How we run a B2B design brief: the five questions that prevent three rounds of revisions

A good brief is not measured by how long it is. It is measured by how many revision rounds it prevents. At Ander.Agency we built ours around five uncomfortable questions, and we ask all five before anyone opens Figma.

When the answers are good, the first design already sits close to the final one. Gabriela Rodriguez, Marketing Manager at Nodum, said it better than any services page we could write.

Their work required very little iteration, as they fully understood everything we communicated.

That was not luck. That was the brief.

Why are three rounds of revisions almost never a design problem?

Because the problem happened earlier, in the first conversation. When a project falls into a revision loop, nine times out of ten the designer did not miss the style. Nobody defined what the design was being measured against.

One client says they want something more modern. Another says it does not convince them. A third sends a link to Stripe. None of the three is giving design feedback. All three are saying, in different words, that the goal of the project was never written down anywhere.

That is where the budget goes. Not into design hours, into redesign hours (which bill the same, but hurt more).

So what do we actually ask?

Five questions. It is not a form, it is a 60 to 90 minute conversation where our job is to listen more than we talk.

• Who do you have to explain your product to, and how much do they know before they land on the site? In technical B2B this one changes everything. A site for a CTO who already knows the category is not the same as a site for a finance director who signs the check without touching the technical part. The answer is often both, and then the site needs two levels of reading, not one prettier level.
• What do your clients say you do, in their words, not yours? This is the one that stings. There is almost always a gap between how a company describes itself (integral end-to-end management platform) and how somebody who uses it describes it (it keeps our orders straight). We write with the second one.
• What happens after somebody fills out the form? If the site generates 40 leads a month and sales can only handle 10, the site is not the problem. We ask about the whole sales process because the site is one piece of it, not an end in itself.
• Who has to approve this, and what does each of them care about? The most practical of the five. If there is a founder who wants bold and a board that wants cautious, better to know in week one than in the final presentation. We map the decision makers before designing, not during.
• What do you NOT want? Surprisingly useful. People are much clearer about what looks awful to them than about what they like. Saying you do not want it to look like a bank defines a visual territory faster than twenty aspirational adjectives.

(Yes, the fifth one is a bit of a cheat. It works anyway.)

What do we do with the answers before designing?

We send them back in writing. That is the step almost nobody takes, and the one that saves the most iterations.

After the brief we put together a short document, two or three pages, not a forty page PDF, where we write down what we understood: who we are talking to, what we are telling them, what has to happen when they finish reading, and which visual territory we ruled out and why. We send it to the client and ask them to correct us.

Correcting a paragraph takes five minutes. Correcting a laid out site takes two weeks.

When that document comes back approved, we are no longer designing something nice. We are executing something agreed. That is the difference between presenting a proposal and presenting an answer.

What does it look like when it works?

At Nodum, an ERP company in Uruguay, we did the branding and a new site in eight weeks. Eight weeks is short for a full brand reset, and it only fits if the back and forth is short.

The project started with a strategy and copywriting workshop before any visual decision was made. By the time we got to design, the definitions were already there, so the work was execution and not guesswork. Hence Gabriela's line about very little iteration. We are not brilliant mind readers. We just ask first.

What if the client cannot answer these questions?

It happens often, and it is not a problem. It is information.

When a company cannot describe its ideal client, or does not know what happens after the form, what it needs is not a new site. It needs to sort that out first. Sometimes we solve it ourselves in the workshop, sometimes we tell them to pause the project for two weeks and go talk to their sales team.

Telling somebody not to start yet is the least profitable part of the job in the short term and the most profitable in the long term. The projects that turn out well are the ones you can show afterwards.

What clients ask us about the brief

The same handful of questions comes up on almost every first call, so here are the answers we give.

The brief is the work

The brief is not the paperwork you get through before the real work starts. It is the work. Everything that does not get defined there ends up defined later, more expensively, and with more annoyed people in the room.

If you are about to start a brand or site project and any of the five questions gives you pause, run the test before you hire anybody: write the answers yourself. If you get stuck on two or more, you already know where the friction is going to be. Better Call Ander.Agency.