There are several crucial factors that can help transform your relationship with your clients from potential to actual. For example, timing; connecting too early means that your lead is not ready to make the purchase. On the other hand, waiting it out for too long would result in your lead moving on to your competitor. Hence, it is essential to qualify your prospects to understand where they stand in the buying process. The BANT sales methodology is one such mechanism to qualify your leads while also eliminating wastefulness. Here, we will discuss everything you need to know about the BANT sales process and how you can use it to detect BANT-qualified leads.
How to ask the BANT questions? : Video Script
Hey, this is Kapil Khangaonkar. Welcome to Sales Street, a series of new insightful videos on sales, lead gen, and marketing.
I hope you guys enjoy watching it and learn something from it. Thank you.
So, how to ask band questions? A lot of times when you actually are discussing your sales pipeline, the sales guys come back and say that they don't know these questions, we don't know if their guys answered or not or if we have captured the right information or not.
So let us discuss how you ask the band questions, which are budget, authority, need, and time. A lot of times when you ask a customer do you have the budget for it? They are very limited in sharing what kind of budget do you have? They are very recently sharing what kind of budget they have because they think that if the budget is higher than what your quote is, then you can increase your quote. So, they typically don't share the budgets very easily. So, a lot of times sales guys walk away from meeting without knowing the actual budget of a customer. So, there are a lot of tricks which are typically used to identify the budget.
The most used trick in this and which works really well is setting up milestones on the budget. So, for example, let's say your product is costing, let's say $5,000, and the guy is not saying what his budget is. So, you can start by saying, okay, can I assume your budget is $50,000? Then he may say, no, it's not that much. Okay, then can I assume that it is $1,000? No, it's slightly more than that. He said, okay, can I assume it is $10,000? So, you can put those milestones in the picture and make him understand where he’s actually landing in between those milestones.
So, you have to get it out of him because no customer typically is going to willingly share his budgets very easily. So, these are some of the tricks to identify budgets. Part of it is when you ask about authority when you ask them, Are you a decision maker? Most people actually end up saying yes, that I am a decision maker because at that point in time they are evaluating the product on the company's behalf. If that happens, then the mistake that sales guys make is assuming that the guy is enough to sign the deal. So, the right question to ask to identify authority is are you going to have to bathe signing authority for this contract? If this goes through, in most situations, the person will say there is some ABC person who will sign the contract and that person actually is the decision maker for this agreement, so not the person who's actually evaluating it.
So again, that is typically how you can ask for authority. Need again is a very tricky way to figure it out. Everyone says if somebody is evaluating a product, you assume that they have indeed. But the question again to ask is can you do your process without my product or can you do your process better without my product? Is there anything that I can do to make your production process better?
So, there are a lot of questions that you can ask around the need part of it to understand the company actually needs your product services as of this moment and the time, again, the urgency of it. The best way to ask him is what he can do to close this deal this month. If the answer to that is nothing, then you know that you are not in a great hurry. So that is how typically you can ask the budget of 13 needs and time and validate those needs before putting those deals into the car. So that typically will really help you in terms of doing this process better.