Qualification

Qualification is the practice of determining, as early as possible, whether a prospect is genuinely a good fit for your offer right now — not out of a desire to turn people away, but to protect your limited time for the conversations most likely to actually close and succeed.

Useful qualification signals include: does the business have the revenue/margin to realistically support your price point, do they have functioning intake capacity to handle new leads if your work succeeds (a Meta Ads campaign generating leads a business can't answer the phone for is a setup for a bad case study, not a good one), and is there a real, acknowledged problem your offer solves, rather than you having to convince them a problem exists in the first place.

Qualification isn't a one-time gate at the start of a conversation — it continues through discovery. If something during a discovery call reveals a genuine mismatch (unrealistic expectations that can't be reset through honest conversation, or a business genuinely not ready for the kind of engagement you offer), it's better to say so directly and part on good terms than to force a deal that's likely to produce a frustrated client and a damaged case study later.