Telling people not to call you

A professional services firm does not have a lead problem. It has an unqualified-lead problem, and the two look identical on a dashboard. Every inquiry from a business too small to serve profitably costs a partner an hour to decline kindly.

So the consultation path states the revenue threshold, in plain language, in two places. It reads at first like leaving money on the table. It is the opposite: it converts a metric nobody should optimize — total inquiries — into one that pays for itself.

The uncomfortable part is that the dashboard will show the change as a decline. Anybody running this needs to agree beforehand which number they are actually managing, because the vanity metric will get worse and somebody will notice.