The best agencies don't walk into a pitch blind. Before every new business meeting, they run a quick intelligence check on the prospect's website. Here are the 6 things they look for — and how to check all of them in under 2 minutes.
The difference between a good pitch and a great pitch is preparation. Walking into a new business meeting knowing the prospect's website scores 41/100, runs on an end-of-life CMS, has no CDN, and is missing basic meta tags — while their top competitor scores 79 — is a completely different conversation than walking in cold.
Here are the six things every experienced agency checks before a pitch, and how to check all of them in under 2 minutes.
The first thing to check is the composite score — a single number that contextualises the site's overall quality. A score below 50 means there are fundamental issues. A score of 50–70 means the site is functional but behind the curve. A score above 70 means you're dealing with a technically sophisticated client who will ask harder questions.
The score also tells you how to position your pitch. A low-scoring client needs a "rescue and modernise" narrative. A high-scoring client needs a "competitive edge and growth" narrative. The same pitch doesn't work for both.
Knowing what technology a prospect is running before you walk in the door is one of the most powerful pieces of intelligence you can have. It tells you:
Real example: A prospect running WordPress 5.2 with 47 plugins, no page builder, and jQuery 1.x is a 6-month modernisation project. A prospect running Next.js 14 with Vercel and Contentful is a growth and optimisation engagement. The same discovery call question ("tell me about your website") gets very different answers — but the tech stack tells you the truth before they do.
Performance is the dimension with the most direct business impact. A 1-second delay in page load time reduces conversions by 7% (Akamai). A site that scores below 50 on performance is almost certainly losing revenue — and that's a number you can put in a pitch.
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The key performance signals to check before a pitch are CDN presence (no CDN = slow international load times), asset compression (no gzip/Brotli = unnecessarily large files), and cache-control headers (no caching = every visitor re-downloads everything).
You don't need to run a full keyword audit before a pitch. But checking the basic SEO foundations takes 30 seconds and often reveals embarrassing gaps that are easy to fix — and easy to pitch.
Security is the dimension most clients don't think about — until something goes wrong. Checking a prospect's security posture before a pitch gives you a conversation starter that most agencies never have: "Your site is missing a Content Security Policy header, which means it's vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. Here's what that means for your business."
The key security signals: HTTPS (table stakes), HSTS header (prevents protocol downgrade attacks), Content Security Policy (prevents XSS), and X-Frame-Options (prevents clickjacking). A site missing all four is a liability — and a pitch.
The conversion dimension tells you what the prospect is doing to turn visitors into leads or customers — and what they're missing. A B2B site with no live chat, no lead capture form, and no CTA above the fold is leaving money on the table. A site with 3 different chat tools and no A/B testing is investing in the wrong places.
This is also where the chat platform detection becomes valuable. SiteReveal detects 60+ chat and live chat platforms — including custom AI assistants. Knowing that a prospect is running Intercom but not using its automation features, or running a custom chatbot built on a platform you don't recognise, is useful intelligence before you walk in.
The manual version of this checklist takes 2–3 hours. SiteReveal checks all six dimensions simultaneously in a single scan — typically in under 45 seconds. The result is a 100-point WIS™ score with a full breakdown by dimension, a ranked list of issues by business impact, and a detected technology stack.
For a new business pitch, the recommended workflow is: run the scan on the prospect's site, run the scan on their top 2–3 competitors, screenshot the score comparison, and use it as the opening slide of your pitch deck.
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