Chapter two ended with a promise: how to tell the difference between a deal that is real and a person that is being nice to you.
Here is why that matters more than almost anything else in sales. Discovery gets you the truth about the prospect. Qualification is where you decide whether that truth adds up to a deal you should chase, and most salespeople never make the decision at all. They stay in every deal that is nice to them, forecast the lot, and then wonder why the quarter fell over on the last day. If you manage a team, here is a good tell: look at how many deals your rep has sitting in outsiders. A pipeline full of long shots is a pipeline full of politeness.
I was given a one-page qualification framework by an old manager early in my career. It is built on MEDDIC with some quirky bits added, and I used it on every single call selling cybersecurity services at NCC Group. Later it became the training framework at ThreatSpike. This chapter is that page.
every deal has one of three drivers
The most important box on the page asks why they are buying at all, and there are only three answers.
Have To. A customer of theirs has told them to do it. A web agency builds a site for a bank, and the bank will not pay the £100,000 invoice until the site has been security tested. The test costs £5,000. It is a no-brainer, and it is the strongest driver there is, because the cost of not buying is immediate, quantified, and imposed by someone with power over their revenue.
Need To. A compliance framework demands it. They need an annual security assessment as part of ISO 27001. It must get done, and it will survive scrutiny from whoever signs the cheque.
Want To. Someone is trying to force change. They used to work at a big bank where testing happened every quarter, now they work somewhere smaller with nothing, and they want at least one test a year for their own comfort. Admirable, and the weakest driver of the three, because it is one person's wish rather than something the whole organisation is being pushed towards.
The line I use to teach this: whilst they may want to do it, I want to live in California. It does not mean it is going to happen.
Want To deals die when the champion walks into the economic buyer's office and gets asked why should I care. So your job with a Want To is to convert it. Find the compliance angle. Find the customer who is going to ask. Arm your champion with a Need To or a Have To before they go into that room, or accept that the deal is a coin toss and forecast it that way.
make them rank the criteria
The second box is their vendor selection criteria, and the mistake most reps make is assuming they know what the buyer cares about.
You ask. But you ask it the Emotive way, as multiple choice, because open questions leave people not knowing where to start. For a security service the options were availability, knowledge, output and price: how quickly can you deliver, how good are the consultants, how usable is the report, and what does it cost. Then you make them rank the four in priority order, and then you go one step further and get a number on it. Is it 25 percent about price? 75 percent about availability?
Rarely will they give you a definitive answer. Most buyers have not gone into this level of detail to figure it out for themselves. But even an inkling from them helps you, because ranking tells you the order and weighting, even a rough one, tells you the truth.
Here is why it matters. If price ranks first and you are the expensive option, you know in the first call, not the last one.
know when to walk away
So what do you do when price ranks first and you are expensive?
You qualify out. But you do it well, and doing it well is a sales activity in its own right.
First, say plainly and without fear that they may end up paying the price twice. Buy cheap, watch it fail, buy again properly. It is a statement of fact, not a threat. Then act like a trusted adviser: recommend a good, cheaper vendor. Genuinely. Give them a name.
Reps hate this because it feels like losing. It is the opposite. You have just done the single thing that builds more trust than anything else a salesperson can do, which is act against your own interest in their favour, and people remember it. The next deal, the next job, the next referral, they come from the deals you walked away from properly. Walking away well is not the end of the relationship. It is often the start of it.
the economic buyer is one rung higher than you think
Now the box that has cost more forecasts than any other.
Everybody asks are you the decision maker, and everybody gets told yes. The person who says they have final sign-off at the start of the cycle is rarely the person signing at the end. It is not that they are lying. They have pride in their position, they want you to feel they are in control, and quite often they have never actually run this process before.
So here is the rule I have seen hold for fourteen years. Whoever you think the economic buyer is, the real one is one rung above them. The head of IT says she has final say. Six weeks later you are dragged into a call with a CFO who has never heard of your product. That is not stupidity on her part. It is happy ears on yours.
Qualification is not asking who decides. It is mapping the real process despite what they tell you. And there is a clean test for it: ask your champion to introduce you to the economic buyer. Their reaction tells you two things at once. Whether they are really a champion, with the influence to advocate upwards, or just a coach, friendly and helpful but unable to open the door. And whether the economic buyer is who you both thought.
the people who know and the people who think they know
Ask about the decision process and the paperwork, and listen not just to the answer but to the fluency of it.
The person who knows narrates it: budget approved up to £25,000, I raise a PO, legal reviews your document which takes about two weeks, then DocuSign within a day. Specific steps, specific timings, no hesitation.
The person who thinks they know gives you vague words designed to make you comfortable. It should be fine. We move quickly here. I will sort it. You will also sense a note of frustration in their voice. People emit that frustration when they know they should have the answer and they do not.
You have to work out which one you are talking to, because the ones who think they know will give you wrong answers with total confidence, and then you will look a fool on your forecast call. Ask about signatories, about procurement, about how often the approval committee meets. A committee that meets monthly and a missed meeting is a month's slip, and you want to know that in week one, not week eleven.
find the pain, then make it sting
Every deal in the framework has to be attached to a pain, and there is a difference between identifying it and implicating it.
Identifying the pain is finding the paper cut. Implicating it is pouring alcohol on it.
You do that with a chain of so what, and you always drive it to a person. We failed the compliance audit. So what? We cannot get the new detection tooling approved. So? Our breach risk stays high. So? I am more likely to lose my job. Now you have a pain that a human being feels, not a line in a risk register. Pain is felt by people. It limits their ability to succeed. And it does not only live in the IT department.
The implication questions are simple. What happens if this continues for six months? What has it done to your team's workload? What would a breach mean for your role, specifically? Is this on the board's agenda? What is at risk if you miss the deadline?
what goes on the page
Drivers, and which of the three. Vendor criteria, ranked and weighted. Whether this is business as usual or part of a bigger transformation, because that tells you the real size of the opportunity. What they are trying to fix, avoid or achieve. All of that for the second decision maker as well as the first, because there is almost always a second, and qualification done for one person is half done. And the agreed next step, which gets its own chapter, because it is the box that decides whether any of the rest turns into revenue.
Write it down. Every call. The framework only works when it is a habit, not a rescue.
what this means for your team
Founders qualify by instinct because they cannot afford not to. Every hour spent on a polite deal is an hour not spent building the company, so you smell a Want To at fifty paces and you walk away from the price shoppers without a second thought.
Your salespeople do not have that instinct yet, and worse, their incentives point the other way. A full pipeline feels like safety, so they keep every deal alive and tell you it is going well. Give them the page. Make them fill it in on every opportunity and read it back to you on the forecast call. Within a quarter you will have a pipeline you can trust, and a team that knows the difference between a deal that is real and a person that is being nice to them.
Next chapter: next steps, and the small discipline that separates a pipeline from a wish list.
You built something great. Now let's sell it.
James Irving is the founder of Emotive JLI, a sales consultancy for technical founders. He learnt to sell the old school way: 50 cold calls per day in a Manchester boiler room, then enterprise cybersecurity, then ThreatSpike, where he joined as the first commercial person and left with a £10M sales engine. Tell him what you've built or watch the stories.