The five questions that qualify a client before the first call

The most expensive thing in a service business is not ads or software. It is the hour you spend on a call with someone who was never going to book.

A good intake form does the first screen for you. By the time a lead reaches your calendar, you already know whether they are worth the time. Here are the five questions that do most of the work.

1. What are you trying to get done?

Open, in their own words. It tells you scope, urgency, and whether you are even the right person for it. It is also the answer you will reread right before the call.

2. When do you need this?

Timeline separates someday from this month. It also surfaces the clients whose dates you cannot make, before you both waste a call finding out.

3. What is your budget?

The question everyone is scared to ask, and the one that saves the most time. Offer ranges rather than a blank box so it feels normal, not intrusive. A lead who picks the lowest band for premium work has told you something useful.

4. How did you hear about me?

Partly attribution, partly a fit signal. A referral from a past client behaves very differently from a cold search, and you can treat each accordingly.

5. Anything else I should know?

A catch-all that reliably surfaces the one detail that changes everything: a venue, a constraint, a hard deadline, a special request.

In Intako you can add conditional logic so these branch to the answer: pick wedding and the venue question appears, pick corporate and it does not. The lead only ever sees what applies to them, and every answer lands in your pipeline with an AI summary and a fit score.