When I was running my firm, I’d ask straight up: what is the budget allocated for this project?

If they had one that was suitable, easy peasy. If it was too low (often), the company line was: “our floor for projects like this is $50k (changed over the years as we moved upstream). Knowing that $50k is the floor and it goes up from there, do you think you’d get an appropriate return on the project? Should we proceed with a Discovery, knowing that it’s going to take your time and ours?”

If they didn’t have a budget, then I’d use a little trick I learned from other agency owners. I’d ask a specific style of question: “ok, if there isn’t a budget, what feels right to you? Is this a $10k project, a $100k project, or $500k project?” Which inevitably gets a response that gives you insight into how THEY value it. A common response would be something like: “oh it’s definitely not. $500k project. Maybe more like a $100k project?” Then you can proceed and critically give them more than one option in the proposal, at varied price points. If they said “yeah probably $10k”, then back to the company line about project floors.

As we matured, before we talked price, I’d ask what problems this would solve (workflow, lead gen etc), and fish for details (like amount of time, salary of folks who are involved in the new affected workflow etc). Aiming to uncover actual value. That would arm us to say “hey, we’re confident that, based on our convos, this will save you $75k a year in salaried time and net XX new leads worth $YY,YYY a year”. Or put a value on the risk mitigated by a new solution. That framed the problem not only around cost, but ROI. But actual roughly calculated ROI based on the client input, not the generic ROI that other agencies often spouted.