Five questions to ask before writing a quote

A quote takes an hour or two to write properly. Roughly one in five gets signed. Do the multiplication: half your unbilled work goes into proposals for people who were never going to buy.

The cause is almost never the price. It is that the quote was written before you knew who you were writing to.

Five questions, ten minutes, on the phone or in writing. None of them is a suspicious question: they are the ones you need in order to price the work, and a serious client is glad to be asked.

1. By when, and what happens that day?

The date decides more than the budget does, and it is easier to get.

"As soon as possible" is not an answer, it is the absence of one, and you should not settle for it. The question that works is the second half: what happens that day? A trade show, a launch, the first race of the season, an opening, the end of a lease.

Two pieces of information arrive at once. The first is whether the date is real: a date pinned to an event does not move, a date pinned to nothing slips three weeks the first time the client gets busy. The second is what not having it costs them, which is the real measure of what it is worth.

And if the date is ten days out for three weeks of work, you have just saved yourself an hour and a half.

2. Who signs off besides you?

This is the question that predicts how many rounds you will run, and it is the one most often skipped.

The person you are talking to is almost never the only decision-maker. There is a partner, a spouse, a club chairman, a parent company, a communications lead away until the 20th.

None of that is a problem, as long as you know. A project with two approvers takes two more rounds than one with a single approver, and those two rounds are either in your price or in your margin. So it is also that answer which decides how many rounds of feedback belong in the quote.

Phrase it as an administrative formality rather than a suspicion: "who else needs to see the proposal before we start?"

3. Does this already exist in some form?

Redoing and creating are two different jobs, and the client never thinks to mention it because to them it is the same project.

Sub-questions that cost thirty seconds each: is there a logo, and in what format? Any copy already written? Usable photographs? Access to the domain, and who holds it? A style guide, even a rough one?

This is where half the nasty surprises live. "I have the logo" means a 400-pixel JPEG found in an email signature about half the time, and redrawing a logo was not in the quote.

On exactly what to ask, trade by trade: the questions that come up in every trade.

4. What happens if you do nothing?

This is the budget question, asked sideways, and it works far better than the budget question.

"What is your budget?" gets three answers: an awkward silence, a made-up number so as not to look uninformed, or a deliberately low number to keep room to negotiate. None of the three is any use to you.

Whereas "if you do not do it this year, what changes for you?" gets an honest answer, because it is not a negotiation. And the answer tells you everything: "nothing, it would just look nicer" and "I cannot open without it" are not the same project, do not price the same, and do not sign on the same timescale.

If you do want to talk money, do not ask: give a range and watch the reaction. "This kind of project is usually between three and six thousand depending on scale" tells you in one second whether you are in the right order of magnitude, and commits you to nothing.

5. Have you worked with somebody on this before?

Two cases, and you need to know which.

No, this is the first time. Then the client does not know how any of it goes, does not know what will be expected of them, and you will have to tell them. Not a problem, but a scoping load to plan for.

Yes, and it ended badly. Listen very carefully to what follows, without judging your predecessor. You are about to learn where the unspoken expectations are, what was promised and not delivered, and sometimes that the problem was not the supplier. It is the richest answer of the five.

What you do with the answers

One thing, and it is the only discipline in this article: they do not stay in a phone call.

Those five answers are exactly what you will reread in six weeks when a conversation goes sideways. Written down nowhere, they do not exist, and "we agreed that" becomes a conversation where two people remember differently.

They go in the brief, with the rest. That is also what makes them reusable: the same five questions to every prospect, without rewriting them.

The shortcut

If you keep only one, keep the second. Who signs off besides you? It is the one whose missing answer costs the most, because it is not paid for in a lost quote but in three unplanned rounds on a project you have already signed.

For what goes into the quote itself, once these are asked: what a freelance quote needs.

Frequently asked questions

What should you ask a client before writing a quote?

Five things are enough: by when and what happens that day, who signs off besides them, what already exists, what changes if they do nothing, and whether they have worked with somebody on this before.

How do you ask a client about budget without putting them off?

By not asking. Give a range and watch the reaction: "this kind of project is usually between three and six thousand" places you in one second, whereas a direct question gets silence or an invented figure.

How can you tell whether a prospect is serious?

By the date. A date pinned to a real event, a trade show or a launch, does not move. A date pinned to nothing slips three weeks the first time the client gets busy.

Should you write quotes for free?

The quote itself, yes, that is normal cost of sale. What should not be free is the design work people sometimes slip into one to be convincing: at that point it stops being a quote and becomes a first piece of work.

Why ask who signs off besides the person I am talking to?

Because it predicts how many rounds you will run. A project with two approvers takes two more rounds, and those two rounds are either in your price or in your margin.