How to use bant to qualify prospects {Key Tips}

Can you relate to the frustration of investing a lot of time and resources towards a prospect to discover they are not the right fit for your business? If so, then you should consider adopting the BANT model in your sales. This model will help your business identify if a prospect is a good fit, helping you be more efficient in the deals you make. In this article, we will look at what BANT is in sales, and how it can help your business qualify more leads.

What does BANT mean?

BANT is an acronym that is a process business will use when qualifying a prospect:

• Budget – What is the prospect’s budget?
• Authority – Who makes the final decision about the deal?
• Need – Does the prospect need my product?
• Timing – How much time will the prospect need to decide?

BANT is commonly used in B2B sales by both the sales and marketing departments to identify if a prospect is a good fit. As a result, your sales process will be more efficient, helping your sales team qualify high-quality leads at a more productive pace.

What is the process of the BANT Framework?

To effectively use the BANT framework in your sales process, ensure that you follow these crucial steps:

1. Get a full understanding of your prospect’s budget, and ROI they want

Understanding your prospect’s budget is crucial to know if your product or service’s price point suits them, but it is also worth trying to understand the ROI the customer wants. The reason for this is that if your price is just out of the customer’s budget, but the forecasted ROI they will get matches or surpasses their needs, there is a chance you will still be able to convert the prospect to a customer.

2. Identify the decision-makers and stakeholders in the deal

Most deals, especially in the B2B market have multiple stakeholders involved, meaning there will need to be multiple people who must agree to purchase your product or service. This means it is crucial for your sales representatives to try to identify the number of decision-makers that will be involved in a deal as early as possible in the sales process.

3. Analyse your customer’s pain points

Next, your sales representatives should analyse your customer’s pain points to identify if they are a good fit for your business. You should attempt to find out:

• The timeline your customer wants to address their pain points
• The urgency your customer has to solve their pain points
• What happens if your customer does not solve their problem
• How motivated is the customer to solve their challenge

Identifying these points will help your sales representatives identify if the prospect is a good fit for your business or not.

4. Identify the timeline of your sales process

Once you have collected all of this information to decide if the prospect is a good fit for your business, you must identify a timeline in which both parties would like to complete your sales process. By having a rough idea of the length of time it will take to complete a deal, you will be able to better forecast your revenue and growth.

Incorporate technology with BANT

The BANT framework will require your sales team to discover and track a lot of information. This can be challenging for sales representatives as there will be multiple prospects to track and manage at one time, which is why technology adoption can be beneficial for businesses.

Sales automation CRM software will re-enforce your BANT strategy

Adopting sales automation CRM software will assist your BANT strategy by enhancing your data visibility and streamlining the process of tracking your sales pipelines. CRM software will:

• Automatically track and record sales data – CRM software will automatically track and record data for your team members. Information about your customer’s progression through your sales funnel, and whom they interact with will all be tracked.
• Get insights into BANT attributes – Gain useful customer insights into who your customers are, with the ability to add notes to customers’ sharing their “BANT” attributes. This will keep your team on the same page and increase collaboration.
• Increase collaboration between sales representatives – A great CRM software will let you assign actions to team members in real-time and leave notes on customers to share important information. An example of software that allows this is TEB.

The challenges with BANT

The BANT framework has fallen out of favour with some sales experts for multiple reasons, the biggest being that although the information collected from the BANT model is valuable, it is collected too late in the sales process. By the time your business has completed the BANT methodology with a customer, you would have already spent a lot of time and resources progressing the customer through your sales funnel. Other challenges include:

• Not asking the right questions – If your sales representatives do not ask the right questions to a prospect, they will not get the required information to know if the customer is a good fit. Learn about the questions to ask when trying to qualify a lead.

• Focusing too much on the questions – If your sales representatives focus too much on the questions they are asking, the interaction with your customers may seem too scripted and less genuine.

Simplify and streamline your prospect management with TEB

Find it challenging to manage multiple prospects at once? This is where TEB, the sales automation CRM software comes in. TEB will streamline your pipeline management, increase your data visibility and keep your sales team organised. Game-changing benefits of TEB include:

• Gain insights into your customers’ buyer journey  - View your customer’s buyer journey in the form of a storyboard to learn more about their needs and where deals are lost.
• Increase collaboration – Leave notes on your customers to share important information with team members, increasing collaboration in your sales department.
• Centralize your customer data – Increase your data visibility by centralizing your customer data so your sales team can offer the best customer service possible.
• Prioritise the right leads – With TEBs lead funnels and filters, organise your leads in terms of their qualities to prioritise the right deals to yield better results.

Do not just take our word for it, book a demo where you can see all of these features live and in action.