Client intake questions for agencies, stage by stage

A client intake questionnaire is the structured set of questions a new or prospective client answers before work starts. For an agency it usually does two separate jobs that often get mashed into one long form: qualifying an inquiry (should we take this on, and at what price?) and preparing delivery (what do we need to start on day one?).

Splitting those jobs matters. A prospect who has not agreed to anything will not hand over brand files, analytics access and a list of approvers, and they should not have to. A signed client, on the other hand, finds it strange to be asked about budget again.

The bank below is tagged by stage so you can build two short forms instead of one long one. The Nielsen Norman Group recommends talking to stakeholders one on one where possible and using a short written list of four or five targeted questions when a meeting is not possible; treat the intake form as preparation for that conversation, not a replacement for it.

Before a proposal, you need enough to decide three things: whether you are the right agency, roughly how big the job is, and whether the money and timing are real. That is stages 1 to 4; trim their 21 questions to the 10 to 15 that matter most for your services.

Budget is the question agencies skip because it feels awkward. Four or five ranges plus ‘not decided yet’ is gentler than an open number and still routes small budgets to a lighter offer. Pair it with ‘who signs off the spend’ to learn whether the range is approved.

Stakeholders, assets, access and legal are onboarding questions. Once the client has committed, asking for files and permissions is expected rather than intrusive.

Send this form as soon as the agreement is signed with a deadline a few days before kickoff, so missing access and unnamed approvers surface before the call rather than during it.

Branching is what keeps a 40-question bank from feeling like 40 questions. Most clients will see 20 to 25 of them. These are the branches worth building:

Do not put a password field in an intake form. Every major platform an agency touches has a way for the account owner to invite you with a named role, which can be revoked later without changing a shared password.

Ask two things per account: who on the client side is an admin, and which role they will grant. Google Ads offers five access levels (email-only, billing, read-only, standard and admin). Google Analytics 4 has predefined roles from administrator down to viewer, with editor, marketer and analyst in between. Meta lets a business portfolio give a partner business access to specific assets, so the agency never logs in as the client.

Put the role you need next to each account in the form's description text.

The intake form is not a contract, but it should surface the facts your contract depends on: whose terms apply, who owns the final work and source files, and whether you will handle personal data for the client.

Ownership is worth asking early because it affects price. The AIGA Standard Form of Agreement for Design Services, a free modular set of terms published by the US professional association for design, treats intellectual property as its own module and distinguishes a full assignment of rights from a license, which is a useful vocabulary for the question even if you use your own contract.

If the work involves client personal data (a CRM, email list, form responses or ad audiences), you are likely acting as a processor. Under UK and EU GDPR a processor contract must cover, among other things, acting only on documented instructions, confidentiality, security, sub-processors and deleting or returning data at the end. The intake question simply tells you whether you need that agreement before work starts.

Read every response the same way: confirmed facts, open questions, owner, next check. An illustrative answer: ‘We need a new site before our conference. Sales want more leads, and product also wants a resource library.’ Confirmed: a conference date exists. Open: which pages support sales, whether the library is phase one. Owner: the marketing lead proposes a page list. Next check: the project manager reviews it before design is scheduled.

Zunoform can hold both forms: conditional logic, file upload (10 MB per file on Free, 100 MB on Pro), a meeting scheduler question for booking the kickoff, hidden fields to tag which service page the inquiry came from, and partial responses so you can see where a prospect stopped. Responses can go to Google Sheets on the free plan; Slack, HubSpot, Notion and Airtable need Pro. An e-signature question needs Pro to publish.

It is not a client portal, CRM or contract tool. The free plan caps responses at 500 a month; Google Forms and Tally have no monthly cap on free, so a very high-volume inquiry form may fit those better. And no form builder should be used to collect passwords, whichever you choose.