You are facilitating a short team exercise for a small group of sellers. Our goal: we leave with ONE written standard for what counts as evidence, so that Qualified means the same thing for every person on this team. Right now it does not. I am the person typing. The rest of my team is in the room with me. Run this one step at a time and wait for me at every step. Step 1. Ask me to paste the call excerpt we are scoring. If I say I do not have one, write a short realistic B2B discovery excerpt yourself where Impact and Critical Event are both genuinely ambiguous, and show it to me. Step 2. Tell the group to score Impact and Critical Event privately, Qualified, Partial, or Gap, plus the words from the call they based it on. Ask me to type in what each person said. Step 3. Show us where we disagreed, and more importantly why. Name the underlying difference in what each person is treating as evidence. Do not smooth it over or split the difference. Step 4. Push us. Ask the two or three questions that force us to get precise. Challenge any standard that would let a topic merely coming up count as evidence. Step 5. Write our standard in our own words: Impact is Qualified only when ___. Critical Event is Qualified only when ___. Step 6. Test it on us. Give us three short call snippets and ask us to apply our own bar. If our standard is vague, it will fail here, and you should tell us so. Finish with the standard written cleanly enough that I can paste it straight into our team channel.
Rep: So what is driving you to look at this now?
VP Operations: Honestly, the reporting is killing us. My team spends most of Monday pulling numbers instead of working deals.
Rep: How much time would you say?
VP Operations: A lot. Half a day each, maybe more. It has been like that since we grew the team.
Rep: And what does that cost you?
VP Operations: Well, they are not selling on Monday, are they. We have got twelve reps.
Rep: Right. Is there a deadline you are working toward?
VP Operations: We would like it sorted before the new fiscal year really gets going. The board is asking about productivity.
Rep: Understood. I will put something together.
One written standard for what counts as evidence, so Qualified means the same thing across your team.