Writing a requirement
What separates an enquiry a supplier can quote from one they have to phone about — units, specifications, scope, timing — and the failure modes that make good requirements unanswerable.
The single biggest determinant of whether you get a useful answer is whether the person reading it can price it without speaking to you.
Everything else — how polite the covering note is, how urgent you say it is — barely moves the outcome.
The test
Before you send, read it as if you were the supplier and ask: could I put a number on this today?
If the honest answer is no, the enquiry will come back as a question, and you have spent a round trip learning something you could have written down.
What makes something priceable
Say what it is, in their language
Use the term the industry uses, not the one your team uses internally. If your requisition says "the blue fitting", the enquiry should not.
Where the platform already has the product or service listed, enquire from that page. Then the identity of the thing is not in question at all.
Say how much, and in what unit
Quantity without a unit is the commonest defect in a requirement, and it is fatal. Pieces, metres, kilograms, litres, hours, square feet — say which.
Say what changes the price
Grade, finish, tolerance, packing, certification, whether you need test reports. You know which of these matter for your requirement; the supplier cannot guess.
This is the field where one extra line saves a week.
Say when
A delivery date, or a window. "Urgent" is not a date, and every requirement claims to be urgent.
Say where
Delivery location changes freight, taxes and often whether they can serve you at all. A supplier who cannot deliver to your state would rather know now.
Several lines, one enquiry
A real requirement is rarely one item. Put the related lines on one enquiry rather than sending several — the supplier sees the whole basket, which often changes the price in your favour and always changes whether it is worth their time.
Keep the lines genuinely related. An enquiry mixing packaging film with forklift servicing is two enquiries to two different suppliers wearing one coat.
Services need scope, not quantity
For services, the equivalent of a unit is the boundary of the work:
| Included | What you expect them to do |
| Excluded | What you are handling, or someone else is |
| Where | On your site, theirs, remote |
| When | Start, finish, and anything that cannot be interrupted |
| Done | How you will both know it is complete |
The last one is the one people skip and the one disputes are made of.
Indicative rates
You can put a rate against a line. Whether you should depends on why you are quoting a number.
Useful when you have a genuine benchmark — a previous purchase, a budget approved at a figure — and you want to know whether the conversation is even in range.
Harmful when it is a number you made up to anchor them. Suppliers who can see the figure is unserious decline, and you have anchored yourself out of a supplier.
The failure modes
If it is bigger than an enquiry
An enquiry asks one business. When you want comparable prices from several against one identical specification, that is a tender — a different tool, built so the responses can be laid side by side.
Rule of thumb: if you are about to send the same carefully written requirement to your fourth supplier, you wanted a tender three enquiries ago.
For the long version, see How to write an RFQ.
Overview
Sending an enquiry — what it costs you in attention rather than credits, what the business sees before it decides, and what you get back when it does not go anywhere.
After you send
What you can see while an enquiry is pending, what changes the moment it is accepted, what comes back if it is declined or ignored, and when to stop waiting.