What should happen during a growth-driven website design consultation?

Start with the business problem, stated as a measurable result. "We need a new website" describes a purchase. "Demo requests from the site have been flat for a year while traffic grew" describes a problem, and it gives the agency something to investigate.

The goal carries extra weight in this method because later work is chosen with it in view. The strategy stage begins with clear objectives and an understanding of what customers need, then turns a wishlist of ideas into a plan. After launch, each improvement cycle starts by choosing one metric to improve. An agency has little to rank ideas against, and little basis for choosing that metric, before it knows which result you're paying for.

Next comes what you know about your customers and how you know it. Sales call notes, support tickets and customer interviews are evidence. A persona built only from the team's opinions is a set of assumptions until someone checks it against real buyers. The agency should ask which of these you have, because the answer affects how much research the paid strategy has to include.

Technical constraints belong in the first conversation too. That means the CMS the site runs on, the CRM it feeds, the integrations that have to keep working, and how much content would need to move. Platform alone can change the scope. Lean Labs, for example, says its growth-driven design program is built specifically for HubSpot CMS, and that it can migrate a company to HubSpot as part of the engagement. A buyer on another platform needs to hear that on the first call, since it adds a migration to the work.

Then there's the question of who decides. Lean Labs' guide to choosing a growth-driven design agency recommends a single person who has final say and controls the budget, backed by one or two people who know the product and the customers. It also expects an experienced agency to raise this before any contract is signed. Ongoing work runs in short cycles, so a change that waits on several approvals can slip past the cycle it was planned for.

Budget belongs in the conversation as well. Give a range, and ask what the strategy, the first build and the work after launch would each cover and on what terms.

Expect the agency to ask a good deal. Much of what it needs at this point is in your head and your analytics.

It helps to keep these three apart, because each one produces something different. An agency that has looked at your site or your records before the call can share what it noticed. Those are preliminary observations. Testing them against customer research and a fuller look at the data is strategy work, which an agency may scope and charge for separately. You may already hold some of that research yourself.

Lean Labs' service page shows the separation. It offers a free 45-minute strategy call. The same page lists strategy as a stage of its own, lasting 10 to 14 days and covering user research, buyer personas, goal setting and a map of how customers reach a purchase. The agency also sells a Design Blueprint, a separate paid design engagement. Each of those is scoped as its own piece of work, apart from the call. The call is where you find out whether the paid work is worth starting.

Analytics make the conversation specific, provided everyone knows what each number counts. Bring figures for the pages that matter to your goal, and note the tool and the date range for each one.

Bounce rate shows why the definition matters. In Google Analytics 4, a session counts as engaged if it lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event, or has two or more page views. Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that weren't engaged. That is a narrower thing than the share of visitors who looked at one page and left, which is what the name suggests. A visitor who spends two minutes on a single page is engaged by this measure.

Suppose your report shows a 60% bounce rate for sessions that began on the pricing page last quarter, and assume the property uses the 10-second threshold Google describes. Six in ten of those sessions lasted 10 seconds or less, with fewer than two page views and no key event. The figure tells you where to look. It can't tell you whether the cause is the page's copy, the ad that sent the visit, or a gap in tracking. Google's guidance is to check whether low engagement is spread evenly or comes from particular channels and pages, and to confirm that the pages are tagged correctly. A useful consultation turns the number into those questions. The agency should also ask which actions you've set up as key events, because that setting changes which sessions count as engaged.

Exits are counted differently again. GA4 records an exit on the page where a session's last event happened, and an entrance on the page where its first event happened. Every session ends somewhere, so a high exit count on an order confirmation page is expected. The same count on a page that's meant to lead to a form deserves a question. Google also notes that entrances, exits and sessions don't always line up. An entrance and its exit can fall on different days, so a date range can count one without the other.

Nobody needs to settle these questions on the call. Opening the numbers together is how you agree which pages and which measures the paid work will examine first. We go through the measures worth recording in what metrics to track in growth-driven design.

The consultation is also your chance to find out how the agency works after launch, since that's where this method differs from a one-time build. Lean Labs' guide suggests asking an agency to describe the second month after launch. It also suggests asking for numbers from earlier work that show a page before and after the agency changed it, and asking what your options are if the work is going badly a few weeks after it starts.

Those questions suit a first call because the answers don't depend on your data. An agency with a defined routine for the months after launch can describe it before it has seen your analytics. If it has figures from earlier work, ask which pages they came from and over what period, for the same reason you brought definitions for your own.

Ask for a short written recap. It should restate the goal with its current figure, list what nobody knows yet, and describe one next step with its deliverables, its length and its price.

That next step should be bounded, with a defined output and a price you can weigh on its own. One form is the strategy work, since a build depends on what the strategy finds. We describe what that involves in how to create a growth-driven design strategy.

A bounded design engagement is a different kind of first step. Lean Labs' Design Blueprint sets visual direction, which is a separate job from strategy research. It runs four weeks and starts at $6,000, and the whole fee is returned if you're unhappy at any point in the first three weeks. The agency's stated reasoning is that its full builds cost $30,000 to $70,000 or more, which is a lot to commit before you've worked with a team. We cover the contents of that kind of engagement in what a growth-driven design blueprint should include.

A fixed price for the whole site can come up on a first call too. It depends on assumptions about page count, content and integrations. Ask which of them are still unconfirmed and what would change the figure. Once you accept a figure, those assumptions belong in the agreement, alongside the terms we describe in what a growth-driven design contract and retainer should include.