Who is actually worth your time

The instinct when you need work is to talk to everybody. It is also the reason the pipeline is full and nothing closes: an hour spent on somebody who was never going to buy is an hour not spent on somebody who was.

Qualifying is not a technique for being rude to people. It is the practice of finding out early whether this is a real opportunity, so that the ones that are get your attention.

What makes somebody worth your time

Four conditions, and the useful insight is that they are discovered rather than argued. You cannot persuade somebody into any of them.

• They have the problem you solve, and they know they have it. Somebody who has not noticed the problem has to be educated before they can be sold to, which is a different and much longer job.
• It is costing them something they can name. Money, hours, a risk, a deadline. If they cannot say what the problem costs, they will not spend to fix it.
• They can decide. Not influence: decide. Or they can tell you plainly who does.
• The timing is real. Something is making this a question now rather than next year, and they can say what it is.

Most conversations that go nowhere fail on the second or the fourth. The prospect is interested, agreeable, has the problem, and nothing is forcing the question, so it stays interesting indefinitely.

The signals that look like interest and are not

• Enthusiasm. Pleasant people are enthusiastic about most things in a meeting and back in their own week by Thursday.
• Asking for a proposal early, before they have told you much. Often a polite way of ending a conversation, or a way of getting a number for comparison.
• Asking the price first and nothing else.
• Bringing more colleagues to each call without any decision between them.
• Wanting to be sent information. Send it; expect nothing.

Qualifying without interrogating

You do not need a checklist in front of you. Four questions, asked naturally, establish all of it.

1. 01What made you look into this now. Establishes timing, or reveals that there is none.
2. 02What happens if you do nothing. Establishes cost. If the honest answer is that nothing much happens, you have learned the most important thing in the conversation.
3. 03Who else would be involved in deciding. Establishes authority, asked as a practical question rather than a challenge.
4. 04What have you already tried. Establishes whether they understand the problem and whether you are competing with their own previous attempt.

Asked in that order, those four take five minutes and are more informative than an hour of describing what you do.

Choosing whom to decline

Harder when work is short, and the arithmetic still favours it. A client outside what you are good at costs more than the fee: the work takes longer, the result is worse, and the reference you get is lukewarm, which is the expensive part.

Two kinds worth declining even when quiet. Anybody whose main interest is price, because you will spend the engagement defending it. And anybody whose problem is not the one you solve, however adjacent it looks, because adjacent problems are how a specialism becomes a general practice nobody can describe.

Declining well is a skill of its own: say what you are not suitable for, say it early, and where you can, name somebody who is. That last one costs nothing and is remembered.

Where the conversations come from

Qualifying assumes a supply of conversations to qualify. If the honest problem is that there are four a month, no amount of discipline about which to pursue will help, and it is worth being clear about which problem you have.

The sources available to a business without a marketing budget, roughly in order of how well they convert:

• People who already know you. Former colleagues, former clients, suppliers. Converts best and runs out fastest.
• Referrals, which arrive with the trust already supplied.
• Writing publicly about the work, which produces people who have pre-qualified themselves.
• Communities you genuinely belong to, where answering questions is normal behaviour rather than promotion.
• Direct approaches, which convert worst and are the only one available on demand.

The practical point is that the first four take months to produce anything and then keep producing, while the fifth works immediately and stops the day you stop. Most people in a quiet period reach for the fifth, which is correct, and then never build the first four, which is why the quiet period returns.