Every estimator has a version of this day. Drive ninety minutes, walk a 40-square cut-up hip roof, pull measurements, spend the evening building a bid, write a proposal, follow up four times, and hear nothing. Or worse — hear that they went with a guy who came in at half your number and you were "way high."
That day cost you real money. Not the fuel and the windshield time. The bid you didn't write for the customer who was actually ready to buy.
Qualifying isn't about being picky or acting like you're too good for the work. It's about spending your estimating hours where they convert. Most roofing companies have a close rate somewhere between 25% and 40% on residential retail and lower on hard-bid commercial. Push qualifying upstream and that number moves without you selling any harder.
Price out what a bid actually costs you. Drive time both ways, an hour on the roof, measurement and takeoff, assembly pricing, proposal writing, and the follow-up sequence. On a typical residential job that's three to five hours of loaded time. Commercial with a pre-bid walk, RFI, and a full scope narrative? Easily eight to twenty.
At a fully burdened $65–$85/hour for an estimator, a residential bid runs $200–$400 in soft cost. A commercial bid can run $700–$1,500. If you're chasing at a 20% close rate, every job you land is carrying the cost of four you didn't.
That math should change how you answer the phone.
The mistake is treating qualification as a single yes/no at the intake call. It's three gates, and each one is cheaper to fail than the next.
Gate 3 matters because information changes on the roof. You showed up expecting a re-roof and found three layers, a failing deck, and an owner who flinched at the word "plywood." You are allowed to walk away after the site visit. Walking away there costs you two hours instead of six.
Generic intake scripts collect data. Good intake questions force a decision. The difference is whether the answer changes what you do next.
"What's driving the timing on this?" Leak, insurance claim, real estate transaction, HOA notice, or "just seeing what it costs." The last one isn't disqualifying, but it belongs in a different follow-up bucket than an active leak. Urgency is the single strongest predictor of close.
"Who else is involved in the decision?" Not "are you the decision maker" — nobody says no to that. Ask who else is involved and you get the honest answer: a spouse, a property manager, a board, a landlord, a brother-in-law in construction.
"How many other contractors are you talking to?" Three is normal. Five-plus means you're a price-check. On commercial, ask who else is on the invite list — if it's an open bid with nine invitees and low-bid award, decide whether you play that game at all.
"Have you had anyone up there yet, and what did they tell you?" This is the most underrated question in roofing sales. You'll learn the scope, the price range already in their head, and whether someone has already sold them a bad idea.
"Is this an insurance claim?" If yes: has an adjuster been out, has a claim number been issued, what did the scope pay for. An unfiled claim with a homeowner who expects a full replacement on a roof with six hail hits is a project that dies in supplement hell.
"What kind of budget range are you working with?" Contractors hate this question. Ask it anyway, and frame it so it isn't rude: "Most roofs like yours land between X and Y depending on the deck and the details — does that range work for what you had in mind?" You're not asking them to name a number, you're testing whether reality and expectation are in the same zip code. The flinch tells you everything.
On commercial, the disqualifiers are structural, not emotional.
Read Division 0 and Division 1 before you read Division 7. The general conditions kill more commercial roofing jobs than the roofing spec does.
Some of these are judgment calls. All of them earn a second look.
Disqualified doesn't mean discarded. Most leads that fail your gates fail on timing, not fit. Sort them into three buckets and treat each differently:
The budget-number bucket is where most contractors leak time. They build a full bid for someone who asked a planning question. Match the depth of your response to the stage of the buyer.
Score your leads. Keep it simple enough that whoever answers the phone can do it without thinking hard. Five factors, 1 to 5 each:
Set thresholds. Above 18: full bid, priority scheduling. 12–17: bid it, standard queue. Below 12: budget number or referral. Write the thresholds down and follow them for ninety days before you argue with them. The point isn't that the number is perfect — it's that it stops you from bidding on mood.
Qualifying cuts the number of bids you write. The other half of the equation is cutting the hours each surviving bid costs you.
Most of that time isn't measuring the roof. It's what happens after: converting squares into material quantities, applying waste factors, pricing accessories and flashing details, building labor by assembly, layering in overhead and margin, then rewriting all of it into a document a customer will actually read. That's the part that eats an evening, and it's the part that's most mechanical.
When your takeoff flows straight into a priced bid sheet and a client-ready proposal, the cost of a bid drops enough that borderline leads stop being expensive gambles. You can afford to say yes to more of the middle tier, because a mid-tier lead no longer costs you four hours.
That's the actual goal. Not fewer bids — better bids, faster, with your estimating hours pointed at the jobs you have a real shot at winning.
Pull your last twenty bids. Mark which ones you won, and next to each loss write the one thing you could have known before the site visit that would have told you it wasn't real. Competition count. Budget mismatch. Absent decision maker. Insurance scope you never saw.
You'll find the same two or three items over and over. Those become your intake questions. Everything else in this article is just structure around what your own lost bids already told you.