deal-qualification-gates

1. Start-up, pre product-market fit: fewer than roughly 30 comparable customers, wins from the founders' network, no measured win rate, cycle time or retention, nobody on quota. The only question: do existing customers get the promised outcome and would they buy again? Run the minimum version, or do not run it.

2. Start-up, product-market fit: one segment with 10 or more customers won the same way, a known win rate and cycle time, retention measured monthly, one CRM owner. Run the skill for that one motion; thresholds are guidance, not rules.

3. Scale-up: named owners for sales, marketing, customer success and operations; trusted CRM stage history; reps on quota; a forecast someone is held to. Run the full skill.

4. Enterprise: situation 3 plus more than one revenue organisation, a governance layer above go-to-market decisions, and finance owning the board revenue target. Run the full skill with the enterprise deltas in the table.

If the evidence is thin, ask three yes or no questions: Is there a segment with 10 or more customers won the same way? Is retention measured monthly? Does someone own the CRM as part of their job? Three no answers means situation 1. One or two yes answers means situation 2. Three yes answers means situation 3 or 4; then ask three more: Is there more than one business unit or region with its own revenue plan and leader? Do go-to-market decisions pass through a formal governance layer? Does finance own the revenue target for board reporting? Two or more yes answers means situation 4; otherwise situation 3.

The full skill applies to both scale-up and enterprise. Not every skill applies at every stage; the table below says what this skill does at each, and "do not run" is a valid answer.

What this skill does per situation:

| Situation | What this skill does |

|---|---|

| Start-up, pre product-market fit | Score evidence quality only for the conversations you are already having. Run the Evidence-Quality Scale on your last 5-10 customer conversations to identify which dimensions you never ask about. This diagnostic serves your pre-PMF question: do existing customers perceive value and would they buy again? Skip all stage gates, deployment, and rollout sections until you have a repeatable motion. |

| Start-up, product-market fit | Install evidence-quality scoring on a single winning motion with one stage gate (typically Discovery to Demo). Score every deal on SPICED dimensions 1-5 as evidence lands from calls and conversations, not from memory. Build a one-page weekly exception report: which deals above this one gate sit below the minimum evidence threshold (14 total for Demo stage). Run weekly qualify-or-kill reviews on those flagged deals with one verdict per deal (re-qualify, downgrade, or kill). |

| Scale-up | Implement the full skill end-to-end. Install all four stage gates (Inbound to Discovery, Discovery to Demo, Demo to Proposal, Proposal to Commit). Score all six SPICED dimensions on all deals. Build a weekly below-gate exception report and attend a weekly qualify-or-kill review with sales leadership. Automate scoring where your CRM or conversation intelligence tool can extract dimension evidence from call transcripts. Expect to kill 15-30% of your existing pipeline in the first rollout; that trade is the entire point. |

| Enterprise | Qualification gates expand from individual deal truth-telling to cross-unit pipeline governance and regulatory audit trails. The skill gains weight in multi-unit pipeline consolidation and duplicate detection to prevent the same prospect appearing in multiple units' pipelines, legal and compliance gates including procurement checkpoints and security review evidence scoring, deal desk operations where discount approvals require qualification evidence, and revenue recognition gating for ASC 606 compliance. Forecasting accuracy ties directly to evidence-quality maturity across all units. |

Skip before product-market fit: The Stage Gates; Deployment; Rollout Order; Diagnostic Questions.

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The Evidence-Quality Scale

Score every qualification dimension 1 to 5. The scale grades evidence, never rep enthusiasm:

| Score | Grade | Meaning |

|---|---|---|

| 1 | Unknown | Never asked. |

| 2 | Weak | Surface mention, uncorroborated ("they said budget shouldn't be an issue"). |

| 3 | Confirmed | Buyer said it explicitly and it is logged (quote, transcript, email). |

| 4 | Quantified | There are numbers behind it (cost of the problem, headcount affected, deadline date). |

| 5 | Validated | Corroborated by a third party or system data (their CFO repeated it, usage data shows it, a signed evaluation plan names it). |

The jump that matters is 2 to 3: from "the rep believes it" to "the buyer said it and we can point at where." A pipeline where most dimensions sit at 2 is a mood, not a forecast.

The Dimensions

Default lens is SPICED, scored across six letters: Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, Decision (criteria), Decision (process). Total out of 30. If your team runs MEDDICC or BANT, keep the scale and gates identical and swap the dimensions; the mapping table lives in references/qualification-frameworks.md. The framework is the vocabulary; the gates are the system.

The Stage Gates

Per-stage minimum TOTAL scores, calibrated for a six-dimension, 30-point model:

| Transition | Minimum total | What it enforces |

|---|---|---|

| Inbound to Discovery | 7 | You know something real beyond a form-fill. |

| Discovery to Demo | 14 | Pain and situation are confirmed, not assumed. Your demo has something specific to aim at. |

| Demo to Proposal | 19 | Impact is at least quantified. A proposal without a number in it is a brochure. |

| Proposal to Commit | 23 | Critical event and decision process are hard. You know why now and how they buy. |

Two enforcement rules:

1. **No single dimension below its floor.** A deal can hit 19 total while Critical Event sits at 1; that deal does not move. Every dimension needs at least a 3 by proposal stage. One letter under its gate and the deal stays put. No rounding up. Go back, ask again, qualify or kill.

2. **The critical-event forcing question:** "What breaks for this customer if they do nothing until next quarter?" No concrete answer scores Critical Event at 1, and the record is a conversation, not a deal. This single question deflates more zombie pipeline than any dashboard.

Why the paranoia about evidence depth: Gong's analysis of 1.8M opportunities found closed-won deals carry roughly twice as many engaged buyer-side contacts as closed-lost ones, and its call research found reps asking 11-14 targeted discovery questions correlate with the highest win rates (Gong Labs, 2017-2021 datasets). The sam