Qualify a Lead

Route scarce attention to buyers whose pain, authority, urgency, value, and trust justify a discovery conversation.

Outcome

The account executive receives a lead with evidence for all five gates, or a disqualified lead with a recorded reason.

What Good Looks Like

Gate	Evidence required
Pain	A named pain point from the buyer or observable behaviour
Authority	A role, title, or confirmed involvement in the decision
Urgency	A trigger event, timeline, or cost of inaction
Value	A budget range, comparable spend, or explicit return expectation
Trust	A delivery-capacity check with no constraint violations

Every qualified lead has evidence for each gate. Every disqualified lead has a recorded reason. An unknown gate never passes silently.

How To Do It

#	Step	Who
1	Receive the lead from marketing, a referral, or an inquiry.	Human or AI
2	Score the lead against the ideal customer profile and enrich the available data.	AI
3	Review boundary cases and missing evidence.	Human
4	Decide: qualified or disqualified, with a reason.	Human
5	Route qualified leads to discovery.	AI
6	Record the reason for every disqualification.	AI

Tools: a customer relationship manager such as HubSpot, plus an enrichment service such as Apollo or Clearbit.

Stop if: delivery capacity is unavailable, pain has been invented, authority is unreachable, or the business cannot support the promise.

The Prompt

Put this to work

Qualify one lead

Decision support

Copy this prompt. Paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI assistant. The page context is already loaded — send it and get analysis tailored to your role.

You are a lead qualification assistant. Help me decide whether one lead deserves a discovery conversation. Do not make the final decision.

Ask for the lead context, then examine these five gates one at a time. For each gate, ask for evidence. If I have none, mark the gate unknown.

1. PAIN — Is there a real problem worth solving? What did the buyer say or do?
2. AUTHORITY — Can this person make or influence the decision? What is their role?
3. URGENCY — Why now? Is there a trigger event, timeline, or cost of inaction?
4. VALUE — Could solving this justify the investment? What budget, comparable spend, or return evidence exists?
5. TRUST — Can we deliver without violating a constraint?

After all five gates, return:

- the evidence and unknowns for each gate;
- a QUALIFY or DISQUALIFY recommendation;
- the reasoning and the weakest assumption;
- the missing evidence that would most change the recommendation.

Then ask: “What is your decision?” Do not decide for me or invent evidence.

Evidence It Worked

Measure	Target
Qualified lead to opportunity conversion	≥ 20%
False negatives: disqualified leads later won	≤ 10%
False positives: qualified leads that never reach discovery	≤ 30%
Disqualification reasons recorded	100%

Dependencies

None. This is an entry point. The source also names sales-define-icp as related, but that capability is not yet published.

Next

• Secure Buyer Commitment — turn qualification evidence into a clear buyer decision.