Within three days this month, two well regarded voices in acquisitions published advice pointing in opposite directions.
One argued that qualifying leads too strictly will cause you to lose major deals. The other argued that most people fail early because they spend their time on deals they cannot control.
Both are experienced operators. Both are reasoning carefully from real experience. And both are right, which is the part worth sitting with.
The disagreement is not actually about leads
Read the two arguments closely and neither is really a claim about which leads are good.
The strict qualification argument says your hours are finite, so spend them where the probability is highest. The do not over qualify argument says your read on probability is worse than you think, so do not throw away a lead on a guess.
Those are not competing theories about sellers. They are competing estimates of the same budget. The budget is your attention.
The variable neither one names
Every disqualification rule, in any business, carries the same hidden term: the cost of one more conversation.
When a follow up costs a person twenty minutes of their day, a rule that cuts the bottom third of your pipeline is not cynical. It is arithmetic, and it is correct. You cannot work everything, so you work what pays.
The problem is what happens next. The rule gets taught. It gets passed down. And somewhere in that handoff it stops being a budget and starts sounding like a judgment about people. Nobody goes back and rechecks the arithmetic, because by then it does not feel like arithmetic.
If you want to see which rule your own pipeline is actually running, our pipeline grader reads your real list rather than a dropdown of guesses. We never store it, sell it, or message anyone on it.
What happens when the cost moves
Here is the uncomfortable implication for both camps. Neither piece of advice is stable, because the term it depends on is not stable.
Lower the cost of a conversation far enough and the strict qualifier is leaving money on the table, exactly as the first argument says. Leave the cost where it is and the loose qualifier drowns, exactly as the second argument says. They are describing the same curve from two different points on it.
Our own pipeline gives a sense of the shape. Since the first of July we have worked two groups of Minnesota pre-foreclosure owners side by side, one with equity and one underwater or close to it. Of the owners with equity we reached, roughly one in four came back to us. Of the underwater owners, roughly one in six. Meaningfully lower, and nowhere close to the zero that the delete-them rule quietly assumes.
At twenty minutes a conversation, one in six is a bad trade. At close to zero, one in six is the least contested list in the market, because everybody else was trained to throw it away.
How to tell which rule you are running
Three questions, and they apply whether you buy houses, sell software, or run a service business.
First, when you disqualify, can you say out loud what it costs you to keep that person in the pipeline instead. If you cannot, you are running an inherited rule rather than your own.
Second, when did you last recheck it. Rules written when follow up was manual do not automatically expire when it stops being manual.
Third, what would you do differently if one more conversation were free. That answer is usually the strategy, and most people never get to it because they never ask the question.
The honest summary
Neither expert was wrong. They were answering the same question with different numbers plugged into the same place, and neither said which number they were using.
That is worth knowing, because it means the argument you inherited about who is worth talking to was never really an argument about people. It was an argument about a cost, and costs change.