Qualifying a deal: four honest questions

A deal moves from discovery to qualified when you know four things. Together they are deal qualification:

1. Need: what problem the buyer has, and what it costs them today.
2. Budget owner and process: who decides, and how the company buys (who compares offers, who signs, who reviews the contract).
3. Timing: why now, and what happens if nothing changes, the cost of doing nothing.
4. Alternative: what the buyer would do instead of buying from you.

Each answer closes one gap. Miss one and the deal can stall for a reason you never saw: a budget owner nobody met, a deadline that doesn't exist, a cheaper option you didn't compare against.

For Veloria, a sure thing in Leo's eyes, none of the four is written down yet. That is the job of the follow-up call with Pavlo.

Four questions in one call can feel like an interrogation. They don't if you ask about the buyer's past and present, not about your deal or the person's authority.

Questions about what already happened are easy to answer and hard to embellish. «Are you the decision-maker?» gets a polite yes from almost anyone. «Last time you bought team training, how was it approved?» gets a story with names, steps and weeks in it, and the budget owner appears without anyone feeling tested.

The same works for the other answers. «What happens today when a dispatcher gets a call in English?» shows the need. «If you didn't work with us, what would you do?» shows the alternative. None of them asks the buyer to predict or to promise; each asks them to describe.

A need becomes useful in a sale when it has a cost attached. «Our dispatchers' English could be better» is a wish. «When the two colleagues who speak English are off shift, the call waits and sometimes the load goes to another company, a few times a week» is a need with a cost.

Get the cost in the buyer's own words and numbers. Ask an open question about their situation, and ask who holds the figures: «When a load goes elsewhere that way, what does it usually cost Veloria, and who would know?»

The pitfalls are tempting shortcuts. A leading question («that must cost a fortune, right?») gets a polite yes and no number. An invented figure or a borrowed «our clients cut such losses by a fifth» is your claim, not their fact, and a finance director will spot it at once. If there is no number yet, write «unknown» and name who to ask.

Knowing the budget owner is half of the second answer. The other half is the buying process: every step and every person a purchase passes through before money moves.

Pavlo's account of last year's safety course gives Veloria's path: he proposed it, Yaryna, the finance director, signed off the budget, procurement compared three offers, and legal took the contract last, three weeks for legal alone. Each step can delay or stop a deal, so each belongs in the record.

Listen for conditions too. Pavlo adds that above a certain amount Yaryna has to present training to the owners. That threshold matters: below it the deal follows the usual path, above it the owners join the decision. So the next question is simply what the amount is.

The pitfall is stopping at a name. «Yaryna signs» says nothing about procurement's comparison or legal's three weeks.

The third answer is timing: why the buyer would act now rather than next year. A real timing signal is an event in the buyer's calendar: new contracts that start on a date, a budget that gets approved in a given month, the end of a current supplier's contract.

Veloria has one. Two new contracts with Polish carriers start in March: more calls in English, and the same two people to take them. That also gives the cost of doing nothing: lost loads grow from March.

Two things are not timing signals. Your own quarter-end is your problem, not the buyer's. And an invented deadline, «prices rise next month» when no change is planned, is a pressure tactic; when the buyer finds out, it costs the trust the rest of the deal depends on.

Ask the timing question to the end: «And if March comes and nothing has changed?» The answer is the cost of doing nothing, and it is often the strongest line in a proposal.

Pavlo's answer: «Then we keep losing loads, and Stepan asks me why we talked about English all winter.» Write it down as he said it. The buyer's own description of the price of standing still needs no proof, because they already believe it. A figure Teams estimates, however careful, is a sales claim that someone at Veloria has to check.

The cost of doing nothing also replaces invented deadlines. You don't need «offer ends Friday» when the buyer has told you that their own problem gets worse in March. The pressure is real, and it is theirs.

The fourth answer is the alternative: what the buyer would do if they didn't buy from you. Sellers tend to assume it's a rival vendor. Often it isn't. It can be a hire, a free tool, a workaround the team already uses, or simply doing nothing.

Ask directly: «If you didn't work with us, what would you do instead?» Pavlo's answer: maybe hire one more dispatcher with good English, or use a free app; their IT lead says apps are fine if they pass the security check.

That changes the proposal more than any feature list. Teams is now compared with the cost of a new hire, not with another school's price, and the security check becomes a step to prepare for. The pitfall is reading an alternative as a verdict: a cheaper or free option is something to compare against, not a reason to give up or to slash the price.

After the call, record the deal's status the way the stages define it. A deal is qualified when all four answers are known, not when most of them sound good.

Veloria now has a need (lost loads when the two English speakers are off shift), a process (Pavlo, Yaryna, procurement, legal), timing (new carrier contracts in March) and an alternative (a hire or a free app). Two gaps remain: the cost of a lost load and the approval threshold. So the deal stays in discovery, with everything known written down and each gap turned into a next step: ask Stepan about the cost, ask Pavlo about the threshold, each with a date.

Both extremes would be feelings, not facts: «contract, Pavlo clearly wants it» and «lost, a hire is cheaper».

How it fits together: stages and qualification make each deal honest. The next lesson adds the forecast: turning the qualified pipeline into a number Marta can take to Leo.