Managing Your BANT Sales Qualification Process with Checklists and Close.io

What is BANT qualification?

Let’s say you’ve got a list of leads. You don’t know which, but some will be ready to buy right now. Others, however, won’t have the slightest bit of interest…

The only way to find out is to call them. And that’s where BANT qualification comes into play.

Invented by IBM sales teams, BANT is a series of criteria, which stands for:

• Budget. What is the prospect’s budget?
• Authority. Does the contact have the right authority to buy?
• Needs. What needs does your prospect have? Do they match your product or service?
• Timeframe. How soon are they wanting to implement a solution?

Any one of these questions can be used to disqualify a prospect, or at least help you decide how to proceed with that particular contact.

How you can use BANT qualification in your sales process

BANT qualification is one of the primary qualification techniques used in software sales.

Here’s a breakdown of each question:

Budget: Is the budget available?

If a team of 15 people want to use your product that costs $100 / user / month, it’s vital that team has a spare $1,500 each month or they simply can’t afford the product.

In businesses, funds are allocated between departments and for different products. Salespeople should find out early on whether there’s a chance that the required amount can be allocated for this purchase.

It’s the first question for a very simple reason: if they don’t have the money, they can’t buy anyway.

Authority: Does your contact have the authority to make the purchase?

When you’re talking to anyone but the CEO, it’s not instantly clear whether your contact is allowed to decide where their department’s money is spent.

Finding this out means you can either use your contact to influence the decision-maker, or get connected to the decision-maker through your contact. Both options are great because they give you a way into the sale.

Needs: Does the target company have a problem your product can solve?

Once you’re sure you’re not talking to someone with neither the budget nor authority to make a purchase, it’s time to focus on whether you’re a good fit for them.

Finding out their problems then matching the solution to your product is the most basic way of doing it, and helps sell the solution and complete BANT qualification at the same time.

Timeframe: When does the target company need a solution by?

Here you’ll find out when you can expect to close the deal. If the answers to the first three questions are positive, here’s where you’ll know how soon the deal will likely go through.

Whether it’s within a month or within a year, every company is ready to buy at different times, especially if they’re locked in with another vendor ’til the end of the year.

At its most basic, the BANT process should be done in a spreadsheet or using the notes section of your CRM…

However, there is a much more effective way to do it that makes sure you’re:

• Creating structured data from your sales calls
• Presenting and storing that data in a uniform way so you can run reports on it
• Automatically qualify or disqualify leads in your CRM
• Automatically calculate the opportunity value in your CRM
• Train new sales reps with simple checklists
• Make sure every sales call is executed at the highest level

Using Process Street for sales qualification management

When you’re managing a sales team, the last thing you want is to waste their time getting them to manually log their work, or to have no clue what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

Here’s how we do it at Process Street, and, thanks to our new integration with Close.io and our run link feature, you can do the same.

Want to learn more about building a sales team? Listen to the podcast episode between our CEO, Vinay and CEO of Close.io, Steli Efti. Click here to listen.

Free BANT Qualification Template

That’s where Process Street comes in.

We have a BANT qualification checklist you can run for every prospect. It’s for working off during the sales call, making sure you’re asking the right questions, and logging the information in form fields.

Get the checklist HERE to get started, or check out the rest of our Sales Process Templates.

Here’s why you’ll want to take advantage of this feature:

• Using a checklist for sales qualification means it’s easy to add new SDRs into the process.
• Train and maintain consistency in your sales process.
• Keep your CRM data uniform by calculating opportunity value and configuring custom fields with Zapier.
• Inside Close.io, you can now hit one button (run qualification checklist) to instantly launch a BANT qualification checklist and populate it with the data from your CRM.
• You can use Process Street’s dropdown menus to categorize leads into use cases.
• The data you input in Process Street can be fed directly back into the CRM to create your call note.
• Checkboxes can automatically configure tasks in Close.io for your SDRs.
• Build out notes, opportunities and tasks while you log information on sales calls.  This makes for zero data entry after each sales call and uniformity in your notes.
•  Easily run reports on your structured data (because the data is formatted properly in your CRM and Process Street, not lost on a freeform note somewhere).

How to use Close.io and Process Street to manage your sales qualification process

Instead of going into Process Street every time you need to run a checklist, you can get a link that will do it in one click from any application. Whether that’s a browser, your CRM, or somewhere like Evernote, you can use a custom URL to launch checklists on the fly.

In the case of the BANT qualification process shown above, you would do this using Process Street’s new Run Link feature, Close.io’s Integration Links feature and Zapier.

For example, for every new prospect, you could go into your account and hit ‘Run checklist’. But with the run link and our Close.io integration, we just made things a whole lot easier…

Links to help you get setup:

• Help article on the Run Link Feature
• Help article on how to setup Process Street with Close.io
• More Sales Process Templates

Setting up the Run Link in Process Street

Using Zapier to send data back to Close.io