How to qualify coaching clients with async video

If you've coached for more than a year, you've had this Monday. Calendar opens, eight discovery calls booked, five of them aren't a fit. Two won't show up. One will tell you 25 minutes in that they're “just exploring.” You finish at 6pm with three good conversations from eight hours of work.

The fix isn't a longer calendar buffer. It isn't a paid screener call. It's a short async video intake that does what your gut already does in the first three minutes of a discovery call — but does it before the call, in their words, with their face on display.

Here's the seven-question flow I use myself.

The premise

A qualifying intake should answer three questions for you, in this order:

1. Are they actually here? (Will they record a video, or do they bail?)
2. Are they in your tier? (Budget, timeline, stage of business.)
3. Are you the right coach for them specifically? (The thing you can only tell from face/voice/context.)

A form can't answer #1 reliably. A phone screen handles #2 and #3 but at the wrong cost — your hour. Async video handles all three for the price of 12 minutes of your time per week watching responses.

The seven-question flow

Question 1 — Hello. (Your video, 15 seconds.)

“Hey — before we book a call, I want to understand what you're working on. This takes about four minutes. There's no wrong answer, and you can re-record any reply.”

This question doesn't ask anything. It does two jobs: it shows your face (which warms the visitor up to recording theirs), and it sets expectation (4 minutes is short enough that they finish, long enough that they take it seriously).

Question 2 — Which best describes you right now? (Buttons.)

Working on a career change · Building a business · Navigating a life transition · Something else

Branching starts here. The next question depends on the answer.

Question 3 — (Branched.)

• Career → “What's your current role and what's the change you're considering?”
• Business → “Are you a founder, an operator, or somewhere in between?”
• Life → “What chapter are you in — naming it loosely is fine?”

Question 4 — Why now? (Open-ended, 60 seconds.)

“If we'd talked six months ago, what was different about your life or work? What changed?”

This is the highest-signal question in the flow. If someone can't answer it with a specific event or recent realization, they're probably not ready.

Question 5 — Budget range. (Buttons.)

Under $X · $X to $Y · $Y to $Z · Above $Z · Prefer to talk about it on the call.

The “prefer to talk about it” option is important — it keeps the gentle disqualifier from feeling like a paywall.

Question 6 — (Branched on budget.)

• Below threshold → polite thanks + free PDF + future booking link.
• At or above threshold → final question.

About 15% of the “below threshold” folks come back six months later as paying clients in my own data. The polite disqualification isn't an ending — it's a relationship.

Question 7 — Anything else? (Optional.)

After the answer: booking link. Pre-show the price on the call confirmation.

What this saves

In my own practice, this cut discovery-call volume by 60%, raised close rate on the calls I did take by ~35%, and recovered about 8 hours a week. Setup took an afternoon. Maintenance is zero.

Build it today

The full template is loadable from Flik's templates library — “Coaching discovery qualifier (7 questions)” — and works on the Free tier. Start free and load it.

If you want to talk through your specific qualifier (some coaches need 5 questions, some need 12), email hey@askflik.com — we read every message and reply within a business day.