call process? I feel like every copywriter does this differently and there's no standard approach.   submitted by   /u/Public_Mortgage6241 [link]   [comments]