The short answer
Establish the use of funds, the amount and urgency, monthly revenue, time in business, existing positions and whether statements are available — roughly in that order, because the first two build engagement and the last four are the disqualifiers. Front-loading the qualification questions gets you accurate answers to fewer of them; earning the conversation first gets you honest answers to all six.
Every broker knows the six things they need. The order is what separates a call that produces accurate answers from one that produces the answers the merchant thinks will get them funded.
The order, and why
| # | Question | Doing what |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is the money for? | Engagement, and it predicts urgency |
| 2 | How much, and when do you need it? | Sizes the deal, tests seriousness |
| 3 | What is the business doing monthly? | The primary qualifier |
| 4 | How long have you been trading? | The floor most funders enforce |
| 5 | Anything else being repaid daily? | The one they will not volunteer |
| 6 | Can you get four months of statements? | Predicts whether this moves at all |
Question five is the important one
Existing positions are the most commonly withheld fact on a discovery call, and not always dishonestly — merchants often do not think of a previous advance as debt. Ask it as a mechanical question about their bank account rather than as an accusation: "is anything coming out daily or weekly at the moment?" gets a straighter answer than "do you have any other advances?"
What to do with a fail
- Under the revenue or time-in-business floor: say so plainly and diarise the date it changes.
- Heavily stacked: be honest about what that means for pricing before you spend a week on it.
- Restricted industry: say it in the first two minutes, not on day four.
- No statements available: find out why. It is sometimes a login problem and sometimes a signal.
A disqualification handled well is worth something. Merchants remember being told plainly that this is not going to work, and a diarised return at the point the blocker expires is one of the cheapest sources of funded deals a floor has.