When does a harvested prospect become qualified?

The stage enum (maps-plan.md) says qualified means "a human-checkable signal exists (the OBSERVED_SIGNAL test)." This rubric makes that operational: four gates, all binary, all must pass; then a priority score that orders the qualified pile but never gates it. The AI applies the rubric and records its work on the prospect row; Brad audits rather than re-derives.

The four gates (all must pass)

G1. The signal test. One specific, public, honestly-citable fact that makes THIS company worth writing to, captured with its URL and date. The test is literal: can we write the letter's {OBSERVED_SIGNAL} line without stretching? If not, the prospect stays identified. Signal categories, one per letter:

category	example signal	letter
cloud	public statement about cloud costs, repatriation, or infra spend	pitch-cloud-exit
legacy	old tech named in a posting or the press (AS/400, VB6, "our custom system", 20-year-old ERP)	pitch-legacy-rescue
hiring	live posting for a data/AI/platform role	pitch-hiring-signal
ai	public AI initiative, AI role open 90+ days, or a visibly dead pilot	pitch-honest-ai

G2. A problem we sell. The signal maps to one of the four letters. A company that is interesting but has no letter is a watchlist row, not a qualified prospect.

G3. A reachable human. A named person in a relevant seat, with a working email found or plausibly findable. No person yet: the prospect goes to the contact-discovery queue and stays identified. (We write to people, not to info@ addresses.)

G4. The fit floor. The engagement could plausibly clear $10K (the bottom of the posted project range is $25K; hourly makes small starts possible). Sole proprietors and micro-shops fail the floor unless their signal is extraordinary. OPEN for Brad: any industries we decline outright.

Hard disqualifiers (override everything)

• closed on file. No means no, forever. A re-harvested closed prospect is discarded at extraction, not re-argued here.
• Conflicts. The Grand Rapids AI consulting field (Augusto, Opinosis, licens.io, Senna) and any current Nominate/CB client relationship. OPEN for Brad: anything else that belongs on this list.
• Government entities. Not disqualified, REROUTED: public bodies buy through procurement (SIGMA VSS / BidNet), and cold-emailing around an open solicitation can disqualify a future bid. They get a gov flag and live in the RFP lane, never the cold-email lane.
• Stale signal. A signal older than 90 days fails G1; the prospect drops back to identified until a fresh signal appears.

Priority score (orders the pile, never gates)

Start at 0; the score decides who gets the next letter drafted, nothing else.

points	for	why
+3	weird, old, or challenging (legacy category, strange stack, "nobody will touch it")	the doctrine's stated preference
+2	cloud-exit signal	the flagship lane nobody local owns
+2	West Michigan / Kent County	on-site possible, local-first doctrine
+1	posted demand (they are already spending on the problem)	highest close rate
+1	signal fresher than 30 days	strike while it hurts
+1	warm path (mutual contact, prior thread, they follow the site)	reply rate

Ties break toward the older signal (first found, first served).

Who flips the stage

• The AI qualifies autonomously when all four gates are machine-checkable, and writes a rubric object on the private prospect row: signal text, URL, seen date, category, score, per-gate results, rubric_version. Qualification is internal and pre-outreach; the audit trail makes it cheap to reverse.
• Brad's gates stay Brad's: drafted requires a letter that exists; contacted requires that Brad actually sent it. Nothing in this rubric touches those.
• A spot-check that finds a bad qualification demotes the row AND patches the rubric (bump rubric_version, note the case), so the same mistake cannot recur silently.

Worked example (from day-one recon)

Steelcase: G1 pass (live "Data Analytics Engineer" posting, URL + date on file; category: hiring). G2 pass (pitch-hiring-signal). G3 pending (need the hiring manager, not HR; contact-discovery queue). G4 pass. No disqualifiers. Score: +2 local, +1 posted demand, +1 fresh = 4. Verdict: qualified the moment G3 resolves, and the letter is already drafted.

Open for Brad

1. Industry exclusions for G4/conflicts (gambling? MLM? crypto? none?).
2. Anything to add to the conflicts list.
3. Comfort level with autonomous qualification as scoped above, or prefer every stage flip on your desk to start.