THE SHORT ANSWER
Qualify on five dimensions: is the property suitable, is the scope something you actually do, does the caller own or control the building, when do they want the work, and who signs. Five minutes on the phone is enough to answer all five if you ask in that order. The purpose is not to screen people out; it is to decide which enquiries deserve a survey visit this week and which need a different conversation.
Qualification has an unhelpful reputation among contractors, because it sounds like a call centre discipline imported into a trade. In practice it is the opposite of bureaucratic. It is the decision about where a van goes on Thursday afternoon, and getting it wrong twice a week costs more than most marketing budgets. That is an operational decision rather than an administrative one.
The five-minute constraint is deliberate. Anything longer becomes an interrogation, and anything shorter misses at least one of the dimensions that reliably breaks a job later. Five short questions asked in a sensible order will separate the enquiries worth two hours of your time from the ones worth two more minutes. The order they are asked in matters almost as much as the questions themselves.
The numbers, at a glance
Dimensions to cover: five: property, scope, control, timing and authority
Time budget: five minutes, which is roughly one minute per dimension including the answers
Written record required: one line per dimension, captured during the call and not afterwards from memory
Decision produced: one of three outcomes, being survey now, diarised for later, or declined with a reason
The five dimensions and what breaks when you skip one
Property. Age, construction, access, existing installation. Skipping this produces the survey where the scaffold cannot be sited or the cavity turns out to be filled already.
Scope. What they think they need against what the job actually is. Skipping this produces the quotation that arrives at half the expected number and reads as a mistake.
Control. Owner, tenant, landlord, co-owner, association. Skipping this produces the enthusiastic conversation with somebody who cannot authorise work on the building.
Timing. A named month. Skipping this fills your pipeline with warm enquiries that were always intended for next spring.
Authority. Who else signs. Skipping this produces the second visit, the repeat explanation and a decision that quietly never happens.
Asking about money without making it awkward
The budget question fails when it sounds like a means test. Framed as what were you expecting this to come to, it becomes a request for their working assumption, which people answer readily because it costs them nothing and they would rather find out now if they are wrong.
The answer is diagnostic in both directions. Somebody expecting three thousand for a full rewire needs a calibration conversation rather than a survey, and having it on the phone saves both parties an afternoon. Somebody who names a figure well above your normal range is telling you the scope in their head is larger than the one in the enquiry form, which is worth knowing before you price it.
Qualifying out is not the same as rejecting
Most enquiries that fail qualification are not bad, they are early or misrouted. The homeowner who wants work in eight months is a genuine job with a date attached. The one whose scope sits outside your trade is a referral you can make, and referrals travel back. Only a small share are genuinely worthless, and those are usually address or specification errors that should go back to the source rather than into your pipeline.
That distinction changes how the outcome is recorded. Three buckets, not two: proceed, diarise, decline. Businesses that record only proceed and decline lose the diarised category entirely, which is where a surprising volume of high-value planned work lives.
Where the specification conversation belongs
Qualification also tells you something about your supply. If enquiries keep failing on the same dimension, the problem is upstream rather than on the call. A pattern of wrong postcodes is a targeting fault. A pattern of tenants rather than owners is a form fault. A pattern of scope mismatch means the advertising is promising work you do not do.
Log the failure reason every time, in one word, and read the list monthly. That single column turns a vague sense that leads have got worse into a specific request to a supplier, and a specific request is the only kind that gets acted on.
A five-minute qualification routine
Ask the five dimensions in order and write one line for each during the call.
Put the budget question fourth, framed as expectation rather than as a limit.
End every call by placing the enquiry in one of three buckets, out loud.
Record a one-word failure reason on everything you decline or diarise.
Read the failure-reason column monthly and take the pattern back to the source.
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Related answers
Frequently asked questions
Does qualification not just reduce my quote count?
It reduces quotes that were never going to close, which raises your quote-to-job rate and frees survey time for work that will. If the goal were quote volume the answer would be to visit everybody, but survey hours are the scarcest thing a small contractor owns.
Can I qualify by email or form instead?
Partly. A well-built form can capture property type, ownership and timing before anyone picks up the phone, which shortens the call considerably. What a form cannot capture is hesitation, scope confusion or an unspoken second decision-maker, and those are the expensive ones.
What if the enquiry fails on timing only?
Diarise it precisely and drop it out of active follow-up. A note for the named month with the scope attached will outperform any generic nurture, because when you ring in September you can open with the specific job they described rather than a reminder that they once filled in a form.
Who should do the qualifying?
Whoever will do the survey, if that is possible. Handing qualification to an administrator and the visit to an installer loses the detail that never made it into the notes, and the installer then re-asks questions the homeowner has already answered, which reads as disorganisation.
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