Clients and prospects will present ideas for projects to you in a whole raft of different ways.

Some will be big formal RFPs, some will be a one-pager, some will just be a chat on the phone.

These differences can make it hard to spot gaps or problems in the client's requests, and hard for your agency to provide its best response.

In order to provide a proposal or quote that can win the business, be delivered successfully, and be profitable — you're going to need multiple people from across your agency to properly understand the brief, and provide their input.

In an ideal world, you'd have a template document that clients would fill in perfectly, and then your team would get a standardises briefing for each new opportunity. That standardisation would enable them to provide a better quality response in less time.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to get clients to do that — so the next best thing is for every incoming RFP/request to be 'translated' into a standard 'opportunity brief' within your agency, before you start work on it.

An example template for such a briefing is below. You can adapt this to fit the kinds of work your agency does, and evolve it over time to cover the key things you find you need to know at proposal stage.