Qualification

The owner's criteria, stored once and reused every run. Read this before asking anything. Re-interviewing the owner about their criteria on every run makes a skill built for speed feel slow.

Deriving criteria without an interview

If no criteria exist yet, do not start with a questionnaire. Derive a draft from evidence and let the owner correct it.

Pull from closed-won deals in HubSpot and paying customers in QuickBooks:

• What services do won deals actually involve
• What size and type of customer
• What geography, and how far out they realistically travel
• What deal sizes are worth their time
• What patterns show up in deals that were lost or refunded

Then show a draft and ask for one correction pass:

From your last 40 closed deals, it looks like you take on:
  Commercial, 3+ buildings, within 30 miles, jobs over about USD 2,000.
  Residential emergency calls you take but they rarely repeat.

Anything I've got wrong?

One question, one answer, done. That is the whole setup.

With no CRM and no accounting connector, the same shape still works. Two paths, in order:

1. Ask the owner for a rough sense in a couple of lines — what they take on, who they take it on for, how far they travel, and what is too small to be worth it. Two lines is enough to sort on; do not turn it into a questionnaire.
2. If they would rather not answer, draft the criteria from the inquiries themselves — the services being asked about, the locations, the sizes — and confirm the draft once.

Either way it ends the same: a written draft, one correction pass, then it lives in this file. Zero connectors is a supported path, not a degraded one.

The four buckets

Hot — route to a human now

Fits the profile and shows urgency. Signals:

• Explicit timing: "this week," "urgent," "our system is down"
• A named budget or an approved project
• They ask about availability or start dates
• Repeat customer or a named referral
• Deal size well above the owner's average

Qualified — reply and book

Fits the profile, no time pressure. The default for most good inquiries.

Unclear — reply with one question

Not enough information to sort. The reply asks the single question that resolves it — the one whose answer changes the outcome. Not a form, not four questions.

Most common resolving questions: what service, where, and when.

Out of scope — reply honestly, refer on

Wrong service, outside the area, too small, or something the owner does not do.

Still answer these. Thirty seconds of honesty in a small market is worth more than the inquiry was. Say plainly it isn't a fit, and name someone who is when possible. Owners get real referral flow back from this, and the alternative is a public review complaining nobody replied.

Sorting rules

Urgency beats fit for routing. A marginal-fit inquiry that says "our unit failed and we open tomorrow" is hot. Fit determines what to say; urgency determines how fast a human sees it.

When torn between two buckets, take the more attentive one. Treating a qualified lead as hot costs the owner one glance. Treating a hot lead as qualified can cost the job.

Out of scope is about fit, not about tone. A rude inquiry that fits is still qualified. Route it and let the owner decide.

One inquiry, one bucket. If someone asks about three things, sort on the one with the highest value.

Criteria format

## Qualification criteria — <owner or business>
Built:   <date>  ·  From: <n> closed-won deals, <n> customers
Updated: <date> — <what changed>

Takes on:
  Services:  <list>
  Customer:  <type and size>
  Geography: <radius or area>
  Deal size: <floor, if any>

Does not take on:
  <list — this matters as much as the positive criteria>

Hot signals, beyond the defaults:
  <owner-specific — e.g. "any mention of the Riverside district">

Refer out to:
  <names or firms for common out-of-scope requests>

Worked example

## Qualification criteria — Okonkwo Mechanical
Built:   2026-07-27  ·  From: 40 closed-won deals, 340 customers
Updated: 2026-07-27 — initial

Takes on:
  Services:  Commercial HVAC install, service contracts, emergency repair
  Customer:  Property managers and commercial buildings, 3+ locations preferred
  Geography: 30 miles of Salem
  Deal size: Above ~USD 2,000; smaller only for existing customers

Does not take on:
  Residential new construction
  Refrigeration (commercial kitchen) — no certification
  Anything past Eugene

Hot signals, beyond the defaults:
  System down or no heat/cooling — always hot regardless of fit
  Any mention of a multi-building portfolio

Refer out to:
  Refrigeration → Basin Cooling, ask for Teri
  Residential new build → Halvorsen Heating

The "does not take on" and "refer out" sections do most of the work. They turn a dead-end inquiry into a thirty-second answer that builds reputation.

Keeping criteria current

When the owner overrides a sort, record why:

Updated: 2026-08-09 — residential emergency now qualified, not out of scope.
         Ray: "they turn into commercial referrals more than I thought."

An override that happens twice is a criteria change, not an exception. Update the file rather than making the owner correct the same sort every week.

Criteria

No criteria set yet. The first set gets written here.