Not the prompts I run during the work. The ones I run the day before the kickoff call so I don't sound like I'm guessing.
Most consultants walk into a kickoff call with a deck full of generic discovery questions and walk out with a brief written from the answers. That brief is the bottleneck of everything that follows.
The kickoff is too late to be discovering things. By the time the client is paying for your time on a Zoom, you should already know:
I run four prompts the day before the kickoff to get those four answers. Each one runs on assets that already exist publicly: their site, their LinkedIn, their competitors, the brief itself. Total time: about 90 minutes. The kickoff conversation that follows is sharper, faster, and worth the rate I'm charging.
The questions you ask in the kickoff call are the questions the client will think you're working from for the next three months. If you ask "tell me about your brand voice," the client thinks you don't know. If you walk in with a 1-page voice analysis and ask "is this how you'd describe yourselves," the client thinks you've been paying attention.
Same hour, same client, completely different engagement.
What it tells me: the actual voice patterns in their published content. Not "warm and approachable," but actual sentence rhythm, opener patterns, vocabulary they use, vocabulary they avoid. The output is a 1-page voice analysis with concrete on-brand and off-brand examples.
Why before the kickoff: it stops me asking "tell me about your brand voice," which is a question marketers can't answer well in a meeting. Instead I bring the analysis to the call and ask "is this how you'd describe yourselves." Nine times out of ten the answer is "yes but better than we'd say it." That's the gap I'm getting paid to close.
Bonus: when I share the analysis on the call, the client sees that I've actually read their stuff. The number of consultants who don't is alarming. This is the quickest way to differentiate from people showing up with AI-padded discovery decks and emoji-loaded LinkedIn posts that all sound the same.
Free version on the Hub: Voice & Tone Extractor.
What it tells me: the positioning matrix for their space. Where the herd is, where the white space is, who's defending what.
The output is a comparison matrix, an executive summary, and three positioning hypotheses with kill criteria for each. I bring two of those hypotheses to the kickoff and ask which one the client has the appetite to defend. That single question changes the engagement from "help us with marketing" to "help us own this position."
Why before the kickoff: it lets me ask the diagnostic question the client wasn't expecting. "Your closest match in the space is Brand X. Are you trying to differentiate from them, or replace them?" Either answer is useful. The hesitation between the two answers is more useful.
Free version on the Hub: Competitive Landscape Teardown.
What it tells me: the most likely failure modes of this specific engagement.
The format: I paste the brief into Claude and ask it to write the post-mortem of this project assuming it failed. Not "what could go wrong" abstractly. A written post-mortem dated six months from now, naming the specific failure: "The voice work didn't survive contact with the founder, who kept reverting copy back to the original 'professional but warm' direction. By month four we'd shipped six pieces of content, none of which used the new voice."
Why before the kickoff: it surfaces the unsaid risks before they become real. Most kickoff calls cover scope, timeline, and deliverables. None of them cover what failure would look like and what would have caused it. I bring two or three of the strongest failure modes to the kickoff and name them. Clients respond well to it. The ones who don't are the ones who would have been the failure mode.
What it tells me: where the stated ICP doesn't match the people actually engaging with their public content.
The format: I paste the client's stated ideal customer (from their site, their pitch deck, our intake form) plus samples of who's actually liking, commenting, and replying to their posts. Claude maps the gap. Often the gap is wide.
Why before the kickoff: most clients have an aspirational ICP and a real one. Working off the aspirational ICP is how marketing engagements drift. Naming the gap on the kickoff call lets us pick which one we're actually working for. Sometimes the answer is "shift the audience to match the aspiration" (a positioning project). Sometimes it's "shift the messaging to match the actual audience" (a clarity project). Two completely different scopes, and the brief usually doesn't know which one it's asking for.
The kickoff is the most leveraged hour of the engagement. The framing established in that hour shapes every brief, every review, every escalation that comes after. Spending 90 minutes the day before to walk in with hypotheses instead of questions changes the entire tone of the work that follows.
The client sees you as a peer doing strategic thinking, not a service provider running discovery. That perception alone shifts the rate you can charge, the deference you get on creative decisions, and the speed at which approvals move.
None of that is in the deliverable. It's in the prep.
Two of these four prompts are free on the Hub. The other two are in the paid library, but the principle is portable. You can build your own versions if you'd rather. The shape that matters:
If your version of these prompts produces output you have to rewrite before showing the client, the prompt isn't ready yet. Iterate until the output is meeting-ready.
Then run them before the kickoff. Not during.
Voice & Tone Extractor and Competitive Landscape Teardown cover half this list. CC BY 4.0, run them on real client work, no signup. The other 28 prompts in the paid library follow the same shape.
See the 4 free prompts →