What this covers
- Disqualification is the skill
- What to establish before investing
- Score it, do not feel it
- The number that proves it is working
Disqualification is the skill
Qualification is usually framed as finding good listings. It is more useful as the discipline of ending bad ones early. A listing that dies in week two costs almost nothing. The same listing dying at Booking has consumed proposals, demos, internal approvals and a slot in your forecast.
A site visit is the single best predictor of a sale, and registration — not booking — is when revenue is real.
What to establish before investing
Before a listing advances past the early stages, you want honest answers to four things — and "we will find out later" is a valid answer only once.
- Problem: is the thing you solve actually costing them something measurable
- Authority: who signs, and have you met them
- Process: what has to happen internally for this to be approved
- Timing: what makes this quarter different from the last four
In real estate & property the third is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that determines whether Site Visit is reachable at all.
Score it, do not feel it
A simple score beats intuition because it is comparable across reps and across months. Assign points to each criterion, set a threshold below which a listing does not advance, and review the disqualified pile monthly to check the threshold is not simply throwing away business.
The scoring matters less than the consistency. Any reasonable framework applied consistently outperforms an excellent framework applied when someone remembers.
The number that proves it is working
Track win rate on listings that passed qualification against those that did not. If the two are similar, your qualification is decorative. If qualified listings convert meaningfully better, the framework is doing real work and the threshold is roughly right.
Also watch average time-to-close. Good qualification shortens it, because the listings that used to stall for a quarter before dying are now ended in week two.