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We receive dozens of agency inquiries every month. Some arrive as a single sentence: “We need a website.” Others come with a 40-page document detailing requirements that took longer to write than the project would take to build.
Neither extreme serves the client well. Here’s how to brief an agency in a way that gets you an accurate proposal, a better engagement, and a more useful end result.
Start With the Business Problem, Not the Solution
The most common mistake in agency briefs is leading with the solution rather than the problem. “We need a new website” is a solution. “We’re getting 200 visitors a month and converting 1% of them, and we believe our site is part of the problem” is a problem statement.
A good agency will diagnose before they prescribe. If an agency jumps straight to proposing a solution without understanding your current situation and business goals, that’s a red flag.
What a Good Brief Should Cover
Business context: What does your business do? Who are your customers? What’s your typical deal size or average order value? What does success look like for this project in 12 months?
Current situation: What are you working with now? What’s broken or underperforming? What’s working and shouldn’t be changed? If you have analytics access, share the key metrics.
Constraints: Budget range (give a real range, not “as cheap as possible”), timeline requirements, technical requirements, integration requirements, internal stakeholders who need to approve things.
Decision criteria: What matters most to you in selecting an agency? How will you evaluate proposals? Who’s the final decision maker?
Questions Worth Asking Before You Sign
Can you show me sites you’ve built for businesses similar to mine?
Portfolio relevance matters. A portfolio of e-commerce sites doesn’t tell you much if you need a professional services firm website.
Who specifically will work on my project?
“The team” is not an answer. You want to know whether your project goes to a senior person or gets delegated to a junior the moment the contract is signed.
What happens after launch?
Any agency can build a site. The question is whether they help you understand how to use it, what to do when things break, and how to grow it over time.
How do you handle scope changes?
Projects change. Understanding how an agency handles change requests — whether it’s a formal change order process or something more flexible — tells you a lot about how the relationship will feel when things don’t go exactly as planned.
What does your communication process look like during the project?
Weekly status updates? Real-time chat? Async documentation? There’s no universally right answer, but it should match how you like to work.
Red Flags in Agency Pitches
- Proposals delivered within 24 hours of the initial call (usually indicates a template, not a thoughtful response)
- Guaranteed SEO rankings (“page 1 in 30 days”)
- Portfolio with no visible case studies or results
- Reluctance to provide client references
- Vague deliverables that make it hard to know what you’re actually getting
- No discussion of maintenance or what happens after launch
What a Good Engagement Looks Like
The best agency relationships start with a mutual understanding that both parties are making a bet on each other. A good agency should be evaluating whether you’re a good client fit as much as you’re evaluating whether they’re a good agency fit.
If an agency is willing to take any project from anyone at any price, that tells you something about how selective they are about their work — and by extension, how good their work probably is.
