Qualify the job before the account
A promising crm software lead needs more than a company in the right sector. Confirm the job: promised follow-ups disappear when leads move between teammates. Identify a small sales team sharing account relationships as the possible user group, then find who can authorize a pilot; the working buyer hypothesis is a founder or sales manager responsible for pipeline follow-through.
Ask about the current workaround, a pipeline spreadsheet with reminders in personal calendars, and what would make changing it worthwhile. Do not assign a budget or procurement timeline from company size, funding, or job title alone.
Use a category-specific qualification rubric
Use the calculator below to organize your judgment after reading the source. Unknown evidence should remain unknown. Its weights are a transparent prioritization convention, not a prediction of purchase probability.
| Dimension | Evidence to seek | Reason to pause |
|---|---|---|
| Problem | Show the last opportunity that stalled because no next action had an owner. | The person cannot describe a recent instance of the problem. |
| Product fit | Can you move ten active opportunities into a pipeline with one owner and dated next action each? | buyers requiring a full enterprise revenue stack from an early-stage contact and pipeline tool |
| Timing | the founder is handing selling work to the first salesperson | The proposed change has no confirmed date or relevance. |
| Implementation | Which customer information must survive the handoff from founder to salesperson? | contact import and everyday update effort may outweigh additional reporting features |
| Value | the new salesperson completes and records a follow-up without asking the founder for context | The buyer and user disagree on what success looks like. |
Work through an illustrative assessment
Suppose the source says: “I am hiring our first sales rep and need to stop keeping every customer follow-up in my head. What is simple enough for two people?” That supports investigating the problem, but it does not yet settle purchasing authority or technical compatibility. A reviewer should ask the two discovery questions above and preserve the answers beside the source.
Compare that with: A company announces funding without describing its sales process. This weaker example should not receive the same pain or timing score. A relevant public topic is not evidence of a current evaluation.
Even a strong problem signal should be rejected when the need belongs to buyers requiring a full enterprise revenue stack from an early-stage contact and pipeline tool. Qualifying out prevents a misleading promise and preserves time for a prospect the product can help.
Create a reviewable handoff
A qualified opportunity should contain the original evidence, a summary of the job, confirmed and unknown constraints, the buyer/user distinction, and an agreed next step. Keep a score attached to those facts so another teammate can challenge the conclusion.
Propose a pilot only when the critical gap is addressed: contact import and everyday update effort may outweigh additional reporting features. Evaluate the pilot through a real observation that the new salesperson completes and records a follow-up without asking the founder for context, and keep that observation separate from the initial qualification score.
About these playbooks and examples
Prepared by DemandBolt with AI assistance as practical planning resources for people building and selling software. The category scenarios and message examples are illustrative, not quotations from real prospects or claims of customer results. Adapt the hypotheses to your product, verify original sources, and review capabilities before making an offer.
The workflow follows our first-customer guide and buying-signal review method. Our PyInvesting and Rae records distinguish actual internal work from targets. Published .