How to write a brief that gets a useful quote

Most bad projects were bad briefs. Not short briefs — bad ones. A good brief can be six sentences, and it will get you a sharper quote from a better person than three pages of background will.

Six things to include

1. The outcome, not the output. “We need people to understand what the product does within ten seconds of landing” is a brief. “We need a landing page” is an order. The first invites expertise; the second invites a price.
2. What already exists. Brand, copy, code, research, an old version. Say what can be reused and what is up for replacement.
3. The hard constraints. A launch date that cannot move, a CMS you are stuck with, a legal review, a language you must support. Constraints are not bad news in a brief — they are the difference between a real quote and a guess.
4. Who decides. Name the person who signs it off. If it is a committee, say so; the price is different and everyone should know that up front.
5. The deadline, and what it is attached to. “End of March” is weaker than “our conference is 4 April”. The second lets a maker tell you what can realistically land before it.
6. A budget range. Yes, really — see below.

Name a budget. It works in your favour.

The usual fear is that naming a number means paying that number. In practice the opposite happens: without one, a maker has to guess your scale, and the safe guess is high. With one, they tell you what is achievable inside it, or that it is not, and you both save a week.

A range is enough. “Somewhere between €3,000 and €5,000, and we would rather cut scope than go over” is a genuinely useful sentence. It says what matters more, money or scope, which is the thing every maker is trying to work out anyway.

One thing almost everyone leaves out

What happens after delivery. Who maintains it, who updates the copy, who fixes it in six months. This changes how the work is built — a site someone else will edit is a different job from one that never changes — and it is much cheaper to say now than to discover later.

What to leave out

Company history, mission statements, and the full org chart. A maker needs enough context to make good decisions, not enough to write your annual report. If the background genuinely matters, one paragraph and a link.

Also leave out the solution, if you can bear it. Specifying “a carousel on the homepage” gets you a carousel. Describing the problem it was meant to solve sometimes gets you something better, from someone who has watched three carousels fail.

A brief that fits in an email

We sell scheduling software to dental practices. Our pricing page converts badly — people reach it and leave, and support keeps answering the same three questions about what is included.

We need the pricing page rewritten, and probably restructured. Brand and design system exist and are not up for debate; copy is. Wordpress, and our marketing person will edit it afterwards.

Budget €2,000–3,000. We would like it live before 12 May, when our next campaign starts. I sign it off, nobody else.

Two pieces of yours made me write: the Northbeam pricing page, and the Halyard docs.

That last line matters more than it looks. It tells the maker you read their work rather than mailing forty people, and it tells them which part of their range you are hiring.