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 deals. It is more useful as the discipline of ending bad ones early. A deal that dies in week two costs almost nothing. The same deal dying at Negotiation has consumed proposals, demos, internal approvals and a slot in your forecast.
The trial is the real qualifier. Deals that skip it close slower and churn faster.
What to establish before investing
Before a deal 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 saas & technology the third is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that determines whether Discovery 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 deal 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 deals that passed qualification against those that did not. If the two are similar, your qualification is decorative. If qualified deals 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 deals that used to stall for a quarter before dying are now ended in week two.