By: Lindsay Tesar May 27/2026
Starting or running a business can be a daunting and overwhelming task. One of the major items on your list of must-haves in today’s world is a solid website. Starting from scratch, or maintaining and updating an existing site, can feel scary, especially when you are trusting an agency with your hard-earned money to create and manage something completely outside your wheelhouse.
When you first reach out to an agency, the process typically begins with the website discovery call. Why we ask the questions during this phase often comes down to one simple goal: the sales team and developers aren’t trying to quiz you, but to provide you with the right solution that suits your needs and protects your time, budget, and business.
To do that effectively, we need to ask a lot of questions upfront during the first exploratory sales call. Often, it is the sales representative leading this conversation, or a technical lead who has jumped on the call. If you are not prepared for it, this process can feel like an interrogation or a technical pop quiz.
The reality is quite different. The sales team asks these probing questions because the developer, SEO, and design teams rely entirely on this initial brief to build an accurate quote and structure your project. Without this information, the technical teams cannot do their jobs without constant back-and-forth delays.
Here are the most common questions you should expect our sales team to ask, why our internal teams need the answers, and why you should never shy away from answering them honestly.
Getting a General Sense of Your Business
One of the first things a sales rep should ask for is a general view of your company. They will want to know your goals, your target market, and what marketing or website changes you have made in the past that did not move the needle. If you don’t have a site, they will ask about your primary competitors.
We ask these questions to understand exactly who you are and what you need. Knowing what you have tried in the past prevents the team from proposing solutions that have already failed for you. It is important to be honest here, as knowing where you are currently is the only way to measure the true success and return on investment of the project in the end.
The Infrastructure: Domains, Hosting, and Backups
Talking about the infrastructure your site is built on can be an overwhelming topic. The sales team will ask you about your current technical setup and tools. Some questions you might get asked are:
- Do you have a domain name, and with whom did you register it?
- Do you already have hosting, who is it with?
- If you have hosting, does it include a backup system and staging sites?
If you do not know the answers or lack these tools, do not panic. We ask so the development team knows if they need to quote to build that infrastructure themselves. A standard assumption developers make when quoting is that you are on a third-party host with zero tools, meaning no staging and no backups. So, if you have any of these and are ready with answers, you are already ahead of the game.
When discussing hosting, you might be tempted to go with the absolute cheapest option available. A good developer will strongly advise against this. The cheapest hosting plans are heavily shared environments with strict resource limits. A slight increase in traffic or a heavy database query can cause your host to flag your account for high usage and take your site offline, or throttle the speed so it becomes painful to use.
Additionally, server location matters for legal compliance. If you purchase hosting based in the United States, your website and customer data are subject to US laws. If data privacy is a priority for your local customers, you must ensure your data centers are located in your specific region. Review a breakdown of the top web hosts across Canada, North America, and Europe to find a provider that balances reliable performance with data sovereignty.
Content: Why it is so important
During your exploratory meeting, one big question mark for all site builds and rebuilds is content. Some questions you may get asked are:
- Who is physically writing the website copy, and realistically, do they have the bandwidth to deliver it within the next 3 to 4 weeks?
- Will you require an SEO and content team to review and edit this so it is tailored for the web?
- Exactly how many pages are needed to launch the site?
- Can you provide a final list of main navigation pages, secondary pages, and a total count of blogs or case studies?
- Are there sections of your current site you know for a fact are outdated, redundant, or can be deleted entirely?
Writing website copy can be incredibly time-consuming, and clients often underestimate the nuance needed for content to be successful on the web. A main roadblock for clients creating their own content is bandwidth. You are the expert in your field, but client copy delays are the number one cause of web project stalls.
When sales asks about your page and blog counts, they are gathering information for the SEO team to define the site’s architecture. As outlined by industry leaders like Search Engine Journal, a well-planned website architecture is critical for search engine visibility. This is essentially the structural tree for your website, dictating how a user flows from one page to the next. You should always expect to see a final sitemap and exact page counts explicitly outlined in your project deliverables.
If you are updating an old site, we will want to know if every single existing page needs to be brought over. If you currently have Google Analytics in place, we might quote you an initial investigation fee to dive into your data. For a deep dive into why this matters, Moz’s comprehensive website migration guide explains exactly how structural changes impact your search visibility. By running a site crawl to see what works, the team can pinpoint exactly what content is obsolete. This helps us quote for a smaller, cleaner migration. In the grand scheme of things, paying for this investigation narrows down your overall budget because you are not paying to migrate digital trash.
The math here is straightforward: the larger the site architecture, the more expensive the build will be.
The design and development teams will look at your content and decide how many unique templates or layouts are needed to house it properly. Once those base templates are created, the site must be populated. You will likely see a line item in your proposal advising exactly how much time is dedicated to the manual population of extra pages and blogs. Populating the site, which means manually flowing in your text, building out the pages, and performing image selection, is incredibly time-consuming, and the costs for that manual labour can quickly add up.
Finding Out What You Need vs. What You Want
When assessing what you might need for a new site or rebuild, sales will ask probing questions to protect the development team. If you already have a site, they will ask if there are existing third-party scripts on your current site, such as chat widgets, booking tools, or ad pixels. Finding these early catches, hidden conflicts, and performance drags.
If you don’t have a site or certain functionality yet, expect questions like:
- Is this site going to be a brochure site or an e-commerce site?
- If e-commerce, do you need an inventory system that connects to a brick-and-mortar or 3rd-party management system?
- Do you want a chatbot?
- Do you need to connect this to a booking system like Jane App?
- Does the site need language translation?
- Where will your paid ad campaigns target?
They will also ask if you currently have Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Tag Manager, or any other tracking in place, and if you have the admin logins. If you don’t know the answers, that is fine. This process is about finding all the gaps that need filling to ensure tracking is ported over correctly.
Legal Ownership and Liability
We’ll also ask if you own all images and written content on your current site, or if any are licensed through a third party.
This is a major liability check, especially for image-heavy or e-commerce sites. Ensuring you own your assets is critical for protecting your digital intellectual property.
When it comes to images, always ensure they are photos you have taken yourself or downloaded through your own paid accounts, like Adobe Stock or iStock. If you are utilizing a free stock service, always document and save the licensing terms. Using unauthorized content can lead to massive legal headaches down the road.
Note: Always ensure you own the licenses for plugins or applications under your own company name. If you need to share access with a developer, that is fine, but ensure that when your final product is delivered, any licenses requiring renewal are set up under your company (e.g., setting up an Elementor Pro license yourself). This guarantees your freedom and ownership.
An exception is when an agency owns an unlimited, one-time purchase agency license. For example, the Bricks builder has a one-time purchase option that allows agencies to build client sites without worrying about losing access to updates. It is vital to confirm they are not passing along an annual license tethered to their agency; if they are, request to have it switched to your own, so you don’t get blindsided by a licensing issue if you switch developers later.
Who is in Charge of What: Identifying the Decision Maker & Tech Team
Sales will ask directly who the primary point of contact is and who the final decision-maker is for approvals during the project.
Defining who signs off on mock-ups, content, and the final site is critical for efficiency. You may have a tech lead who handles Google Analytics and licenses, or an internal team member responsible for content. Having defined roles helps us determine how much time needs to be budgeted for communication and timeline management. Ultimately, this establishes clear boundaries early on and prevents endless revision cycles caused by late feedback from unannounced stakeholders.
The Budget & Scope
Because a website’s final cost is heavily dependent on the architecture, technical integrations, and content scope discussed above, talking money is the ultimate culmination of the discovery call.
You may be afraid to provide your budget because you feel an agency will simply charge you more for less. However, a proper sales professional asks if there is flexibility if a highly requested feature pushes the project slightly over budget, or if the number is a strict cap.
Knowing your absolute limit helps the sales team qualify how firm the budget is. It allows them to build a realistic roadmap and prioritize the tools you need. Before you sign, if the sales team has asked and you have answered these questions honestly, you should receive a robust plan and scope of work detailing exactly where your hard-earned money is going.
Moving Forward with Confidence
At the end of the day, a discovery call shouldn’t feel like a barrier to getting your website built; it should feel like the first step in a strategic partnership. By understanding why these questions are asked, you can come to the table prepared, protect your business assets, and ensure your new website is built to perform, scale, and succeed.
If you’re looking for a website that meets your needs and budget, Snaptech builds websites that work for you. Contact us to see how we can help turn your website dreams into a reality..
About the Author
Lindsay Tesar