Writing a brief that gets you comparable bids

Most corporate learning briefs describe a solution. "We are looking for a one-day workshop on collaboration for forty middle managers, ideally experiential, with a follow-up module."

Three providers respond, proposing three different things, each reasonable. The bids cannot be compared on price because they are not the same product, so the decision gets made on chemistry and slide quality. Then the session runs, and it does what was specified rather than what was needed.

The fix is to stop describing the solution and describe the room.

Write the behaviour, not the topic

A topic is "collaboration". A behaviour is something a third party could confirm happened or did not.

Cross-team requests currently go unanswered for a week or more. We want them to get a yes or a no within two working days.

Project leads open kickoffs without naming who owns the decision, and it gets relitigated in week three.

Our regional heads present a unified position to clients and a different one to each other.

Anyone bidding against those three lines is bidding on the same thing. Anyone bidding against "collaboration" is bidding on their own interpretation of it, and so is everyone else.

If you cannot write the behaviour down, the programme does not yet have a purpose, and the most useful thing a brief can do is expose that before the money moves.

Describe who is in the room, honestly

Number, seniority, function mix, and — the one that is almost always omitted — whether they want to be there.

A room of forty volunteers and a room of forty people who were told to attend need different opening thirty minutes. A provider who knows in advance can design for it. A provider who discovers it on the morning is recovering rather than delivering.

Say whether they know each other. Say whether there is a history between two of the functions in the room. Say if the sponsor will be present, because that changes what participants will say out loud, and a good provider will want to talk about whether the sponsor should be.

State the constraints as constraints

Budget range, date window, location, languages, room and whether it can be reconfigured, how long you have the group for, and what else is on the agenda that day.

Withholding the budget is common and it is counterproductive. It does not produce a better price; it produces bids that are guesses, at least one of which will be at the wrong scale entirely and waste everyone's week. A range is enough. It lets a provider tell you honestly what is achievable inside it, which is more useful than a proposal you cannot afford.

Leave the method open

This is the discipline the whole brief depends on. Do not specify physical or digital. Do not specify the number of rounds. Do not specify that it should be a simulation at all.

Specify the behaviour, the room and the constraints, then ask each bidder to tell you what they would run and why. The variation in the answers is the single most informative thing you will get from the process, and you lose it entirely the moment the brief prescribes a format.

You may have a strong view about format. Put it at the end, marked as a preference rather than a requirement, and ask bidders to say if they disagree. The one who argues against it with a reason is usually the one worth talking to.

Ask for the three things that make bids comparable

Whatever else you ask for, ask every bidder for the same three items:

What happens in the room, hour by hour. Not a concept. A schedule. This is where a provider who has run it many times and one who has not become immediately distinguishable.

The total cost, including everything you would invoice. Materials, travel, second facilitator, customisation, the follow-up. Comparable totals or the exercise fails.

How we would know it worked. What they would measure, when, and what they need from you to do it. A provider who answers this well is proposing a relationship; one who does not is proposing a day.

How long the brief should be

Two pages. One is not enough to carry the behaviour and the room honestly; five means you have started designing the session, and you have hired someone else to do that.

The test

Before you send it, read the brief and ask whether two capable providers could respond with genuinely different proposals and both be right.

If yes, the brief is doing its job: it describes the problem precisely and leaves the method open, and the difference between the proposals is the information you are buying from the process.

If no — if there is only one sensible response — you have written a purchase order and should send it to the provider you already intended to use, which is a legitimate thing to do and a waste of three other people's fortnight if you pretend otherwise.