If you’re a videographer, photographer or anyone that has service-based clients, we would recommend sending new clients a questionnaire before you schedule a phone call or meeting with them.  This will actually help you out tremendously in the small and big picture.   

Here are the reasons why you should always send new clients questionnaires before meeting:

It Helps You Understand Their Wants/Needs For The Project

This one is obvious so we wanted to get it out of the way.  It helps you understand the project and obtain the information you would need if you decide to take on the project. 

It will also let you know if it’s not the type of project you’d like to work on.

It Helps You Prepare (And Impress) For Your Meeting With The Client

If you’re like us, you like to prepare if you’re able to.  In this case, you’re preparing for the meeting with your client so you’re not going into it blindly. 

Just imagine this: you have enough information about the client and their project and you can go into the meeting well prepared and on the same page as them; you not only impress them with your professionalism and commitment to their project, but you can use that information to help advise them based on your professional opinion. 

And if you do it correctly, you can potentially upsell them on services or lock them into a retainer contract for more than a one-off project.

Some people are great with improvising but even if you improvise during a meeting blindly, there will always be something that you may miss.  Meetings with new clients are make-it-or-break-it and if you impress, your conversion rates become that much higher. 

Helps Your Client Understand Their Own Wants For The Project

You won’t believe how many times I’ve had clients not fully know what they want with their own project.  They have a general idea but they need help.  Before you give your time advising them, the questions from your questionnaire will often give them more clarity on what they want.    

It Adds A Layer To Weave Out Clients Who Aren’t Serious In Actually Hiring You

Time is money, right?  Imagine if you can cut out the time spent talking to potential clients who aren’t even really serious about hiring you or they simply don’t even have a budget to be able to hire you. 

If you receive a bunch of inquiries, especially on social media, imagine trying to respond to every single one of them to find out less than half actually had a budget to hire you to begin with.  Now you just wasted all day responding to potential clients who weren’t really serious. That is time you could’ve been using on other important business items.

And if you receive spam or scammer emails, this will easily red flag them!

Avoid The Awkward “What Is Your Budget?” Talk

You don’t want your first question to a potential client to be “what’s your budget?” because that seems like you’re only interested in getting paid rather than helping your potential client.  We believe asking clients what their budget is upfront is necessary but to avoid that awkward talk, we suggest adding that question to your questionnaire. 

This will also gives you a heads up on if the client can afford your services.

Helpful tip: put in parenthesis examples of your pricing starting with your minimum.  For instance, “What’s Your Budget (ex. $1,000, $2,000, $3,000+)?”  This lets them know the minimum on if they can afford you or not.

You Have A Reference In Writing

Whatever their answers are, you have it in writing to reference later, if needed. 

Say one of your questions is “do you have an example video or photo style you’d like us to reference?”, now you can refer back to the example they gave, especially if you didn’t take notes or have a bad memory, like us.  🙂

On top of that, there’s no miscommunication on what they’re telling you.  It’s in writing for a reason.

Bonus Tip: Save Yourself More Time By Automating The Questionnaire Sending Process

If you use a CRM/CMS (we use HoneyBook, get 50% off your first year) then odds are you have the option to automate some of your processes such as sending out automated emails as well as things such as questionnaires. 

This will save you so much time!

Conclusion

Sending out questionnaires have helped us in numerous ways and we believe it will help you out as well.  As you can see, this will save you a vast amount of time in the big picture but it will also help narrow down the time spent on quality leads. 

And if you need a videographer/video pre-production questionnaire example template for future clients, this is one of the many templates that are available for our email newsletter subscribers. Feel free to sign up here to receive our FREE templates!