Marketing Survey

Run Client Discovery Before the Kickoff Call

Every agency has sat through the kickoff that reveals the wrong things: the real competitor never came up during the sales call, the budget line was optimistic, and the ‘rebrand’ turns out to be three unrelated projects wearing one name. Live conversations rarely leave time to cover business context, competitive landscape, past campaign history, and internal politics — and proposals written on partial answers win work that was never scoped correctly.

This marketing survey reverses the sequence. Send it the moment an engagement looks likely and let the client complete it on their own schedule. By the time you meet, you already hold their objectives, audience definition, competitive set, investment range, and sign-off process — so the first call becomes a strategy conversation instead of an interrogation.

The Questions a Winning Proposal Depends On

• Company snapshot — website, sector, and markets served, captured cleanly with a website field and short structured answers.
• What marketing must deliver — pipeline, awareness, retention, launches, or another outcome the business expects this year.
• Audience in their own words — who they sell to, plus any segments they believe competitors underserve.
• The competitive set — who they lose deals to and why; open-text answers often expose positioning gaps the client already senses.
• Channel mix and current spend — what is running today, roughly what it costs monthly, and what was tried and abandoned.
• Campaign history — their proudest win and their most expensive failure, both in the client’s voice.
• Self-assessed maturity — a 1–10 opinion scale rating of their current operation, which calibrates how much foundational work belongs in scope.
• Investment band and approval path — a realistic range selected from bands you define, plus who signs off.
• The deciding metric — the single number that, twelve months from now, determines whether the engagement succeeded.

Deploy It at Three Moments in the Client Lifecycle

1. Post-inquiry, pre-proposal. A prospect willing to complete a detailed survey is signaling seriousness — and their answers let you write a proposal that quotes their own goals back to them.
2. Ahead of a renewal or expansion. Resend annually to capture how objectives shifted, and anchor the renewal conversation in updated answers rather than last year’s assumptions.
3. Before a major engagement or rebrand. For long-running projects, the completed survey becomes documented discovery you can cite when scope questions surface later.

Convert Answers Into a Scoped, Defensible Pitch

Read the responses side by side and flag the tensions worth raising in the meeting: an ambitious revenue target paired with a modest investment band, or a ‘differentiated’ positioning that mirrors a competitor’s homepage word for word. Those gaps become the strategic substance of your presentation.

Operationally, set an instant email alert so the team knows the moment a client submits, and redirect them to your booking page afterwards so the strategy call gets scheduled while intent is fresh. Share the link by email or drop it into your CRM sequence at the qualification stage.

Teams running many of these will find companion formats in the consultation templates collection and the broader marketing library. When the survey doubles as inbound qualification, it slots naturally into your lead generation funnel.

Frequently Asked Questions