How to qualify a lead before you write anything

A proposal feels free because nobody invoices for it. Put a number on it and the whole activity looks different.

Say a proposal takes nine hours end to end — the call notes, the scoping conversation with whoever would deliver it, the writing, the pricing, the internal review, the follow-up. At a loaded cost of $95 an hour that's $855. Send forty a year and you've spent $34,200 on writing. If a third of them were never winnable — no budget, no decision-maker, no real intent — that's $11,400 gone on documents nobody was ever going to approve.

The point isn't to write fewer proposals. It's to stop writing the ones you can already tell won't land, and put those hours into the ones that will.

Five questions, scored

Before you open a document, score the lead. Each question is worth 0, 1 or 2.

Question	0	1	2
Is there a real problem with a cost?	Vague ambition	Problem named, cost unclear	Problem and consequence both specific
Is there money?	No budget, no range	Range indicated informally	Budget approved or firmly confirmed
Have we met the decision-maker?	Don't know who it is	Known, not spoken to	On the call
Is there a date something has to happen by?	"Sometime this year"	Soft target	Fixed, external, and realistic
Do we have a specific reason to be chosen?	We're one of several	Some relevant work	Clear, nameable advantage

Ten points available. Draw the line at seven. Below seven you don't write a proposal — you go back and get more information, or you decline.

Two rules make this work rather than becoming theatre. A zero on money or on the decision-maker is an automatic stop regardless of the total, because those two can't be fixed by writing a better document. And you score it before you've decided whether you want the work, not after — otherwise the score just reflects how much you liked the client.

The information you need, and how to get it

Most leads score badly because you don't know enough, not because they're bad leads. The gap is almost always closable with one email or a fifteen-minute call.

On money. Don't ask "what's your budget", which invites "what do you charge". Ask:

Projects like this usually land between [X] and [Y] for us. Before I put time into a proposal — is that the right range for what you've got in mind, or a long way off?

Any answer is useful. "That's about right" is a qualification. "That's higher than we hoped" is a scoping conversation. Silence is an answer too.

On the decision-maker. Ask directly and without apology:

Who else needs to say yes before this starts? I'd rather they saw this at the same time as you than heard about it second-hand.

If your contact resists, they're either not senior enough or they're managing an internal politics problem you should know about now.

On the date. Push for the external reason:

Is there something driving the timing — a launch, a season, a contract ending, a funding round? Or is it more "when we get to it"?

A deadline that comes from outside the business is real. A deadline that comes from a project plan someone wrote in January moves whenever it's convenient.

Where the lead came from tells you a lot

Before you score anything, look at the source. It's the single best predictor you have, and it costs nothing to check.

• A referral from a happy client, with a warm introduction. Highest value. Trust is already transferred; you're mostly confirming fit and price.
• A referral from a peer agency who couldn't take the work. Good, but ask why they passed. Sometimes it's capacity. Sometimes it's the client.
• Inbound from your site, having read something specific. Variable. Someone who mentions a particular piece of your work is qualifying themselves. Someone who filled in a form with "need a quote" is not.
• Outbound you initiated. Longest cycle, lowest immediate intent, but you chose the target — so the fit question is usually already answered.
• A cold RFP you were invited to with no prior relationship. Treat with suspicion until proven otherwise.

Track this. After a year, knowing which source converts for you beats any general advice, including this article.

Say no without burning the relationship

Declining is a skill and most agency owners are bad at it, because it feels like turning down money. It isn't — it's turning down a cost.

Thanks for thinking of us. Having looked at it properly, I don't think we're the right fit — [honest, specific reason].

Two people I'd suggest instead: [name] and [name]. Both good, both do this kind of work more often than we do.

If things change, or if there's a different piece of work where we'd be more useful, do come back.

A referral out costs you nothing and makes you the person people ask. The agencies that get the most referrals are usually the ones that give the most.

There's also a middle option people forget: propose a smaller first step. A paid discovery or audit, priced properly, converts an unqualified lead into a qualified one and gets paid for the qualification. If they won't buy a small engagement, they were never going to buy the big one.

Write the sentence first

Here's the fastest version of all of this. Before you write a proposal, write one sentence in your notes:

We're going to win this because ______, and the thing most likely to kill it is ______.

If you can't fill in the first blank with something specific, you don't have a reason to be chosen and you're providing a comparison price. If you can't fill in the second, you haven't understood the deal well enough to write about it.

Two minutes. It catches most of what the scorecard catches.

This week

Go back through your last ten proposals. Mark which ones you won, and score each one retrospectively against the five questions above — honestly, using what you knew at the time, not what you learned later.

You'll usually find a clean split: the wins clustered high, the losses clustered low, and one or two surprises worth thinking about. Then apply the threshold to the next lead that arrives, and notice how much easier it is to say no when the number says no for you.