Every Consulting Firm Needs a Discovery Service

And Why Most “Discovery Projects” Completely Miss the Point

An increasing number of clients are disappointed with the value consulting firms deliver.

According to Source Research, in 2025, only 32% of UK clients spoke positively about the value consulting firms delivered. This number is down from 39% in 2023 and 44% in 2021. Furthermore, the same study shows that CxOs are the most dissatisfied (compared, for example, to managers and department heads).

Unfortunately, a major reason this happens is the reliance of many consultancies on the outdated "trial and error" method to solve clients' problems.

Just like an operator wouldn’t order spare parts for a broken manufacturing machine without a full diagnostic, a consultancy should only propose a contract for a large-scale project with a proper discovery.

In our conversations with consulting firms, we’ve learned that most firms intellectually agree that they need some form of discovery or diagnostic at the front of an engagement.

But when we look at what they are actually selling, we see “discovery projects” that are little more than maturity scans with a logo on the cover: a 4–5 step model, a couple of workshops, some traffic-light visuals, and a “you are here” arrow telling the client what they already know.

And while many clients tolerate these, they rarely value them. And they definitely don’t want to pay meaningful fees for them.

In this article, I want to discuss how consulting firms can drastically improve client satisfaction – and reduce complexity in the client success journey – through value-focused discovery services. 

What Value-Focused Discovery Is. And What It Isn’t

The Low-Impact Discovery Model

Let’s be blunt: most “discovery projects” in the market today are disappointing for clients.

While they are positioned as diagnostics or assessments, in practice, they are:

• A few workshops and interviews

• A maturity model with 4–5 stages

• A slide deck placing the client somewhere on that curve

And it’s the same pattern over and over again: a client is placed somewhere between ‘Developing’ and ‘Established’ on an XYZ Capability Model. 

This is then followed by a few generic recommendations: invest in leadership, modernise infrastructure, strengthen governance, or align your data.”

Clients may nod, but internally they’re thinking: “We already knew we weren’t ‘best in class’. But we still don’t have a clear, credible path from here to the desired results!” Is it really surprising that they end up walking away from the engagement dissatisfied?

This approach fails for a few reasons, including:

• It provides little to no new information to clients: In 99% of cases, clients already know roughly where they stand on the maturity model. They don’t need a consulting firm that’s supposedly an expert to repeat that they’re not at the “leading” level of a generic model.

• It rarely incorporates a concrete path to the next level: When they do, the advice is high-level and abstract: “improve governance”, “invest in analytics”, and “break down silos”.

• Any “next steps” are generic by design: Since the underlying model is generic, the recommendations can’t be truly tailored or actionable without doing more work than the scan is designed for.

• There is no real decision confidence-building: The client doesn’t walk away with a robust, quantified, prioritised roadmap they can trust when making a significant investment decision. The decision paralysis is still there.

• It reinforces clients’ “poor value” perception: Many C-level executives are hesitant to work with a consultancy due to the abundance of choices – tech solutions moving into the advisory space, AI tools, and the ability to resolve their problems with internal capabilities, etc. This type of discovery service does not assuage their concerns about risk, ROI, or the final value and outcome. If anything, it makes those concerns stronger.

As a result, clients tend to think of these services as low-value, meaning they expect them to be done either at no charge or for a small fee. And frankly, I don’t blame them. 

This kind of “discovery” is fundamentally incompatible with a value-focused consulting proposition and runs a high risk of leading to client dissatisfaction.

Recommended reading: Why Prospects Freeze. And How Consulting Firms Can Fix It

The High-Impact Discovery Model

A credible discovery service isn’t a nicer version of a maturity scan. It’s a value creation engine that helps the client and the consulting firm answer four critical questions:

• Where exactly is the value?

• How much is it worth, realistically?

• How will we actually realise it?

• How will we sustain it beyond the initial project?

If a consulting firm can’t answer all four, its discovery will feel interesting but incomplete when the client has to make a real investment decision.

That’s why a robust discovery service must create deep value across four dimensions:

1. Value identification

2. Value quantification

3. Value realisation

4. Value sustainment

Let’s review each of these.

Value-Focused Discovery in Consulting

Step 1. Value Identification: From Generic Gaps to Concrete Opportunities

Most maturity scans stop at “identifying gaps” – e.g., “You’re weak on governance”,  “Your data quality is inconsistent”, “Your processes are siloed”, etc.

That’s not value identification. That’s giving labels to problems that most clients are already aware of.

Value identification is systematically mapping concrete value opportunities across the client’s business by answering questions like:

• Where exactly can we reduce cost, risk, or complexity?

• Where can we increase revenue, speed, or quality?

• Which levers are controllable in the next 12-24 months?

• Which ones are truly strategic, not just “nice to have”?

This discovery should then lead to a prioritised opportunity map – a focused list of high-impact value hypotheses, each linked to specific areas, stakeholders, and levers, with a clear indication of feasibility and time-to-impact.

So while a maturity scan results in a generic evaluation of “You’re at level 2 out of 5”, value identification says “Here are the 3 or 4 concrete value opportunities we see, and why they matter.”

Step 2. Value Quantification: Conservative, Credible ROI Modelling

Once a consulting firm identifies opportunities for its client, the natural next question is: “If we do this, what is it worth?” Or: “What is the business case of this/these opportunities?”

This is where most discovery work goes vague again. It’s usually statements like: “Significant cost savings,” “Increased efficiency,” “Improved decision making”, and so on.

That’s not enough for a CxO to commit significant budget, time, or personnel resources.

Value quantification is building conservative ROI models for the key opportunities:

• Translating operational improvements into financial impact

• Using realistic ranges rather than inflated best‑case scenarios

• Being explicit about assumptions, data sources, and limitations

• Presenting scenarios (low / base / high), the client can interrogate

As such, a high-impact discovery output should include:

• A clear, conservative value range per opportunity 

• Aggregated potential impact across the roadmap 

• Sensitivity analysis: what happens if key assumptions change?  

This is not an easy step. The objective is to show that the consulting firm understands the economics of the client’s world. This, in turn, will boost decision-makers’ confidence in moving forward and anchor any subsequent proposal in numbers, not hope.

Here’s a tip: a few of our clients (consulting firms) use numbers from previous client projects: “On average, previous projects achieved between [X] and [Y] improvements of [something].”

Step 3. Value Realisation: An Adoption-Focused Implementation Roadmap

Once value is identified and quantified, it is imperative that consulting firms don’t leave clients wondering how exactly to get from Point A to Point B. That’s where “value realization” comes in.

Value realisation is about designing an implementation roadmap explicitly focused on adoption. It answers questions like:

• Which initiatives will be executed in which sequence?

• What capabilities, roles, and behaviours need to change?

• What are the critical dependencies and risks?

• How do we de‑risk early and build momentum?

As such, this part of the discovery service should produce:

• A realistic, phased roadmap (e.g., 3-4 waves)

• A clear assignment of accountabilities and stakeholder ownership

• A view of required investments (time, money, people)

• A small number of non‑negotiable change enablers  

This roadmap is not a 200‑page project plan. It’s an adoption-focused framework that makes the value story executable and credible.

Step 4. Value Sustainment: Governance and Optimisation Beyond the Project

Finally, smart clients know that value tends to erode over time. Initial enthusiasm fades. People change jobs. New priorities appear. Metrics stop being tracked. The “transformation” that the organisation worked so hard to achieve decays.

That’s why discovery services that ignore this fact implicitly position consulting firms’ work as a one‑off event.

Value sustainment is defining how progress will be monitored beyond the initial project, which governance structures will own the outcomes, which metrics and signals will trigger course corrections, and how learnings will be captured and re‑applied.  

This doesn’t mean that a consulting firm’s discovery should push clients to lock themselves into a multi‑year retainer. It just needs to show that the consultancy has thought about what happens after the initial project.

The Benefits of the Value-Focused Discovery Service

From the client’s perspective, there is one giant reason to start working with a consultancy through a discovery process: the unique insights into their business, the expert assessment of opportunities, realistic targets, and an outline for achieving and sustaining success. This expert information is invaluable.

I believe this is the most inviting format for the client to get ‘expertise in a box’, reduce risk, avoid trial-and-error, reduce decision-making anxiety, and have a clear way forward.

And the ultimate outcome? Happy clients! Clients who know exactly what kind of value they received from engaging the consulting firm. Clients who bought into the entire success journey, who ensured internal alignment to have the project succeed, and who have a clear understanding of how to maintain the momentum gained through the project.

For consulting firms, the benefits are abundant as well:

• This discovery model allows consultancies to charge real fees: Unlike a maturity-scan type of discovery, this model requires significant work to deliver meaningful value. As such, it becomes a business asset. And business assets can and should be paid for.

• Proposals get easier and faster approvals: Traditional proposals are often based on vague promises of “improving X” and “helping you become Y”. No wonder they require endless follow-ups, requests for information, and prolonged negotiations. In value-focused discovery, consulting firms are not asking clients to buy an idea. They are asking them if they’d like to proceed with an engagement that they already see value in.

• Delivery risks are significantly reduced: They tend to stem from unclear scope, misaligned expectations, and vague success definitions. These issues are addressed upfront by a value-focused discovery service. As a result, delivery work is no longer based on guesswork. The engagement is structured and predictable.

• Profit margins improve: When value is clearly articulated during discovery, delivery work is less likely to be commoditised. Pricing is based on value. And costs are predictable and accounted for. Resources are utilised efficiently.

Addressing the Pushback to Value-Focused Discovery

When we explain how the value-focused discovery method works, consulting leaders usually become convinced or even enthusiastic. However, sometimes concerns arise. Here’s an overview of these concerns:

• “Sharing expertise at this stage will make us redundant”: Consulting leaders fear showcasing expertise in discovery projects may not lead to larger engagements. We, in turn, highlight how discovery phases build trust, demonstrate value, and how they can lead to larger, successful projects.

• “We don’t have a standard way to run discovery”: Consulting firms lack a standardised approach, making leaders hesitant to offer discovery phases that might seem inconsistent. We advocate for creating a standardised discovery process that effectively introduces the consultancy's methodologies and capabilities. Of course, if there’s a lack of focus, specialisation and no pre-defined value proposition, that’ll be a difficult job.

• “Clients want solutions, not discovery”: Some believe that discovery services are seen as less valuable by clients, who may prefer immediate solutions. We tend to agree when the discovery service is just a typical maturity scan. However, as explained in this article, discovery can be designed to be a high-value business asset for clients.

• “Our business development process is not set up to include discovery”: There's often concern about the difficulty of incorporating discovery services into current business development and project initiation methods. In response, we ask these consulting firms to take a long, hard look at their current business development process and answer honestly if they are satisfied with the volume and quality of incoming requests.

I believe these concerns, while understandable, are holding many consultancies back from realising the full potential of the discovery service.

The key lies in recognising that the discovery phase isn't just a preliminary step; it's a strategic opportunity to build a strong partnership with a client and exponentially increase the value delivered to them.

The Bottom Line: Value-Focused Discovery Is the Antidote to Client Dissatisfaction

If consulting firms want to reverse the alarming trend of declining client satisfaction—where only 32% of UK clients reported a positive view on value in 2025, down from 44% in 2021, as highlighted by Source Research—the outdated 'trial and error' approach must end.

The cycle of client dissatisfaction rarely happens at the end of a project; it often starts at the initial stages of engagement, when a consulting firm commits to solving a problem it doesn’t yet fully understand.

Value-focused discovery changes this dynamic. It eliminates guesswork and assumptions. It replaces generic roadmaps with action plans grounded in the client’s real priorities, constraints, and opportunities. It reduces complexity for clients.

It also strengthens the rest of the engagement. Clients are not being asked to “trust and see what happens.” They are actively involved at every step of the way in a journey they already fully understand and have signed off on. 

Consulting firms that continue to sell either generic diagnostics or jump straight into delivery will keep facing the same cycle of disappointed clients. Those who rethink their approach and establish a value-focused discovery process will experience a significant drop in dissatisfied clients. It’s that simple.

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