Home/Pune practice/How to brief a consultant
Guide
The five things that make a brief useful
Written from the receiving end, because a good brief gets you a sharper proposal and a considerably more accurate number, and most briefs I receive make both harder.
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- Most useful
- The recurring objection
- Least useful
- A list of deliverables
- Always send
- Your current material
- Always say
- What has already failed
What to send
The objection you keep hearing
One sentence. It locates the problem faster than any brief document, and it is usually not where the company thinks it is.
Your current material
Website, brochure, presentation, a recent quotation. Not curated. The version actually in use.
What has already been tried
Including what failed and why you think it failed. Nobody will judge you for it and it prevents a proposal that repeats it.
Who decides
Promoter, sales head, group marketing, a committee. This changes the shape of the engagement more than the scope does.
A rough budget range
Not to be exploited. So that the proposal is for something you can actually buy, rather than a fantasy that wastes two weeks.
What to leave out
A list of deliverables. If you already know you need eight blog posts and a video, you want a supplier, not a consultant, and you will get better value from a production agency.
A three-page confidentiality preamble before any description of the problem. Sign an NDA if you want one, then describe the actual situation.
The phrase we want to be seen as a premium brand, with nothing following it. Everyone wants that. What matters is what you can evidence that a competitor cannot.
Before you ask
Should we run a formal RFP?
For a large multi-vendor programme, reasonably. For a positioning or brand project, an RFP usually produces proposals written to the document rather than to the problem, and the best consultants often decline them.
How many consultants should we approach?
Two or three, properly briefed, beats six briefed thinly. The quality of proposal you get is roughly proportional to the quality of access you give.
What if we do not know what we need?
That is the normal situation and it is what an audit is for. Saying so plainly is more useful than inventing a scope.
Send the objection, not the brief
One sentence describing what your sales team keeps running into, plus your current brochure. That is genuinely enough for a first conversation.
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Kunal Waghmare · Padmavati Hills, Mokai Vasti, Bavdhan, Pune, Maharashtra 411021
office@quiamo.com · +91 90216 02686