Qualify for deal size before you qualify for fit
Standard qualification asks whether a prospect is a good fit: do they have the problem, the budget, the timeline. That keeps you busy but it does not make deals bigger. The question that grows deals is different: is this an account where a large outcome is even possible? Some accounts have a ceiling no skill can lift, and you want to know that in the first call, not the fifth.
Look for three signals early. First, the size of the problem in money: is the thing you fix worth six figures to them a year, or is it a nuisance worth a few thousand. Second, the seniority of the person feeling the pain: a frustrated coordinator caps the deal, a frustrated VP uncaps it. Third, whether there is a budget the buyer already controls, or whether every pound has to be fought for from scratch. Two of those three present, and a bigger deal is on the table.
Worked example: two near-identical inbound enquiries land in the same week. Both want help with reporting. The first is an analyst who finds the monthly board pack painful, with no budget line and no authority. The second is a commercial director whose forecasting is so unreliable the board has frozen hiring on the back of it, with a transformation budget she signs off herself. Same surface request, same product, but the second account can carry a deal ten times the size of the first. Qualifying for fit alone would have you treat them as equals. Qualifying for size tells you where to spend the next month.
This means walking away faster from accounts that can only ever be small, even when they are pleasant and ready to buy. A pipeline full of friendly small deals feels like progress and quietly caps your revenue. Saying no to a 5k deal so you can spend that hour on a 50k account is the single most uncomfortable discipline in sales, and the most profitable. It also means asking sharper questions sooner. Not "what are you looking for", which invites a small answer, but "what is this costing you a year if it stays broken" and "who else feels this". Feed those answers into a lead scoring model so size, not just fit, decides where your hours go, let your lead qualification gate on the ceiling rather than the symptom, and treat your ideal customer profile as a profile of accounts that can carry weight, not just accounts that will say yes.