The Value of a Robust Discovery Process for Revamping Your B2B Website

In today’s fast-paced digital world, regularly updating your B2B website is critical to remaining relevant and driving ongoing customer engagement. Whether you’re looking to refresh your brand, redesign your website, or rebuild it completely to meet your digital performance goals, preparation is key — and that starts with discovery.

At Clear Digital, we know the value of a robust, dynamic, and comprehensive discovery process that goes far deeper than creating a brief and holding a kickoff meeting. Having worked with leading B2B brands for well over 20 years, we’ve spent a lot of time honing our approach. We know which factors are likely to send a project off the rails, and how to manage them. We break discovery down into multiple workshops and working sessions that serve to align our team with our client’s team on both the vision and processes that will drive the project from start to finish, ensuring everyone is happy with the outcomes.

While it may seem like a lot of work to do up front, putting time and effort in at the beginning will save you time and resources in the long run, helping to establish ownership from the outset and laying the foundation for true collaboration.

The importance of building trust

Finding the right agency for any large website design or development project is challenging. You need a partner that can not only deliver on your technical and creative needs, but that also gels with your team and company culture. And if you’ve had issues with past agency partners, you might bring residual worries or unease into the new relationship, whether you realize it or not.

A core benefit of discovery workshops and sessions is to establish trust between your team and your new agency partner’s team. You should feel confident that the agency understands your goals and has the experience and expertise to deliver.

Discovery also opens the door to strong communication, which is critical to the success of any project. At Clear Digital, we include seamless communication methods throughout our project management processes to ensure everyone is on the same page, approvals and working sessions are managed efficiently, and timelines are met.

Proven processes for successful projects

Understandably, a certain degree of anxiety is often involved in a large-scale project like a B2B website redesign. That’s why we take a considered approach and start by holding multiple workshops before we start working. This helps our team understand the full landscape of the project in greater depth and also gives us the opportunity to identify potential risks and challenges, so we can take steps to mitigate them.

A robust, multi-faceted discovery process provides clarity and helps to set expectations about what will be discussed during each session, how that content fits into the larger project ask, and who’s responsible for getting answers — on both the client and agency partner sides.

Starting off strong

At Clear Digital, we start every project with our trademark Velocity Workshop™ to discuss everything from estimation to execution. It’s kind of like a live-action brief, but much more effective. By discussing each facet of the project in person, we can ensure that every stakeholder is involved, has a voice, and is in agreement. This workshop sets the overall tone for the project and brings questions and concerns to light early on, allowing us to proactively address pain points the client may not even be aware of yet. The risks are different for every project, so it’s important to tackle them head on.

The Velocity Workshop is something we’ve developed over years of working with B2B clients, and it truly sets us apart. It’s well-researched, well-executed, and has led to our 90% client retention rate and 80+ NPS score — because it’s how we set our clients up for success. Finding a time to get all the players from both sides in one room together can be daunting, but it pays off in dividends.

Next, we hold separate working sessions to align on the creative approach, specific content needs, and technology we’ll use in the build. For these respective sessions, we bring together the people who own each part of the process from both the client and agency teams — for example, designers, copywriters, and developers on the agency side along with creative directors, subject matter experts, strategists, and marketers from the client’s team. We dig deeper into your goals for the site’s design, content, and functionality, so we can start planning.

To tie everything together, we end with a retrospective working session, using metrics and analytics to gauge our success and returning again to those early conversations to ensure the work we’ve done together has delivered on your goals.

Set yourself up for success

When you’re ready to jump into a B2B website redesign project, it can be tempting to skip some of the up-front legwork. Everybody always wants to get right to the striking designs and new UX. But the truth is, the more time you invest into a robust discovery process, the more your website redesign will pay off the long run.

Our goal is to become an extension of your marketing team. Spending more time on the discovery process allows us to better support you. When we really understand your goals, metrics, and bandwidth, we can create a realistic roadmap to achieving the outcomes you desire. Plus, it gives us a solid foundation for a strong relationship that can continue to support your digital experience needs for years to come. A website redesign doesn’t have to be a one-and-done project. When you find a good agency partner that gets your brand, understands your marketing objectives, and is great to work with, you have a true partner that can support you for the long-term.