Episode 37
4 Red Flags with New Business Leads
Episode 37 opens a new format for Creatives Grab Coffee: no guest, no wide-ranging catch-up, just Dario and Kyrill taking one specific business topic and working it over from the trenches. First up: the four red flags to watch for when a new lead approaches, drawn straight from Lapse Productions’ own sales calls.
The ground rules come first. This is not about the obvious tells, like a lead whose garbled free-email handle already answers the question. These are the four substantive warning signs: a lead who does not know what they want, a lead who will not talk budget, the moment your gut says something is off, and a video with no strategy behind it. And crucially, several of them can be flipped from red to green if you know how, and when it is worth your time to try.
Key Takeaways
- Vague leads are fixable early, fatal late. A lead who cannot name goals, audience, or purpose can be guided in pre-production. If it persists to the first cut, they will not know what they want, only that it is not what you gave them.
- Turning a red flag green costs time. One recent vague lead took about five calls and a hard stop to close. Weigh that sunk cost against long-term potential: worth it for recurring work, rarely for a one-off.
- No budget talk, no next call. Fish the number out early. A legitimate lead will share it; one holding it hostage in the hope you get invested first is wasting both sides’ time.
- Put the budget question in your contact form. Pre-selected ranges do the vetting at stage one. Stage two is the intro call: confirm the selected range in the first two minutes, ask if there is wiggle room, then stop talking.
- The countdown trick unsticks 'I don't know.' Is it 100K? 75? 50? Walk the number down until they react or admit they truly have no idea, then tell them to figure it out and call back.
- Trust your spidey sense. It is the last filter after every rational check. A tiny project with an astronomical budget, or numbers that do not add up, and nine times out of ten the feeling is right.
- A video with no strategy blames you for its ROI. Posted at random on a Friday night, the work goes nowhere, and the client mentally attaches the poor return to your name. Those become one-off clients at best.
- Match the marketing budget to the asset. A 10K video needs more than 10K behind it to reach anyone. Nothing goes viral on its own, including the lead who opens with ‘I want to go viral.’
Timestamps
A New Kind of Episode
This one marks a first for the show: a hosts-only, single-topic episode. After 36 conversations with guests, Dario and Kyrill sat down with their own notes to codify something they deal with weekly at Lapse: how to spot a problem lead before it costs you. They deliberately skip the minor stuff, the mangled Hotmail handle that already tells you this is not a real company, and the deeply technical tells you learn with reps. What is left are four substantive red flags, and, running through the whole episode, the more useful idea that several of them can be turned green on purpose.
Red Flag 1: They Don't Know What They Want
The most common flag: a lead knows they need video but cannot name the goals, the audience, or the point of the piece. Early on, that is workable. The right questions in pre-production, the same discovery that anchors any solid production process, can guide them there, and leads who get walked through that thinking actually end up valuing you more. The real disservice is saying yes, yes, let’s make a video and racing forward, because the failure arrives at the worst moment: by the first cut they still do not know what they want, only that it is not what you gave them, and as the hosts put it, nobody is happy and everyone has a bad experience. Dario’s analogy is hard to argue with: it is like going to the doctor and saying I have a pain. Where? I don’t know. Then I can’t help you.
The catch is the meter running. One recent vague lead took a total of roughly five calls, plus one hard stop, you need to figure this out, then get us involved, before closing. Lapse takes some of those on deliberately right now because they are fine-tuning the sales process and have capacity to experiment. But if you are busy, the calculus flips: a bigger shop with five other leads in the queue can rationally hard-pass, because the sunk cost of educating a lost lead outweighs a one-off project. The tiebreaker is future value: five calls is a fine price for a client with monthly work behind them.
Red Flag 2: They Won't Talk Budget
Some leads treat money talk as taboo. The hosts treat it as the first gate: if you cannot establish what the project costs and what they can spend, nothing else in the conversation matters. Stage one happens before anyone talks: the contact form carries pre-selected budget ranges, so tire-kickers filter themselves out. Stage two is the intro call, inside the first two minutes.
“You have to figure out ways to get the budget within the first few minutes of talking with a lead.”
Kyrill Lazarov, Creatives Grab CoffeeThe script is simple: I saw you selected 7.5 to 10K, does that still hold? Then wait, and do not fill the silence. The frame that keeps it comfortable is practical, not nosy: the budget dictates the inputs, meaning what crew you can bring on and what the production can carry. Two encouraging truths follow. Whatever range a lead selects, there is almost always a little more in the bank, and when they see real value, clients find more budget, because the spend tracks the return they expect.
But a lead who still refuses after you have fished for it is the flag at full mast. The tactic is usually to get you so invested you will agree to whatever number finally surfaces, and the hosts’ answer is to stop the sales funnel cold: a legitimate client will tell you; one hiding it is either shady or circling back to red flag one, they do not actually know. For the genuinely stuck, there is the countdown method, credited on air to Doug Darling of Tripwire Media: is it 100K? 75? 50? Walk it down until they react, and if nothing lands, tell them to figure it out and call you back. Dario runs his own simpler version: he needs a range to work off, and leads either give him one or move on.
Red Flag 3: Your Spidey Sense Goes Off
Sometimes the paperwork looks fine and something is still wrong. A modest project paired with an astronomical budget. Promises that feel over-inflated. Details that do not quite reconcile. The hosts call it the spidey sense, and their point is that it is a trained instinct, not magic: enough sales calls build a pattern library, and producers in particular live or die on reading people. You cannot teach a gut feeling, which is exactly why it works as the last filter, the check that runs after every rational one has passed. When something still does not sit right at that stage, nine times out of ten the feeling is correct. And if you genuinely do not have it and cannot develop it, the advice is blunt: stay on the technical side of production and let someone else run the sales calls.
Red Flag 4, Revised Live: No Strategy Behind the Video
The fourth flag starts life on the notes as your services are just a checklist item for them, and then gets rewritten in real time. Dario decides mid-episode that the sharper version is this: the lead has no strategy in place for the content.
“You're going to do all this work for them, it's going to be great, but when you deliver it there's no strategy for how it's going to be sent out into the wild, and the ROI is going to be low as hell.”
Dario Nouri, Creatives Grab CoffeeThe failure pattern is depressingly consistent. The finished video gets posted at random, midnight on a Friday, nobody sees it, and the client quietly attaches the poor return to your name. Those clients become one-offs who resurface every other year for something minor, precisely because the first project earned nothing. Sometimes the cause is leadership: the champion who hired you loves the work, but nobody above them will push it out. The math the hosts give is the useful part: spend 10K on the asset and the marketing budget behind it has to be higher than 10 G’s, because you cannot just post it on YouTube and expect the views to roll in. The exception that proves the rule is the internal video, where the purpose and audience are baked in. And when strategy is done right, you know it: Kyrill’s favorite moment is scrolling YouTube and getting served an ad that Lapse produced, with clients sending screenshots of the same thing.
The Bonus Flag and the Long Game
A fifth flag sneaks in at the end: the lead who opens with I want to go viral. The hosts’ fix is calibration rather than rejection. How viral? A million views? Then how are you going to do that, what is the plan? Because nothing goes viral on its own. The closing thought zooms out: the longer you are in the industry doing good work, the more quality leads you attract, and that is usually because you built your own process for filtering them, exactly what this episode is. It is a grind, as they say twice for emphasis. And the new format comes with a call to action: drop the red flags they missed, and the topics you want covered next, in the comments.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the four red flags with new business leads?
A lead who does not know what they want (no goals, audience, or purpose), a lead who refuses to talk budget, a gut feeling that the details do not add up, and a project with no distribution strategy behind the video. The episode adds a bonus fifth: leads who open with ‘I want to go viral’ and no plan.
How do you get a lead's budget early?
Put pre-selected budget ranges in your contact form so leads self-qualify before the first call, then confirm the selected range within the first two minutes of the intro call and ask whether there is wiggle room. Frame it practically: the budget determines what crew and scope the production can carry.
What if a lead refuses to share a budget?
Stop the conversation and say you need the number before going forward. A legitimate client will share it; one holding it hostage is usually hoping you get too invested to walk. For leads who genuinely do not know, count down out loud, 100K, 75, 50, until they react, or send them away to figure it out and call back.
What does it mean when video is just a checklist item?
The client is commissioning video because they know they should, not because a strategy calls for it. With no plan for distribution or promotion, the finished piece gets posted randomly, earns little, and the client associates the poor ROI with your work, which is why the hosts reframe this flag as ‘no strategy in place for the content.’
Should you drop every lead that shows a red flag?
No. The first two flags especially can be turned green by educating the lead and guiding them to clear goals and a real budget, and leads handled that way often value you more. The judgment call is time: flipping a flag can take several extra calls, which makes sense for long-term clients and rarely for one-offs.
The Hosts
Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov are the co-founders of Lapse Productions, a Toronto video production company, and the hosts of Creatives Grab Coffee, a weekly show about the business of video production.
About
Creatives Grab Coffee is a podcast about the business behind video production: sales, strategy, pricing, team building, and everything that happens off camera. New episodes every week on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Lapse Productions is a Toronto-based video production company serving tech, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing clients with corporate, promotional, event, and testimonial video. New to commissioning video? Start with our guide to the types of corporate video.
This is a hosts-only episode of Creatives Grab Coffee: no guest, just Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov of Lapse Productions taking one business topic and breaking it down from experience. Have a topic you want covered in a future episode? Leave a comment on the video or write to dario@creativesgrabcoffee.com.
Full Transcript
Read the full episode transcript
This transcript was auto-generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability. It is not speaker-attributed and may contain small errors. For chapter deep-links into the video, use the Timestamps section above.
0:00welcome everybody we're here on a completely new type of episode that we're doing for Creatives Grab Coffee where we're going to be talking about very specific topics and today's topic four red flags to look for when a lead approaches you so Dario what would you say is probably the first of these red flags let me get my notes out I don't know how I'm memorized I guess we should preface it with the fact that we're not really going to go over like very minor stuff it's like something as simple as someone contacts you and their email handle is all messed up and you kind of
0:31get the understanding that they're not really a legit company or whatever it's just someone starting out we're not really gonna Hotmail email yeah we're not if it's a Hotmail email we're not really going to focus on stuff like that but you know going over everything we didn't really come up with too many I think we just came up with like four main ones I think everyone else you should all the other ones like if there's like more than that you should already know it by now or it's or it's very very technical stuff yeah and not only are we gonna go over these particular red flags but we're also
1:02going to talk about how you can actually turn them almost into green ones in a way right where it you can use it to your advantage so for example one of the very first red flags that we can that a lot of companies encounter is that these leads they don't know exactly what they want and sometimes this is a good thing sometimes this is a bad thing but the the place where it becomes bad where is where they don't know what they want they know they need video but they don't know what the goals are they don't know who they're targeting they don't know uh what the point of the video is or
1:34anything like that and this can be frustrating for a lot of organizations when when the lead doesn't know what what they want right it becomes is a big problem when that extends well into the production process all the way to the end that's not really a big issue if at the beginning of the conversation they're a little lost in that because you can kind of guide them towards it and say listen I need you to figure that out before we continue this but if you kind of take them on and they still don't know that stuff and you guys go through the whole production and by the time they see the first cut
2:06they still don't know what they want but they know it's not what you gave them that's what becomes a big problem right yeah and this is why it's so key to have these discussions earlier on in pre-production and I feel like we haven't really experienced this issue so much because of the different types of budget ranges that we typically work with this happens occasionally here and there but when the one thing we notice is that organizations uh when they're starting to pour a lot of money into their marketing they already know what their goals are and what they're looking
2:34to do so when they reach out for video a lot of the time they already know what what they need at that point not always because we still have had that happen recently too but you kind of again you have to stop them and say I need you to know this information and even recently we had a lead where we just straight up said look you guys need to figure this out then get us involved in this because it seems like you guys don't have this figured out right now so figure it out then let us know and then we can help you help you to the next step but until you don't know that like I can't I can't I can't
3:08do it it's like going to the doctor and saying I have a pain where I don't know okay so I can't help you like is it in your head no exactly no okay so where is it and you nailed it right on the head like it essentially with these situations you have like the good thing is that if they don't know what they want and you start to ask these very key questions to get them to start thinking about things they will actually value you a lot more because you're getting them to think about what the key purposes are for the video content that they want to do there's nothing more of a disservice
3:41than saying yes yes yes let's make a video Let's Start and move right forward without even you or they knowing what they want because like you said what will happen later on in the later stages is exactly as you said no one will be happy and everyone has a bad experience yeah I I can see this also being a great way for bigger companies to vet leads because you know we're at the stage where we we can take on more capacity so sometimes and we're even fine-tuning our sales process so a lot of the times we'll I will actually just test out different sales method with these types of leads
4:12but if you're a bigger company and someone just comes to you like that and I guess it's it's way easier to say okay I have five other leads to go through this one I'm just gonna do a hard pass yeah exactly and as we mentioned before the once you start asking these questions asking them what the goals are who their target market is and all these questions be get answered they will value you more and then in later down the road though that relationship will flourish even better but I will say that's also another thing to keep in mind with that type of lead is that sometimes the amount of time you'll need
4:45to put into uh those uh those sales calls is a lot more than with a client that has that stuff figured out so just keep that in mind going into it because again like we're testing stuff out techniques out so we might take those on just to like better our process but if you're at a stage where you can't your time is valuable and you really can't afford something like that or you have other people on those on those calls that you're mentoring you might have to tell them hey you know what this type of person just pass on it because like going back to to my previous example it
5:18took at least three more calls to be able to three more calls in addition to like my typical amount of calls or like a total like maybe five calls or something be able to close that client so now we have them but like it was like the total of five calls and there were a couple like we had to do eventually like a hard step and say listen you guys need to figure it out so just keep that in mind yes you could turn this into a green flag but it will be more time consuming and uh the rate wise the is I don't know what that is but it's probably not as high as you think it would be so it's it's more it
5:52might be more of a sunk cost than than a potential opportunity yeah you have to really evaluate how much time you need to spend acquiring this client and if there is a potential for a long-term relationship because if like you said because of the amount of time that goes into acquiring this new client if it's going to be a one-off then it's maybe not worth your time but if it's something that could potentially lead to monthly projects or consistent work here and there then it can actually be beneficial so it's all a matter of weighing uh weighing your time versus the cost
6:26um now that being said let's move on now to our second red flag and this is when clients typically refuse to talk about their budget we don't have that often now like right now we we fish it out pretty quickly out of them some people I don't know why some some people think it's taboo to talk about money but I like to know what the budget is going into the first call that's why on our contact form we have the budget option because I need to know like are you even worth my time if you like that and that's why we also select we have to pre-select certain options for them just to vet them out
7:02from that stage right so if a client is not or of the lead is not willing to tell you their budget even after you're trying to fish it out of them you have to just stop the conversation and just say I need to know this before we go forward because what if you get to the end of a uh you keep going down your sales funnel and then they say oh I can't afford this and they're just wasting your time like what is this they're wasting your time you know I know what their tactic is to hopefully get you so invested in them that you'll kind of agree to what the price is but that's that's BS listen you need to know
7:36your numbers right away yeah and this actually a benefit also to them because it's not only your time that it's going to be wasted but also theirs because imagine if you went through an entire one hour call or discussion with this lead uh determining uh idea discussing ideas uh discussing other details and then and then you find out what the budget is then you tell them how much it costs for your services then they're like great I just wasted an hour of they also wasted an hour of their time trying to figure out if this is a potentially good partnership so there's a flip side to it right and you
8:10have to you have to figure out ways to get that budget within the first few minutes of talking with this lead and luckily for Dario and myself what we're doing as you mentioned is having a baseline set on our website for when people are contacting us so that they know generally what to expect that's that stage that's stage one then stage two is when you do the intro call within two minutes you say okay so I also saw that you selected our the option of 7.5 to 10K for your budget does that still hold and they'll you just wait for the answer you don't talk you could also flip it though and
8:45even say like why why did you select this particular budget why is this the budget that you've allocated right and see what they're reasoning no you just say like what what's the budget I'm working with like the way you got to phrase it is basically like you need to know because then you can you can put in the right inputs for the project right so I need to know what kind of I can bring on for this like what do you want are you looking for this or that and the more you ask about the budget the more you will find out that that budget is flexible and whatever they selected is oh like
9:16it's always couple okay less than what they actually have to work with so yeah always keep that in mind too whatever the budget is there's always a little bit more in the bank yeah and sometimes uh when you get into earlier discussions and you find that there's more value that you can provide to them and you communicate that to them clients if they see the value they will find more more budget to work with for you because it all depends on what kind of return on investment they're going to get as well yeah but again if they if they just straight up just won't tell you what the budget is
9:49uh you like that's it just move on like that they'll have to tell you at some point anyways if they're holding it hostage from you then something's up and I mean if they're a legit client lead or client they'll tell you if they're not legit they're probably Shady in some sense because why why hide that information yeah and and to be honest them hiding that information can also lead back to the first red flag whereas they still don't know what they want and that's a good way to determine whether they do or do not know so basically if you have a client that says oh I don't know my
10:23budget then you just say you you do like okay is it like a hundred thousand is it 75 000 no is it fifty no if if this and then you kind of go down until they see if you figure out what it is or if they still won't tell you at that point then you just say Okay figure it out and then give me a call back when you figure it out and you just end the call there yeah that was actually a tidbit from one of our guests in one of our previous episodes uh and it's a very good way to kind of throw certain numbers uh out there I think it was Doug Darling for uh from Tripwire Media that actually said
10:54that no that was great that was from uh that was from the future actually oh yeah oh yeah but I mean like from the episode from the cgc episode that we discussed it I think it was there that we discussed it I actually haven't used that method yet I just I use the other methods of just like I mean they always they always tell me they always give me a Range I need a range to work off of right yeah so they'll either tell me the range and then we move forward or they just uh move on so and sometimes though if uh now kind of like having said that as we move on to the third red flag
11:26sometimes if they have all that stuff figured out and something might still not be sitting right with you that's what we call your spidey sense going off essentially as a third red flag where there's something that's not adding up based on the information that they've given you or something that you feel based on the leads and this is a skill that takes time to develop so the very general it's a very general red flag like your gut is telling you something like you you'll have this if you're in business and if you don't then you'll either develop it or you might just not
11:56be good at at this part of the sales process maybe just stick to like the other technical side of producing yeah it really it really depends like it like as you as you go through your career and you do more and more of these kind of calls and you start talking to different kinds of leads you will start to kind of see a pattern of situations where things are accurate and things aren't whereas like say for example a client wants to do this this and this where it probably won't be that big of a project but then there saying that the their budget is something completely astronomical that
12:30makes no sense or if they're it's like an over promise and under deliver kind of situation even something just simply doesn't add up that's just one example I don't know like for me I I uh I mean look if you're a producer you you have to know how to read people pretty well then you kind of get a general you'll get a general sense when you're talking to someone of how that person is and roughly what this project is going to be like that just comes from experience um like I said you'll you you can't really teach a gut feeling that's why it's called a gut feeling is just an instinct that's what it is so
13:06you get something you either develop with time or if you just don't have it at all you'll you'll run into problems because you won't be able to figure out things exactly it's like your last it's like your last filter almost like after you've gotten through every other part of the process and just if there's something that still doesn't sit right with you then nine times out of ten that that feeling is right because at the end of the day you don't want a bad experience your client doesn't want a bad experience and you want to create you want you want to do good work too right let's move on to
13:37the last one which is uh your your your services your video services are literally just a checklist item for them um so sure this is fine I guess in a way but you just get like the only thing that would suck about that is that there there's no like they're just doing the the the the service just because they know they need to but they will probably won't be any strategy involved with that you'll face this I mean we're not we're not hard on Veterans so I don't know how common this is but we've we've had it happen once or twice um it sucks because they don't care about it and you want them to care about
14:13your work I actually I don't even know if we face this to be honest we haven't faced this at all I mean it's more so I think I think the biggest differentiating thing that we're kind of like trying to identify is if they value you and your service offering at the same time because sometimes people might need something where yes it is just a checklist item but they still also know the value of it I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna revise this one this is what this point should have been uh they they don't have a strategy in place for your video content that I like that one better because basically
14:50what that means is like you're gonna do all this work for them it's gonna be great that's why they're coming to you but then when you deliver it to them there's going to be no strategy in terms of how it's going to be sent out to the Wild and like the the the the ROI on that is going to be low as hell because you know they'll post it randomly in the middle of the night on a Friday No One's Gonna watch it and then you just look at it and you're like Yeah Boy it looks great but marketing wise is not doing too well or they're not putting any money into it or anything like that
15:20that's that's where it really like that's the only thing I think of where it sucked for us and the other thing that sucks about that is that anytime we've had clients that do that it's normally like a one-off or like we might see them every other year for something minor so there's no because there was no strategy involved with it they didn't get any return on their investment and because of that they didn't see the need to pursue future video content because of it well basically that that's uh one of those situations where they didn't get the ROI that they were hoping for
15:50even though they didn't have a plan in place and in their mind they're going to associate that with you but it also depends on what obviously what kind of video that you're producing for them if it's an internal video there's a very specific purpose and goal in there right it's a matter of like if they if they uh in that situation that you just talked about Dario that's an example of where they don't really really value the video as much as they might have indicated and that actually goes back to the previous point where they don't see they just see it as a checklist item and there's no
16:23they don't have a value behind I don't even think I said I think sometimes it's lack of leadership in those situations because we've like the people we've been involved with where that's happened it's like they they loved it they were for it but you could tell that there was no one else past them that was gonna really push it out or maybe they didn't have budget for it enough to do that because again like once you come to us and you're spending like 10 000 on a video you got to remember that you still got to push that out into the wild especially if it's an external video so
16:48like sure you you spend ten thousand on the asset but the marketing's got to reflect that somehow the marketing budget is definitely gonna have to be higher than 10 G's to be able to push it and then again it depends for how long right so that's why we always we always try to like see like what the purpose of the video is what the strategy is behind it because again like it there's a lot of determining factors in there but there's no sometimes like we've we've had situations at times where it's like it was supposed to be a really important video for them but they weren't gonna
17:14they didn't set any marketing budgets aside and I was like look if you're not gonna do anything with it on that don't expect miracles you know it's not gonna go viral on its own nothing goes viral on its own exactly there's nothing that's that makes me happier more when we create a video series for a client and then you know one day I'm just scrolling through YouTube and then I just see on one of the YouTube ads one of the videos that we produced and even like sent the screenshots from uh from people that we've worked with like hey I just saw the video on YouTube and sends us a
17:42screenshot that that's strategy that is a clear purpose behind that project you know as you said you can't just post it on YouTube and just expect expect the views to roll in you know oh and maybe that's another red flag actually if somebody comes to you and says I want to go viral I feel like that could be another red flag well no that's when you're kind of tailored your expectations and you say what does that mean and they say okay well how viral do you want it to go yeah a million views it's like so how are you gonna do that what is your plan it all depends on the type of clients
18:18and the types of leads that you're targeting and honestly like the kind of opportunities to start to roll in as the longer you are in the industry if you're doing something right you will grow and you will start to attract more quality leads and that's usually due to the fact that you come up with your own process of filtering them through right and it It's a Grind It's a Grind well on that note I think we covered all of the four uh red flags that we or main red flags that we kind of look out for in our leads if you have any uh other ones that we didn't mention please feel free to comment them at the
18:54bottom of this video uh or to the side if it's on Instagram or TikTok let us know what topics you want to hear about in the future that are along these lines that you want to know about the video production process or the industry itself so we're always open to topic ideas cool all right thanks for tuning in guys
