Qualification criteria and the prospect dossier

Most qualification frameworks were designed for a salesperson on a discovery call. Before the call, you need something simpler: a short list of yes or no questions you can answer from public information in a few minutes. If the answers are mostly yes, the company earns a message. If not, it goes back on the watch list.

• Make each criterion observable. Has filed accounts in the last twelve months is checkable. Has budget is not.
• Anchor to your profile. Each criterion should trace back to a firmographic, a pain or a disqualifier.
• Keep it to five or six. More than that and nobody uses it.
• Include at least one disqualifier as a hard stop, such as in administration or runs an in-house team.

A dossier is the handful of facts you gather before writing. Its purpose is to make the message specific and to stop you writing to companies you have not really looked at. Five fields are usually enough:

1. 01Who to write to and their role, from the company website or LinkedIn.
2. 02The timing signal that surfaced them and its date.
3. 03One fact about the business that shows you looked: a product, a customer, a location, an award.
4. 04The pain you believe they have right now and the evidence for it.
5. 05Your wedge for this company.

Set a time limit. If you cannot fill four of the five in ten minutes, the company is not ready for outreach and that is useful information.

The wedge is the one thing you can say that a generic supplier could not: an observation about their situation, a comparison with a similar business, a question only someone who understands their world would ask. It comes from the intersection of your profile's pains and the signal that surfaced them. Congratulations on the listing, the cold chain usually creaks first, is a wedge. We provide temperature-controlled logistics is not.

Enrichment tools can tell you a great deal. Use them for business facts and business roles. Do not gather personal information beyond a work role and a work email, do not scrape in breach of a platform's terms, and keep a record of where each contact came from so you can answer an opt-out or an access request without a scramble.

Stage four of Sales Architect Studio writes your qualification criteria as checkable questions, designs the dossier fields for your market and drafts your wedge from the pains and signals you chose. The Claude agent brief in the report includes all three, so an assistant can qualify and enrich for you.

How stage four works Write openers tied to signals