Pre-Qualify Your Sales Prospects?

Ilise Benun of MarketingMixBlog.com wrote an interesting post about how to weed out the "tire-kickers"--folks who request a meeting with you or with whom you spend a lot of time only to reveal in the end that they either aren't serious about buying at this time or can't afford your services. D'oh!

She recommends having prospects fill out a brief form on your web site, answering several questions, one of which is about budget. Or have the same conversation upfront before setting up a meeting. If you are low tech or don't have a web site, you can always send the questions via email, which is a nice way of screening out anyone who is not really serious. If they can't bother replying to your message, how motivated are they to work with you?

Then again, this violates one of the primary rules of sales: make it easy for prospects to buy. Seems to me that it's a trade-off. You can either lose one commodity (time) to make an eventual sale or potentially lose another commodity (money) to save yourself some time. The question to answer then is which, time or money, is more precious to you at this moment?

Your thoughts?