Sales will make or break your business

Outbound sales feed your team. Your cold-callers are foragers. Your senior sales staff are hunters.

They find the new clients and bring them back to the tribe of engineers and human resources staff who depend on them.

But we live in a more complex world than the hunter-gatherers of old, and with that comes the need for more complex processes.

The key to a successful sales process is understanding the overview.

There are lots of individual processes you can employ to improve different aspects of your sales and they need to fit together into a coherent sales narrative. Some call this narrative a sales funnel, and others a sales pipeline.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading