BANT For Freelancers | The Secret BS Detector For Bad Leads

368. BANT for Freelancers

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Brian: [00:00:00] have you ever been on a discovery call with a potential client? And then you realized about halfway through the conversation that. They aren't gonna need your services for like another six months. They can't really afford you and they're probably just trying to milk you for free advice. So not only did you get your hopes up getting on this call thinking you've got a new client, you also wasted your time talking to this person in the first place.

Brian: Yes, that sucks. And today we're gonna talk about fixing that. Freelancers have the habit of just jumping on a discovery call with pretty much anyone with a pulse. You're desperate for clients. You wanna get on a call, you wanna potentially close somebody. You've listened to this podcast long enough to know that, Hey, Brian says, get on discovery calls. Don't just try to close through email or just proposals.

Brian: And so you're like, yes, I'm gonna talk to anyone, but you have no idea how serious they are. You have no idea what their budget might be. You have no idea what other stakeholders could kill this project, even if you sold this one person and you have no idea how long it's gonna take them to get their shit together anyways.

Brian: and so you end up wasting time on calls or worse, you end up wasting even more time with worthless proposals that you'll never close

Brian: you get burnt out feeling like you're bombing call after call after call, which can be really common once you actually start taking marketing seriously and you're having to talk to actual [00:01:00] strangers versus just referrals. Very common.

Brian: You're way under charging your services because you priced at a fraction of what their actual budget was, and then you spend months trying to chase down the leads because they weren't ready when you first talk to them.

Brian: And you listen to my advice and said, follow up until they say yes, until they say no, until they die.

Brian: Which again is true. It's just a waste of time. If you're talking to the right people.

Brian: As a creative freelancer, your time is your product, so every time you jump on a discovery call with an unqualified lead, you're missing out twice. You're losing out twice for two different things. One is the unpaid time you just wasted talking to somebody who wasn't ready and will maybe never be or maybe could never afford your services.

Brian: And then again, for the opportunity cost of what you could have done during that past hour, working on your business, fixing something, actually working with a client who is paying you. Finally wrapping up that project, finally getting ahead on something. So your time has to be protected as much as possible without missing out on qualified opportunities.

Brian: Again,we obviously don't wanna miss out on discovery calls with a great potential client here.

Brian: So if you don't already have this, you need a lead qualification system, something that's easy to follow, and that's what bant is. BANT. It's an old ass framework created by IBM in the [00:02:00] 1960s, but it can easily be adapted to freelance businesses in 2025 and beyond.

Brian: So I'll walk you through how to assess all four things in bant and just if in case you don't already know, this, BANT stands for budget, authority, need and timing. So you can think of it like a BS detective for bad leads, in other words.

Brian: And the whole point of this, if you implement it correctly,

Brian: is to potentially save hours each week

Brian: by not chasing down dead end leads. You'll feel more confident on sales calls because you're the one leading in conversation and you know you're talking to the right people and you'll close more high quality projects because again, you're talking to the right people.

Brian: The key here is don't talk to the wrong people. Do talk to the right people, and that's what Bant is.

Brian: if this is your first time listening to the podcast or you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is Six Figure Creative Podcast. This is a podcast for creative freelancers who want earn more money from their creative skills without selling their souls.

Brian: we take lots of outside influence, not only from different parts of the freelance and creative world, but also the greater business world.

Brian: And pull them in so that you, a common freelancer, can make more money without selling your soul. Again, if that sounds appealing, you're in the right place. So, bant, what is bant again, I [00:03:00] talked about it a second ago.

Brian: It's budget, authority, need timing. It's basically budget. Do they have the budget to work with you? Authority? Do they actually have the authority to make the final decision need? Do they actually need your service at all? And timing is now the right time? and we can build questions around all four of these things and weave them in your sales process and your pre-call questionnaire.

Brian: But in this episode, I really wanna focus on the pre-call questionnaire because the best thing to do is to weed out unqualified leads before you ever get on a call with 'em. sometimes it's impossible to get all this stuff figured out in a pre-call questionnaire. But the pre-call questionnaire is the best way to do this. Now, if you're wondering what a pre-call questionnaire is, if you're new here or you just don't really listen to that much of this show, my favorite way to close clients, and this is what we consult most of our freelancers on, is a sales process that is hinged around a discovery call.

Brian: the discovery call is a way you figure out where they are now, where they want to be, what's missing, and can you actually bridge that gap or not. but before you do that discovery call we send them to a pre-call questionnaire. And this pre-call questionnaire has a series of questions in it that they're answering so that you know if you can actually help them before you get on the phone with them.

Brian: Not only that, [00:04:00] but it also gives you ammo for the close when you get on a call with them. But the pre-call questionnaire is very important to make sure you're only talking to qualified leads.

Brian: ' cause nothing is worse than having a low close rate. Only to realize the people that you're not closing are all unqualified leads, which shouldn't count towards your close rate anyways.

Brian: So with my own team or the clients that we consult with, we look at what is your qualified lead close rate. Like of the leads that you're talking to are actually qualified to work with you, what percentage of those do you actually close? And a pre-qual questionnaire is the place to do it. So that's what this episode's gonna really be focused on here.

Brian: So let's start with B budget. Can they afford you? Big thing here is try to figure out if they're expecting Fiverr prices or if they're serious about actually hiring quality help. Some freelancers or some projects Are just doomed to Fiverr pricing, and that's just the nature of some projects. For example, I do this all the time. I hire on Fiverr all the time for small little projects that are just little nickel and dime things. For example, if I film 10 new ads, I'm probably gonna just send them to a Fiverr editor,

Brian: and this goes back to a completely different conversation of just saying, if you want to have premium pricing, you need to have premium services.

Brian: Something that's transformational, [00:05:00] something that's actually hard to find or hard to find high quality. So the bigger the transformation you offer, the more you can charge, the less likely you're gonna be doomed to five for pricing. But most freelancers can't just straight up ask about budget

Brian: in my opinion, if you are a freelancer working with the types of clients where you have really large scopes, or you have vague uncertain scopes of work where you're trying to figure it out together with the client, if that is you, if you're in niche like that, you can actually just straight up ask budget.

Brian: You can ask questions like, have you set aside a budget for this project? Or, what's your investment range for this work? And the reason this is important is because when you are shaping scope, you have to know budget.

Brian: On the flip side, if it's a really well-defined scope of work, especially for your productized services out there, then in these cases you're generally not gonna ask budget because you generally know what you're gonna charge and they're going to just have to fit into that budget. In these cases, we look for proxy questions.

Brian: A proxy question. Is this a more clever way of asking something that they're willing to answer truthfully and not just put a fake number into a budget line item so that you can figure out this is a good proxy for them having a budget? I'll give you some [00:06:00] examples In the B2B world, the business to business world, this is a much more obvious place to ask proxy questions.

Brian: So if you're a freelancer, let's say you're web designer, you're working with businesses, one of those proxy questions could be team sides. If you're working with solopreneurs. The team size is one. Chances of them having actual budget are pretty small.

Brian: If they have a team of 10 or more, 10 to 15, 10 to 2050 or more,obviously they're gonna have some sort of budget for a website at that point. So you can ask questions like. How many full-time employees, or you can even ask how many people are on your marketing team if you're working with larger organizations, But in this case, the size of the team likely gives you an idea of what their budget will be or really it's not even necessary budget. it's their willingness to pay. Solopreneurs willingness to pay for a $10,000 website is probably pretty low, but a 10, 20, 30 person organization willingness to pay a 10,000 dollar website likely very high 'cause they're gonna be a multimillion dollar organization at that point.

Brian: Another proxy question could be around ad spend. You could just ask roughly how much do you invest in paid ads each month? Now, this is, again, good. If you're working directly with marketing teams, you're doing something like funnel build outs. You're doing [00:07:00] something really where the website is tied to paid advertising.

Brian: But this is offputting if you're not really working. In that world. So we gotta make sure that your question is not a weird question to have in a pre-call questionnaire. For a web designer to ask about team size, it's not a really weird question. That's a very common thing for businesses to answer when they're filling out lead forms.

Brian: For example, go try to sign up for a lead magnet from HubSpot. You'll see what I mean.

Brian: But ad spend can be a really good proxy

Brian: because if a company is spending $50,000 a month on paid ads, their willingness to pay five, $10,000 for a fast, high converting website that also looks good and is on brand, whatever that is a much higher likelihood. Another one you can't ask depending on your market and your service and your offer, and.

Brian: A lot of different factors is the client's annual revenue ranges in the B2B world, I suggest putting these in ranges. So like, which best describes your annual revenue. You can put it in different tiers from, under a million to one to 5 million, five to 10, 10 plus, something like that.

Brian: And obviously those ranges can vary depending on which niche you're in. some niches, under a million is all of your clients and other niches. Over 10 million is all your clients, so. [00:08:00] Make the actual tiers realistic for what your market is. And the goal here is when you have like under a million,you'd put that break point under a million when you don't wanna work with clients under a million dollars.

Brian: And you put that upper break point at a high enough level to where you're not pushing away or scaring away potential clients at the upper level that you wanna work with. So find the sweet spot and have multiple tiers within your sweet spot zone.

Brian: Another proxy question for budget could be around project impact. You could ask something around like, how would this project impact your revenue? Or if this project went off exactly how you wanted, how would this impact your revenue?

Brian: Now in this one, people know what you're doing. people understand this. But I have seen this question work, and I have actually filled out forms myself for this, where I've seen that question played out. I like it. Don't love it. But it's one to think through and it also helps them frame your offer in a high ROI, frame of mind where they're having to at least think through, if not directly, write down how much impact your service has on their business. And finally, in the B2B proxy world for budget is previous spending.

Brian: This one is a little tougher. It's worth trying or looking at some different wording you could put here. [00:09:00] So it's like, have you worked with a web designer before? And then this is where you have logic in the form. If they say, yes, I have before, what was the investment or what was the project value for that?

Brian: Again, not all markets and niches and people will even answer this sort of question, but it's worth at least considering different ways to address, again, a proxy budget. Because again, if they've spent money on this before, then they're generally going to give you an idea of what they're gonna be willing to spend on in the future.

Brian: of all of those, when it comes to my favorites, there's previous spending project impact, annual revenue ranges, ad spend, and team size. My favorite two are team size and average ra,annual revenue ranges.

Brian: I like team size because no matter what, if you're in the B2B world, you can likely put something like that. And if you're only working with solopreneurs, then you should put revenue ranges. So what you'll eventually find over time is if they're under this revenue range, my conversion rate is so low, it's not even worth getting on calls with them. So I will just filter out anyone under this revenue range, or I'll filter out anyone under this team size range. That's the goal here, is to find ways to filter out people before you get on calls with them.

Brian: Now let's talk about B2C proxies. So this is again business to consumer. I'm gonna focus just for this on music producers 'cause we [00:10:00] have a lot of those that listen. 'cause that's my background. That'sprobably one of our larger segments of listeners for this show. Because they don't really fit in the,traditional B2B world.

Brian: so you can't really ask like team size. You can't really ask revenue ranges. You can't really ask maybe project impact. There's a few things that really don't tie in with this, so I just wanna talk through what that looks like. So if you're doing music production or audio engineering, or mixing or mastering or something like that.

Brian: There's only a really a couple proxies that I like, and there's a couple you could maybe add in or think through just to get your,creative juices flowing. but the first one is band members, number of band members. If you're working with solo artists only, then this is irrelevant. But if you're working with bands, multi member bands.

Brian: Then knowing the number of musicians can be a good proxy for budget. And that's generally because if you're working with unsigned artists who don't have label support to fund their albums, the number of band members can dictate how much money they have at their disposal. And I say this from somebody who I was charging thousands and thousands of dollars to bands to come to my studio, for me to produce their albums when every member worked at Taco Bell.

Brian: But there were five members all earning minimum wage at Taco Bell [00:11:00] who could save enough money over the span of a year in order to come to my studio because it was a high enough priority for them.

Brian: So the more members the band has, the more potential saving power they have in order to afford you. The second potential proxy question is around stage of career. And you can have this, again as a, radio select, or they just select one.

Brian: So like the question could be something like, where are you in your music career? And it could be they're just starting out. they're releasing their first songs, They're touring or monetizing, they're already signed or there's labeled interest. Again, find like the different stages for the types of clients you work with and try to find clear drop off points where selection A, I don't ever wanna work with these people.

Brian: Selection. B, questionable. I might, under circumstances selection, C and D, perfect fit people, I would work with 'em every time. Because you know if they have a career that's mature and they've invested a bunch of time, effort, energy into it, then there's likely a budget because they value their careers.

Brian: A third potential one would be studio experience. So just a simple question, have you ever recorded in a professional studio before? Something like that?

Brian: And if so, have like a fill out question of like, tell me about your experience or what studio was it, or something like that, [00:12:00] that can give you at least some indication of whether they, invested in their music before. Obviously you can go listen to the music and figure out is this good quality or not?

Brian: But it's not always the full picture.

Brian: So this is a decent one. Kind of in a similar vein, you

Brian: could ask gear questions like what level of gear do they have or what gear have they purchased for their band, or something like that. Again, these are all kind of a little flimsy and weak. But the fourth one worth asking is, whether they perform or they actually monetize or music.

Brian: So something like, are you currently performing licensing or selling your music in any way, shape or form? Because we know that if there's money coming in, then there's money that is able to go out towards investing in something like, music production. Again for B2C for this world, my favorite is the total number of members in the band.

Brian: And then like the band stages. Those two are probably the best proxies for budget. Now, there's one more sneaky thing, whether you're B2B or B2C. The best thing to do here is there's always going to be a range of,income or team size, or a number of band members or stage of career, no matter where it is, where it's questionable.

Brian: Where it's not a clear yes, it's not a clear no where you're still in question here. And in these [00:13:00] cases, when you are really booked solid or you're really in high demand, or you really don't wanna get on a call with an unqualified lead, the best thing that you can do here is to just put a hard qualifier for those questionable leads.

Brian: And this is where you just drop a number. it could be something like if it's under five team members or under four band members, or.

Brian: whatever the thing is where you're like, this is a questionable range. That's where the logic based form, again, almost any good form builder can have a logic based form where if they select one answer or below this amount, then it brings up another question, and that logic based qualifier will simply say, our projects start at blah, 5,000, $10,000.

Brian: Is this within your budget? Yes or no? It's a very clear yes or no answer. Can you afford this or can you not afford this? again, this is the Hail Mary. This will weed out so many people. And the reason we don't put this as just the budget question is that it can give sticker shock without real context, depending on your service, your experience level, what you do, and you're better off, again, only doing this sort of like.

Brian: Hail Mary, what is it? It's [00:14:00] actually just like a scorched earth, method. It's only worth scorching earth on those leads you're in question about.

Brian: But having this in your pre-call questionnaire is a really good way of, again, filtering out leads without a good budget so that you're not always getting a pricing objection when you're talking to clients. 'cause that's really frustrating. the goal is to remember this, it is not your job as a freelancer to help them come up with a budget.

Brian: It is their job to have a budget, and then when they have a budget, it is your job as a freelancer to sell them on your services. So when you get the objection all the time that you're too expensive or that they can't afford you, then those were not qualified leads. A qualified lead has a budget of some sort, and all we're doing here is filtering out those bad fit leads before you get on a call with 'em.

Brian: And if everyone you talk to forever never has a budget, it's likely that either you have a messaging problem,

Brian: you have a positioning problem or you have a problem of getting enough leads in where that relatively small percentage in your niche actually has budgets.

Brian: Because in some markets, only 10 to 20% of leads actually have budgets that can afford your services, especially in B2B world where you're in a premium price. [00:15:00] So I see this with music producers a lot, where you're in that like $1,500 plus per song range, especially in a two to $2,500 per song range, and you're working with.

Brian: independent artists, that's a range where very small percentage of people are willing and able to pay that amount of money. And so in order to stay booked solid, you have to bring in a high enough volume of leads in order for that 10 to 20% to actually be enough to give you enough at bats. 'cause you're not even gonna close a hundred percent of those 10 to 20%, you'll close three to five outta 10.

Brian: So that is budget, and I spent a lot of time on that because that's the thing that trips up so many freelancers.

Brian: The rest of these are not that long. Authority is the second one that can trip you up, and the whole goal with authority questions is are you talking to the decision maker? So a simple question to ask on your pre-call questionnaire is, is there anyone else involved with making the final decision or who else is involved with making the decision?

Brian: Or if we decide to move forward here, who else's permission do you need to get?

Brian: And the goal here is one of two things. If there are multiple decision makers. Then to either get all of the decision makers on the first call so that you can have a very productive conversation with everyone and get everyone's [00:16:00] input and sell everyone and close everyone on that first call or turn it into a two call close.

Brian: Two calls as usual, but you could do more than that.

Brian: and the idea with Call one is to build a champion up. You're talking to someone who is,who's responded to one of your marketing messages or been referred to you and they're interested in working with you, and they have the budget because they made it to the first question and you're talking to them and they wanna work with you, and you build up the desire.

Brian: You do a great job on the sales process, building the champion. But then you use that champion to then go collect all the other stakeholders, bring them on a second call with you, and then together you and that champion close the other people on the call.

Brian: And the sounds very B2B, but this is something I dealt with for years in music production because I'm working in a band. And in a band there are five generally equal members. Most bands don't have any sort of real operating agreement,but it's generally five members, 20% ownership each, right?

Brian: So they're all equal stakeholders and I'm only talking to one person, but then that one person has to relay all the stuff we just talked about back to the other four band members, and all four band members have to say yes in order for [00:17:00] me to be the person they're gonna hire. and the mistake many producers make in this case, or really even B2B World, you make this mistake, is that you expect that champion to go off and sell for you.

Brian: The problem is most are not as good at selling your thing as you are. No one is actually. So that's why the whole goal with the first call should be to get all the other stakeholders on the second call so that you can recap everything, make sure there's no objections from other people in the, company or in the band.

Brian: And then close everyone. Get everyone to agree to move forward.

Brian: So that's authority. I told you that was much faster than budget, but this is one that trips up fewer people and it's relatively straightforward, although there's more to be said in the sales conversation. The sales process for that two call close versus one. And when I say two call versus one call, it doesn't mean you're always closing people on the first call.

Brian: Like people have to still do other things, get budgets together, think about it, whatever. But it's two different sales processes. A one call close is, I'm going to go through everything including pricing. Try to get them to make a decision on the call or make a decision soon after the call. With a two call closed, the first call, the only point of that is [00:18:00] to build a champion and get the other stakeholders onto a second call.

Brian: That's the whole goal. You would've closed the first call if it ended positively, and they're willing to get everyone else onto a second call. That's the first call closed. The second call being closed means you talked to all decision makers and they decided to move forward with you. And you would track those metrics separately.

Brian: You wanna know what your close rate on the first call and what your close rate on the second call, so you can see which one's the bottleneck in the future. Alright, now we're moving on to need,the goal here is to see is there a real pain or problem that you can solve as a freelancer?

Brian: And mentioned this before, every freelancer were either. Solving a painful problem, trying to get them away from pain or you're working them towards a goal that they have. You're getting them towards pleasure that they want. And generally speaking, in the B2B world, you're almost always solving a painful problem, getting 'em away from pain.

Brian: in the B2C world, it's 50 50, I'd say a lot of times, more times than not, you're helping them towards a specific outcome. Whether you're like a photographer trying to capture family memories, that's towards pleasure. Or you're a music producer trying to, capture the vision that's in their head so that they can get signed or they can tour the world again towards pleasure, towards [00:19:00] something that they want.

Brian: But the goal here is can you actually help them with this?

Brian: And this sounds like a weird thing to have questions about. Of course, if they're talking to me, they need my service, but it's not always the case, especially if you ever do paid ads, for example, you're gonna start getting a lot of unqualified leads in, especially at the start before you've optimized things.

Brian: So when you get unqualified leads, you'll realize they actually don't need your service for whatever reason. So the easiest way to fix this, if you have problems where you're coming on and people don't actually need your service, or there's not a high need for your service. Is having questions like, are you a avatar who needs specific outcome?

Brian: Just straight up asking, are you this person who needs this outcome? Yes or no

Brian: if you're a brand designer, it could be something like, are you a licensed therapist or counselor who needs a brand that feels safe, professional, and approachable? Or if you're a web designer, are you an e-commerce brand owner who needs a site that not only looks great, but actually converts browsers into buyers?

Brian: I can see there's like a little bit of salesmanship to these questions. They're a little leading, but the goal is this, like if I'm not an e-commercebrand owner, or I'm not looking for a site that looks good and converts, then I'm probably not gonna move forward. You're weeding people out that are bad [00:20:00] fits.

Brian: Or if you're in the music world, are you a worship leader or Christian artist who needs help producing heartfelt, high quality music that connects with your audience? that one's a little more obvious. If you're a death metal band, you're probably not gonna answer yes to that question, right?

Brian: And if you're like, in Nashville, there's tons of CM producers here,contemporary Christian music. If you're in that niche, you probably don't wanna work with death. Metal bands most likely. Now there's gonna be other things that would weed those people out. I'm using an extreme example here, but you get the gist.

Brian: it's helping you again, make sure you're working with your people. If you're a specific niche, you have a specific outcome. Is the person who booked a call on your calendar? Are they your specific avatar? And do they want that specific outcome?

Brian: So that's like the straightforward approach. You can ask,other questions like what's been frustrating you about trying to solve this problem on your own?

Brian: This is common. Again, if you're in the. Music production space especially, or even in the B2B space for web design where they're trying to build their own site or bands trying to self-produce.

Brian: If you know your clients try to do this stuff themselves and they're frustrated and they're trying to hire a professional, finally, that can be a good question for, this. Or why are you looking for help with this now? That can help uncover frustrations that like, [00:21:00] Hey, we're looking for help with this now because we've been dealing with X, Y, and Z for six months now we're sick of it.

Brian: So that's need. The last one is timing and that last kind of question for need. Why are you looking for help for this right now? That one actually kind of ties into timing. It can pull up questions about need and can also. Answer the timing question again, the timing question is, is now the right time? Or they justbrowsing?

Brian: Are they just kicking tires and timings are really important. One, this is probably the second most common reason that clients aren't closed on discovery calls is that they're just checking. They just wanna see, they're just kicking tires. They're just seeing pricing. They just wanna know.

Brian: They're just curious. Right. And a curious client is not a qualified client.

Brian: and this is where you have to use your judgment. How in demand are you? If you're in high demand, you can weed out people who are not ready right now. You can talk to them when they're ready. If you're in low demand right now, maybe you talk to these people, you start the conversation early.

Brian: It's ruling again on these calls, if that's the only thing holding it back. They have budget, they have the authority, they have the need, but the timing's not quite there. Chat with them. If you don't have a lot to lose here, you're gonna have a, a relatively low conversion rate on the front end. But you still, ifyou can follow up well, and you do a good job with it, making a good first [00:22:00] impression, and you're one of the first people that they're talking to about this, you can have a really good long-term conversion here.

Brian: So this isn't an end all be all, it's just, you know, you're not gonna close the deal soon because the timing's not there. But if the timing's not there and you were already booked up. Unless you're booked up six months in advance and they don't need your services for six months, you're probably not gonna get on a call with them.

Brian: So there's a couple questions you can ask. One is simple, straightforward. When are you hoping to get started with this? Or when are you looking to launch this? Or when are you looking to have this done by? Simple, straightforward, easy to answer. You can do pre-select. I like pre-selected like radio selects where it's like ranges like, lesson seven days, seven to 14, 14 to 30, 30 plus is what we do in our coaching applications.

Brian: But you can also put whatever makes sense for you. We're hoping to launchthis in six months, in three months, in two months, whatever, have some sort of pre-select. And that way the reason you can do this is whenever you have a lot of pre-call questionnaires filled out, it's called 10 20, 30, 40 50.

Brian: You can export all the data and you can start doing a cohort analysis. And you can say, when I'm looking at this, and I know this in our own cohort analysis, if someone fills out our coaching questionnaire and they put in, over 30 days from now is when we're looking to get [00:23:00] started. That is a really low close rate, or not anymore because we talking to these people, but before I stopped talking to those people, that was a really low close rate. Now it actually has a higher close rate because we filter out most of those and we only talked to the ones who had, some other reason why they were trying towait.

Brian: Another way you can kind of word this, depending on your service, is this something you're ready to get started with this month? And that's sort of phrasing, unless they're filling it out the last day of the month usually makes sense. You're just trying to figure out are they just browsing or are they actually serious about taking next steps soon?

Brian: So that's bant. It's really good at filtering out unqualified leads so you're not wasting your time with unqualified leads. But there's a second part to this Qualifications on everything, and this is something Bant does not address, and this is something I have not seen Bant people address because.

Brian: Really not that common in the B2B world. And this is where I think the freelancers need to step out of the B2B mindset for a second and think through the creative mindset here. And that is how do we filter out red flag leads? Because you can have, tons of unqualified leads have red flags and they're horrible to work with, but there's [00:24:00] also tons of qualified leads who still have red flags and you should not work with them.

Brian: And by working with these people and ignoring the red flags. You are essentially selling your soul for money, which is against the ethos of this podcast. So how do we actually make sure that some of these qualified leads are not making your life a living hell? That's what I'll talk about on next week's episode.

Brian: Where I'll give you a similar framework. It's another acronym. It's something you can, again, apply to your checklist of criteria whenever you are looking through pre-call questionnaires in your sales process, you have questions to suss out some of these things in next week's episode or once you're done with the sales conversation, you can just go through the checklist and make sure that they're not exuding any, some of these red flags.

Brian: That'll be on episode, I guess 360 9, I think is next week's episode so check that out. Ifyou're listening to this in the future, then this episode's already out and go check it out. The one that'll go perfectly hand in hand with this.

Brian: Otherwise, if you're listening to this, the week it came out, that's all I got for you. I'm gonna go off and enjoy my week in Yellowstone with my dad. I'm taking my dad to Yellowstone this week. I've never been, he's never been to, been on his bucket list and when, when I did my mom's retirement trip.

Brian: So if you don't know who I am or care, then just fuck it. Just skip all [00:25:00] this. This is for people who've been listening for a while. Last year my mom retired and I took her to Europe for the month, for the summer, and I went with her, my wife, my sister, and we had a wonderful time. It was an awesome trip In order to bribe my dad into allowing me to take my mom out there and leave him at home alone for a month I bribed him with a trip to Yellowstone.

Brian: So we're finally doing that trip. And, uh, it'll just be me and my dad. So it'll be a father son trip for Father's Day weekend. So that dates when this podcast is recorded. next weekend is Father's Day weekend, and I'm hoping for a good time. So I'll report back, see if this is as beautiful as I think it is.

Brian: We're also doing, we're actually flying into Jackson Hole and then driving up through the, grand Teton Mountains. So we'll go through that park. We'll spend a day in that, national park as well. should be a good time. I'm looking forward to it. And, uh, that's all I got for you this week. I'll see you on next week on the six Figure Creative Podcast.

Brian: Same time safe place where we're talking about, Red flag clients peace.