A Public-Evidence Pre-Sales Audit for Marketing Agencies

A marketing agency can use Alesta before a discovery call to organize public website evidence into a concise account brief. The brief should improve questions and scope, not manufacture certainty. Public observations can show what a prospect presents to the market. They cannot reveal private goals, budgets, customer economics, analytics, or internal constraints.

The situation

An agency receives an inbound request that says, "We need more leads" or "Our SEO is not working." The sales team has a domain and a short form submission, but no analytics access and limited time before the first call.

The weak response is a generic pitch. Another weak response is an unsolicited audit that announces dozens of "errors" without understanding the business.

The stronger response is a hypothesis brief:

• what the public site appears to sell;
• who it appears to serve;
• where the visitor or search experience deserves clarification;
• which competitors appear relevant;
• what the agency cannot know yet;
• which discovery questions will resolve the uncertainty.

The boundary between preparation and diagnosis

The agency should label every statement as one of four types:

Label	Meaning	Example
Observation	Directly visible or measured within stated scope	"The homepage title does not name the product category"
Interpretation	A reasoned explanation that may be wrong	"The title may make non-brand discovery harder"
Question	Information required from the prospect	"Which non-brand queries generate qualified opportunities today?"
Recommendation	A proposed action after evidence review	"Test a category-specific title on the canonical product page"

This labeling protects the agency from turning a limited public review into an implied promise.

The pre-call workflow

1. Define the call objective

Choose what the first call must establish. Typical objectives include fit, problem clarity, access requirements, stakeholder alignment, timing, and whether a paid diagnostic is justified.

Do not make the objective "prove that the prospect needs us." That framing biases the review toward finding faults.

2. Build the public baseline

Run the domain through Alesta and review:

• visible company and offer description;
• apparent audience and conversion path;
• mobile and desktop performance evidence;
• available real-user data;
• on-page and bounded crawl findings;
• proposed competitors and public positioning context.

Record the source, device, page, and retrieval date for any finding that enters the brief.

3. Perform the identity check

Write a two-sentence description of the prospect based only on its site. Then prepare these questions:

• Is this how you describe the company in a sales conversation?
• Which audience creates the most strategic value?
• Which offer should the website prioritize?
• What changed recently that the public site may not reflect?

If the prospect corrects the description, that is useful discovery, not an audit failure.

4. Classify the competitor hypotheses

Use Alesta's proposed set as a starting point. Mark each company as direct, substitute, search rival, aspirational, or unknown. Ask the prospect which alternatives appear in real opportunities and why buyers choose them.

The competitor validation guide provides the full classification process. Use the AI marketing audit guide to keep the pre-sales review inside a declared evidence and decision scope.

5. Select three evidence cards

Do not bring a 60-item checklist into a first conversation. Select up to three observations that are:

• relevant to the prospect's stated concern;
• supported by a clear source and scope;
• easy for the prospect to confirm or correct;
• likely to reveal a useful constraint.

An evidence card can cover message clarity, a meaningful page-experience issue, a discovery or indexability question, or a competitor mismatch.

6. Convert the cards into discovery questions

Public observation	Useful discovery question	Information needed before a recommendation
Primary offer differs across sampled pages	Which offer is commercially most important this quarter?	Revenue mix, margins, sales priority
Mobile field performance is poor for an eligible scope	Do mobile users abandon key steps, and where?	Analytics, funnel events, device mix
Proposed competitor set conflicts with page language	Which alternatives do buyers name during evaluation?	Opportunity notes, win-loss data

The question is the deliverable. It opens a path to client evidence.

A concise pre-sales brief

Keep the document short enough to use during the call:

1. Public company summary: two sentences and a request for correction.
2. Observed evidence: three cards with source, page, device, and date.
3. Competitor hypothesis: no more than five names with classes.
4. Unknowns: private data required for a diagnosis.
5. Discovery questions: ordered by decision value.
6. Possible next step: a scoped diagnostic, only if the conversation supports it.

Avoid score theater. A blended red, yellow, or green rating can hide whether the concern came from field data, one lab run, one page, or an inference.

From discovery to scope

If the prospect confirms a material problem, define the engagement around evidence and decisions:

Business decision:
Pages and markets in scope:
Required access:
Public evidence already collected:
Private evidence required:
Methods:
Deliverables:
Out-of-scope questions:
Acceptance criteria:
Review owner:

This structure helps the agency avoid promising a complete SEO, positioning, or conversion diagnosis from public data alone.

How to measure the workflow

Useful agency process measures include:

• percentage of discovery questions answered with evidence;
• number of prospect corrections to the public company summary;
• time spent preparing the first call;
• percentage of scoped recommendations tied to a stated business decision;
• reduction in scope changes caused by missing access or misunderstood goals;
• qualified opportunities that advance after mutual problem confirmation.

Do not publish performance claims from this process without a consistent definition, a representative sample, and appropriate substantiation.

Ethical and practical limitations

• Respect public access controls, terms, and reasonable crawl behavior.
• Do not imply that the prospect authorized a full audit when it did not.
• Do not present public employee or contact information as a profile of an individual.
• Do not use fear-based language such as "Google penalty" without evidence.
• Do not promise rankings, leads, or revenue from a technical fix.
• Do not let fine print contradict a strong headline or spoken claim.
• Treat Alesta's generated interpretation as a hypothesis until the agency and prospect review it.

The audit-to-actions article can support the paid diagnostic after discovery.

Frequently asked questions

Is it appropriate to audit a prospect's public website before a call?

Public evidence can support reasonable preparation. The agency should respect access controls, avoid intrusive behavior, state the limited scope, and use observations to ask questions rather than claim access to private facts.

Should the agency show every finding?

No. Select findings that clarify the prospect's decision. A long defect list can create noise, fear, and accidental promises about scope.

Can the agency call the report comprehensive?

Not if it uses a bounded public crawl and lacks first-party access. Call it a public-evidence baseline or pre-discovery brief.

What should happen when the prospect rejects a proposed competitor?

Record the correction and ask which alternative appears in real buying conversations. The correction improves the market model and may reveal a message gap on the public site.

Start the scenario

Build the prospect's public baseline, select three evidence cards, and enter the call prepared to have your assumptions corrected.