A Bergen County prospect called me last Tuesday: “I need a quote for a new B2B website. Can you send me a number by Friday?” I told him no. Not because I didn’t want the work — because anyone who sends you a number on a B2B build without knowing what’s already there is guessing, and guesses cost both sides money. Before I quote any B2B site, I ask the same 12 questions. If you can’t answer them, I can’t quote. Here they are.
The 12-question pre-quote checklist
Grouped into four buckets — tech, traffic, conversion, sales. Each one materially changes the quote.
Tech stack (1-3)
- What’s the site built on today? WordPress + Elementor is a different rebuild than Webflow, which is different than a hand-coded React app, which is different than HubSpot CMS. A WP-to-WP refresh might be $4K. A Webflow-to-WP migration with content rescue is $12K+.
- What’s the hosting setup? Shared GoDaddy, managed WP Engine, Cloudflare Pages, custom VPS? Hosting limits performance, deployment, and whether I can use modern tooling. Cheap hosting often forces a $1,500 hosting migration before any other work.
- What integrations are wired in today? CRM, marketing automation, payment processor, calendar, custom dashboards. Every active integration is a thing I have to preserve, migrate, or rebuild. Listing them upfront prevents the “oh I forgot we use that” call three weeks in.
Current traffic (4-6)
- What’s your monthly organic traffic? A site getting 200 visits/month is a different SEO risk than a site getting 40K. On the small site I can move freely. On the big site every redirect and URL change is a decision with revenue attached.
- Top 10 landing pages by traffic? Pull this from Google Search Console or GA4 before we talk. These pages cannot lose rankings during a rebuild — they get extra care, careful redirect mapping, and content preservation.
- Where’s the traffic coming from? Mostly Google organic? Paid LinkedIn? Email list? Referral partners? Each source has different requirements for the new site — paid LP optimization, partner-page treatment, etc.
Conversion baseline (7-9)
- What’s the current conversion rate? If you don’t know this number, that’s the first problem. Without a baseline I can’t tell you whether the rebuild moved the needle. “Decent” or “I think pretty good” is not a baseline.
- How many leads/month is the site producing today? Real number, last 90 days, from the CRM not from gut feel. This tells me what the bar is and what’s at risk.
- What’s the average deal size from inbound leads? A $500 deal and a $50,000 deal don’t get the same site. The high-ticket version has trust signals, case studies, longer sales pages, calculators. The low-ticket version is fast and frictionless.
Sales process (10-12)
- What happens after someone fills out the contact form? Auto-reply? Sales rep calls within an hour? Sits in an inbox for two days? The site’s job ends where the sales process begins, but I need to know the handoff so the form, follow-up, and CRM tagging are all wired correctly.
- How long is the sales cycle? A 3-day cycle needs different on-site content than a 6-month cycle. Long cycles need nurture content, calculators, gated reports, retargeting hooks. Short cycles need straight-to-cart UX.
- Who else is involved in the buying decision? If your buyer needs to convince a CFO and a procurement team, the site needs to arm them — a “share this with your team” PDF, an ROI calculator, a printable one-pager. If it’s a single decision-maker, skip that overhead.
Why I can’t quote without these answers
Quoting without these answers means pricing a hypothetical site against a hypothetical scope. That quote will be wrong by 30-60%. Either I quote too low and eat the loss, or quote too high and lose the deal to someone who quoted blind and burns the client later.
The checklist takes 45-90 minutes to answer if you have the data, longer if you have to dig. That filter is itself useful — prospects who can’t or won’t answer are almost always price-shoppers, and price-shoppers are who you lose money on.
How AJD handles this
Every B2B build inquiry I take gets sent the 12-question intake before I commit to a quote. Once I have the answers, the quote takes me about an hour to put together and is accurate within 10%. If you’d rather use the checklist with a different agency, the questions are above — copy them, use them, quote elsewhere. The point is to get a real number from someone, whether you work with us or not.
Ready to get a real quote on a B2B build? Bring the 12 answers and I’ll send you a fixed number within 48 hours. Book Free Discovery Call →
