Freelance discovery call questions: what to ask before you quote

Every guide on this subject gives you a list of questions, and the lists are mostly fine. Here is one, so that the useful part of this post has something to stand on.

What the work is for. What is prompting this now, what changes if it goes well, who is it for. Listen for their phrasing and write it down verbatim, because you are going to hand it back to them later and their own words are the most persuasive thing in the document.

Who signs it off. Who else sees this before a decision, and what will they care about. A named approver you have never met is a normal situation. An unnamed one is a round of feedback you have not priced.

What they think is simple. Covered below, at length, because it is the question that stops estimates from going wrong.

What they can spend. Also below.

What happens after you deliver. Who maintains it, who has the files, whether anybody internally can use the tools. This surfaces the work that gets asked for in week nine.

How they found you. Thirty seconds, asked near the start, and the only question here that pays you after the call ends. A year of those answers tells you which of your channels is actually producing work, which is information almost no freelancer collects and everybody guesses at.

That is the list. Now the two that matter.

The question about what they think is easy

Somewhere in every project is a task the client believes is trivial and is not. They rarely mention it, because in their head it is not worth mentioning. Then it arrives in week three as "and can you just."

The purest example of the genre lives in the Clients From Hell archive: a client who wanted the subject of a stock photograph to have their eyes open, and who was entirely certain the software had a button for it. It reads as a joke about a difficult client. It is not. It is a person with a completely reasonable mental model of a tool they have never used, and every client has three or four of those about your work.

So ask directly, in whatever phrasing fits the call:

Which parts of this do you imagine being quick?

The answers are worth more than anything else you will hear. You will learn that they think the ten-page site is a small job because the copy is written, or that they expect the animated version of the logo to come free with the static one because it is the same shape. You then get to correct the model early, in a conversation, rather than late, in a negotiation.

The corollary question, which takes ten seconds: has anyone here commissioned this kind of work before? A client who has been through a branding project knows what a round of revisions is. A client who has not will use the word "draft" to mean something you do not mean.

The budget question

Almost everyone flinches at this and asks it badly, at the end, apologetically, in a form the client can dodge. Ask it early, plainly, and give them something to react to.

The version that works is a bracket, because choosing between two numbers is a much smaller social act than producing one:

Projects like this usually land somewhere between about eight and twenty-five thousand depending on how much of the rollout you want. Does that sound like the right neighbourhood, or is it wide of where you are?

Three things happen. They tell you which end they are near, or they tell you the whole range is wrong, or they say they do not know. All three are useful and the third is the one people misread. A client who genuinely does not know what this costs is not being evasive. They are new to buying it, which means a longer approval path, more explaining, and more meetings. Price those in rather than resenting them later.

What you should not do is write a proposal for someone who has refused a range twice. That is not a client with a secret budget. That is usually a client comparing quotes, and you are supplying free market research.

Then book the next conversation

Before you hang up, put the review of the proposal in both diaries. Not a promise to follow up. An actual date, agreed while you are still talking, which converts the awkward chasing email into a calendar entry that already exists.

Everything above is upstream of the document. What comes next is turning an hour of talking into deliverables, boundaries and a number, and if you would rather run the call from a written sheet than from memory, the script version of these questions is free and unwalled.

One last thing, and it is the hardest for anyone who likes their craft. Spend the call finding out what is true rather than demonstrating that you are good. Your work already does the second job. The call is the only chance you get at the first.