What's up brand builders Stephen Houraghan here at BrandMasterAcademy.com and in this
video you're going to learn how to run a brand discovery session so you can gather the critical
info you need to build strategic brands and convert your prospects into clients as you
do it now if you want actionable brand strategy tips and techniques to grow your business then hit
the subscribe button and the notification bell as well and you'll be well on your way now if you're
coming across the term brand discovery session for the first time or you want to understand a
little better well then check out my other video what is a brand discovery session where i cover
exactly what a brand discovery session is including the different session styles and
the primary and secondary goals i'll leave a link for that video in the description below now before
i dive into how to run a discovery session let's just clear up the goals of the discovery session
and i covered this in the last video as well the primary goal of the discovery session is
understanding you need to understand everything about their business and the environment that that
business is going to live in and the secondary goal is to show expertise and empathy so that
you can build trust with your prospect now this doesn't mean that you talk all the way
through the discovery session in fact you want to be talking only around about 20 of the time
and allow your prospect to talk about 80 percent of the time and the best way to do this is to
ask a lot of questions now if you're asking a lot of questions you will be demonstrating authority
you will be gathering that information and your prospect will see you as an expert now there
are a number of different styles for discovery sessions you could be in a conference room with
20 of the c-suite if it's a larger company or you could be in a one-on-one session with the business
owner if it's a smaller business and that could be over the phone or via video conference and
anywhere in between in terms of these styles but whatever style you decide is right for your agency
it doesn't really matter again the overarching goal here is to gather that critical information
so you can develop a strategic brand and to earn that trust with your prospects so that they
convert from a prospect into a client me personally i like to take a two-pronged approach
to the discovery session and that's by breaking it up into phase one and phase two now phase
one is the preliminary discovery now this is where the leadership team and the strategists
work together and collaborate to uncover all of that critical information so here
the discussion is between the two and it's really important here that the key decision maker is
involved and what you're going to cover within this session is everything about the business
in terms of its operations and its industry everything about the people that they're trying
to attract the primary audience the existing customer the ideal customer then the competitive
landscape who are the direct competitors the indirect competitors and then of course the goals
of the business the goals of the overall brand and the goals for the project itself
now the answers to these questions will paint a picture of what the market landscape looks
like from the perspective of the leadership team but it's also important to remember
that the leadership team aren't necessarily branding strategists they're not necessarily
branding experts and their area of expertise lies in delivering a solution to a certain problem so
it's important here not to make any assumptions yes it's important to gather the information from
their perspective but don't assume everything they say or everything they believe to be true
and that is why phase two is so important so what is phase two well phase two is advanced discovery
so what you're doing here is you're taking the information that you've gotten from the
business leadership team and you're confirming the information that you've gotten you're confirming
those assumptions and beliefs to be true and what you're also doing is you're uncovering
new information that you can potentially use for the development of that brand new
new information that might uncover opportunities or weaknesses of your competitors that your
leadership team didn't know so the combination of these two phases are really important here you're
getting the information from the prospect from their perspective and it's important to have their
perspective and a clear understanding of their beliefs but it's also important to go further
than that and gather more information from the market as to what the accurate landscape looks
like because it might not always be aligned so what you should have on the back of phase two then
is a much deeper understanding of the landscape and the conditions a much deeper understanding
of who the audience is of who their competitors are and what their weaknesses are and hopefully
they should throw up some insights as well so what does a successful discovery session look like well
you could sum that up into a single word and that would be clarity if you have a clear understanding
of all of the information needed then you have the perfect conditions to go on and develop
a strategic brand for your clients so it's really important to take that time now
there are four categories of questions that you need to make sure that you're asking to gather
that critical information and those categories are divided up into business audience competition
and goals if you understand all four of those categories and ask questions around all of those
categories and make sure that you follow those answers up with research then you should have
the conditions and you should have the ingredients to go on and develop an effective brand strategy
but i would love to hear from you as to how you go about running your discovery sessions do you
break it up into multiple phases like i do or do you do that in a single sitting i'd love to hear
any challenges that you might have if you're new to discovery sessions let me know of any questions
that you have in the box below i'll do my best to answer all of those if you like this video
please give it a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button and hit the notification bell as well if
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inbox but as i said please let me know in the comments below any challenges you might have
until next time brand like a master and i will see you in the next video you