Qualify the job before the account
A promising referral software lead needs more than a company in the right sector. Confirm the job: the team cannot tell which referrals produced an eligible new customer. Identify satisfied customers inviting appropriate peers as the possible user group, then find who can authorize a pilot; the working buyer hypothesis is a growth owner designing a customer referral program.
Ask about the current workaround, coupon codes reconciled manually in a spreadsheet, 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 | What verified event makes a referral eligible, and what invalidates it? | The person cannot describe a recent instance of the problem. |
| Product fit | Can you trace a test invitation through an eligible event and an ineligible event without issuing real rewards? | teams expecting a referral tool to create product satisfaction or guarantee viral growth |
| Timing | a small manual referral experiment has produced enough activity to strain reconciliation | The proposed change has no confirmed date or relevance. |
| Implementation | Who resolves duplicate attribution, refunds, or a disputed reward? | reward rules and abuse controls need explicit definitions before automating payouts |
| Value | a qualifying test referral is attributed once while the ineligible case is excluded | The buyer and user disagree on what success looks like. |
Work through an illustrative assessment
Suppose the source says: “Our customers already introduce friends, but we lose track of which introductions qualify for the reward. How do we reconcile this?” 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 founder wants rewards to compensate for a product nobody uses yet. 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 teams expecting a referral tool to create product satisfaction or guarantee viral growth. 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: reward rules and abuse controls need explicit definitions before automating payouts. Evaluate the pilot through a real observation that a qualifying test referral is attributed once while the ineligible case is excluded, 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 .