Decide whether a lead deserves discovery

Workflow family: Customer Intent & Demand. Use this guide after an enquiry has arrived and an accountable seller owns it. Qualification does not repair a missing message, authorise contact, or turn uncertainty into evidence.

Outcome

The possible buyer and seller receive a human-approved decision: qualify for discovery, hold for evidence, or disqualify with a recorded reason.

Use When

Trigger this job when a customer signal deserves review but fit is unclear. The accountable sales owner keeps the final decision, permission to contact, commercial promises, and the stop decision. An assistant may inspect supplied evidence and draft a recommendation only.

Inputs

Bring the buyer's stated need, the offer being considered, permitted source evidence, delivery constraints, and the named sales owner. Record missing facts as unknown. A title alone is not buying authority; interest alone is not budget.

Recipe

Freeze method revision qualification-v1 and the enquiry before assessment. The sales owner records an unaided gate assessment before seeing one assistant draft. Then:

1. Confirm that the signal was received, assigned, and is ready for a fit decision.
2. For pain, authority, urgency, value, and trust, record the observation, source, and supported, contradicted, or unknown.
3. Recommend qualification only when every gate is supported; hold when evidence is missing; disqualify only when evidence establishes a mismatch.
4. Return gate evidence, unknowns, recommendation, reasoning, elapsed time, and any boundary exception without taking the next action.
5. Ask the sales owner to accept or correct the recommendation and record the human decision, corrections, next responsible person, and review date.

For practice, use: “Our team loses track of incoming enquiries. I manage the service desk and want to explore a shared queue before next month's busy period.” Pain and timing are supported; buying authority, value, and delivery capacity remain unknown. Hold for evidence is defensible.

Pass only when all five gates are explicit, unsupported claims remain unknown, the evidence supports the recommendation, the owner makes the final decision, and no prohibited action occurs. Test supported, contradicted, and unknown evidence deliberately. Also test an attempted invented fact, missing owner, requested contact, expired authority, and repeated failure requiring manual recovery. These are method checks, not permission to contact a person.

Human and AI Control

The owner may permit one draft from the supplied text, for at most ten minutes, with no external lookup, inbox or CRM access, enrichment, customer contact, or live mutation. Stop immediately for invented facts, permission expansion, a requested promise, or an unclear owner. Review manually after a stop.

Output and Handoff

Return the recommendation, evidence by gate, missing facts, human decision, next responsible person, and review point. A qualified lead may move to secure buyer commitment; a held lead returns to the sales owner for the smallest evidence request.

Evidence and Stop

Retain the input, method revision, unaided owner assessment, draft, elapsed effort, evidence by gate, unknowns, recommendation, corrections, human decision, boundary exceptions, and stop events. Compare whether the draft improved the owner's decision after correction effort. Stop using the assistant when it invents facts, hides unknowns, acts without a current owner, requests contact, continues after authority expires, or repeatedly treats a role as proof of authority. Preserve a stopped result and recover through manual assessment. A structural or content review may update last_verified; only a retained evidence reference may support a maturity change. A synthetic success does not prove demand, conversion, or customer benefit.

Next

If a gate misleads, preserve the first result, change one instruction or evidence requirement, and retest the original plus this contrasting enquiry: “We have an approved project to replace our shared inbox this quarter. I am collecting options for the decision team; our budget and delivery constraints have not been supplied.” Check whether the correction transfers without silently passing value, trust, or decision authority. At most, retained passing receipts may support MECHANISM_PROVEN and ASSISTED; keep demand HYPOTHESIZED and beneficiary value unproved until a separately authorised representative trial. Return method corrections here; return authority changes to the sales owner.