Empower Your Team with Sales Lead Qualifier for Teams

How to create outlook signature

- One of the biggest secrets to be successful in sales is actually just to sell to people who are qualified to buy product or service. Now, most salespeople make the mistake of trying to sell something to somebody that doesn't actually need what you have to offer. And when this happens, sometimes you can put a lot of energy trying to sell someone and kind of push them in the right direction, but in the end, they never buy because they were never qualified to buy in the first place. Now to qualify your prospects and make sure that whoever you're talking to can actually buy your product or service, I'm gonna teach you a special framework that's been around for decades and it's proven to work and it's called BANT, B-A-N-T. And what we're gonna do is I'm gonna show you step by step how you can use this framework during your sales meeting to figure out whether or not someone should buy your product or service, and you want to make sure you watch this video until the end because if you don't know how to use this framework and you're not using BANT properly, it's gonna be extremely difficult for you to close deals. (bright electronic music) Hey, what's going on, everybody? My name is Patrick Dang. Welcome to my channel where we're gonna talk about all things sales. Before we get started, make sure to give this video a like, subscribe, and turn on notifications. Now diving right into it, we're gonna talk all about BANT, B-A-N-T. Now BANT is gonna be an acronym for budget, authority, need, and time. So how we're gonna use this is during any type of sales meeting where you're talking to someone over the phone or in person, we want to go through each of the steps. It doesn't have to be in this exact order. It can be in any order you want, but by the end of the call, you need to understand if a prospect has a budget, who the authority decision-makers are, if there's a need for the prospect to even buy, and timing on when they will buy. So we're gonna break down these steps one by one and I'm gonna show you exactly how you can execute on these strategies during your sales meetings. Now, the first letter that we're gonna cover is gonna be the B, budget, okay? So, in any type of sales meeting, you have to understand whether or not the prospect or the customer that is gonna buy from you has a budget. Do they even have money set aside to buy what you have to offer? Because if they don't have money in the bank and they don't even have a budget to buy whatever it is you're selling, well, you can't actually close a deal. Even if they wanted to buy, they can't because they can't, they don't have the money to afford it, so that's why during your sales meeting, usually it's in the middle or at the end, you want to ask a prospect if they have a budget. For example, you could say something like, hey, Sally, I was just curious, did you already set aside a budget for something like this? And when you ask Sally, or the prospect, this type of question, they might say, yeah, we have a budget of about three to $5,000 a month to invest in this type of solution. So when you ask it like that, people are willing to give you an answer if they have a budget. Now, in some scenarios, they may be a little hesitant to give you their budget because they might feel like if they give you a budget, you're gonna charge the max amount of money that they have, right? Because even when you're selling, it always is some type of negotiation. So when someone is hesitant to give you a budget, right, if you say, hey, Sally, do you have a budget set aside to invest in something like this? Sally might say, ah, yeah, we kind of have a budget and she might just stop talking there, right? And she doesn't want to give you a number, and you need to figure out that number because, one, you need to charge appropriately so you don't come in too high and you don't come in too low, and second, you need to qualify Sally to make sure that she can buy your product or service. So you can go a little further and say, okay, cool, you have a budget. Just curious, when it comes to that budget, do you have a range you're working with, whether it's 1,000 to 3,000 or maybe 3,000 to 5,000? What is that range looking like? And Sally might just give you a number and she might say, oh, it was probably the second one, 3,000 to 5,000, and you don't have to get the exact amount of budget that she has, but you need to get some type of range so that when you give your pricing towards the end of the call, Sally doesn't get shocked and be like, oh my god, that was so expensive. It has to be fitting to what Sally wants. Now there are scenarios where maybe sometimes the prospect will ask you how much your products or services cost, and you're in a situation where you kind of have to answer, and what you want to do is, one, the first thing you got to try is instead of answering with the number directly, so you can say something like this. Sally, thanks for asking that question. I really appreciate it. Now before I go ahead and give you a budget, I want to make sure that this is something that fits you and what you're looking for, so what was the range of investment you were looking for to invest in something like this? So as you can see, I'm not answering the question directly. I'm actually just answering her question with another question so that she can give me her budget. Once she gives me her budget, then I'll give her my price based on her budget, right? So you want to try that a couple times and if Sally or whoever it is keeps pushing to just get a number and she doesn't want to give any numbers, then fine, you can kind of anchor it high and then negotiate from there. That would be my recommendation. Now that we covered the budget, we're gonna go into the next letter which is A, and that is authority. Now authority is all about who has the decision-making power when it comes to buying a product or service. For example, the other day, I was on a sales call selling some consulting and coaching services, right? And I was talking to a director of marketing, director of sales type of person. Although this person is the person in charge in running the sales team, I need to figure out whether or not this person is the one who is actually going to sign off and make the decision, right? Because even if the director is executing on the strategy, sometimes they need approval from their boss, like a VP or a CEO or a chairman or somebody needs to sign off and spend the money to buy my coaching services, right? So I can say something like, hey, John, I'm really just curious. I understand that you're the director of sales. You're the one that's gonna be executing all of this, but I'm curious to know if we were to move forward with this coaching program, is there anybody else who we need to involve before we actually move forward with the deal? And John might say, yeah, I'm the one that needs to filter out and find the right person, but I need to give it to my boss, make sure he's okay with it and sign off and approves the budget before we get started. As simple as that. You just need to ask, is there anybody else we need to involve before we move forward with this deal? And people are really okay with telling you how the decision-making process works in their company because if they like you, they like your product or service, they see a clear fit, then they're just gonna tell you how they work internally and give you all the steps, so then from there, you can kind of figure out if you need to get on the phone with their boss or if you just need to send a proposal and they pass it to their boss, whatever the case is, and you just move from there, but the most important thing is to understand who makes the decision, right? Because you don't want to talk to, let's say, a lower level person, let's say, like a sales rep or sales manager, and hope that they're gonna push your deal through their boss and through their boss because it's very difficult to do that, right? You want to make sure you talk to the director level or above because you want people who actually have some sort of influence within their company, and the higher, the better, right? Because if you're talking directly to the CEO and that's the person that makes the decision, well, there's no approval process. That person doesn't have to go one level higher. They just have to either like you are not and sign the deal. All right, the next letter we're gonna cover is N which is need, all right? So when it comes to need, all that really means is does a prospect need your product or service? A lot of times, we might feel like our product or service is so good that we should sell it to everybody, but if people don't really need what you have to offer, well, they shouldn't even be buying in the first place. So that's why during a sales meeting, you have to ask questions to uncover pain, which I talk a lot about in all my other videos, and uncover these pains, see if your product or service solve those pains, and that will give you your answer to whether or not the prospect has a need, right? If there's no need to buy your product or service, no matter what you do, they're not gonna buy, right? Because there's no need, there's no reason for them to buy. But if you find that need, then okay, now it's starting to make sense and you can kind of move forward with the deal. So when it comes to need and uncovering the need from a prospect, so basically, it's like this. You have as current situation of where the prospect currently is, right? And they have a certain goal that they want to achieve, and you want to find all the things that are blocking them from achieving their goals, whether it's to generate more revenue, hire more employees, become more efficient, whatever their goals are, what's stopping them, right? And hopefully, your products or service remove those blockers so that they can get from point A to point B, easy as that, right? So if they want to go somewhere, but something's stopping them, you want to dig deeper of what exactly is stopping them? How long has it been stopping them? Why haven't they been able to fix it on their own? Why do they need help from an outsider to get this job done? You start asking these questions and you uncover the need, and again, if there's no real need for your product or service, there's no way you are going to sell it. Now, the final letter of the BANT acronym is going to be T, which is going to be time. Timing is especially important because I remember when I was at Oracle, somebody said, "Time kills all deals." And that is somewhat true, right? Because sometimes when you're on a sales meeting, everything is going good and the prospect says they're gonna buy and they'll say something like, okay, be in touch, right? And then the more time that passes, the more chances your deal is killed. And you always want to know the timeline on when someone will make a decision. So at the end of a meeting, instead of just saying, oh, let's be in touch and hopefully they'll come back to you, you want to say like, hey, look, when exactly do you want to move forward with something like this if we were to move forward? And they're gonna give you a timeline. They might say, if we did hire you, Patrick, well, we want to get started two weeks from now. Okay, cool, so you have a timeline on when they want to get started. Then you ask questions like, okay, well, when it comes to actually finalizing the deal, was there a certain date that you're trying to get this done by? And they might say, yeah, if we are gonna do it, we might sign the deal by next week, right? So now you're getting a timeline on how their decision-making process works. If you don't know this timeline, it's hard to really know when you can close a deal, right? You always have to forecast when these deals are coming in, and that's why you always have to ask a prospect, when is their timeline? When are they trying to sign the deal, or when are they trying to do a demo if there's multi-stages before you sign a deal, and when you sign the deal, when are they trying to get started? And the reason why you want to do this is because sometimes things fall through the cracks. They might say, hey, we want to get this done by next week. And then next week comes by and they don't respond back to you, right? And it's kind of like, okay, well you said next week but you didn't really do it, so what am I supposed to do? Now because you asked for the time in the initial meeting, when it comes to following up, all you want to do is remind them about the conversation that you had and you say something like, hey, Jim, last week we talked and you let me know that you were gonna talk to your boss next week to see whether or not this is gonna work for you. I haven't heard back from you yet, so I was just curious to know if you had any more additional questions or if there's any help that I can offer before you can actually make a decision. So when you're following up with this person, it's not as if you're bothering them and just saying something like, hey, just checking in. You're actually using context and you're using something that somebody said last week or in the past and you just remind them that they actually said it, so when you use that context in your followup email, and you say, hey, you told me this, but I didn't hear back from you. Now they feel a little guilty, right? That what they said doesn't match with what they did, and people don't want to do feel like they're lying or incongruent with what they say and what they do, so they will give you an immediate response a lot of the times because they don't want to feel like they're lying, right? And so they might say, oh, I meant to follow up with you but this and this happened and I'm gonna reach back to you in three days, right? So it could be something like that, and so you say, okay, cool, totally fine, and then three days happen and you say, hey, John, it's been three days and you let me know that you're gonna follow up and is there anything that you need help with and things like that, right? That's why you always want to have context and get a timeline. If you don't get a timeline, you don't have permission to follow up and it doesn't feel as natural. So that's pretty much how BANT is going to work, budget, authority, need, time. In any sales meeting, make sure you ask the right questions to uncover all of these things. If you're missing one of these pieces, it's very difficult to know if a deal will close. Now, if you enjoyed this video, make sure to go ahead and give it a like. Subscribe, turn on notifications if you want to see more videos like this on how to sell and generate leads and things like that. And let me know in the comments, when it comes to BANT, budget, authority, need, and time, which one do you feel is gonna be the most important in the sales cycle? Is it budget, finding the authority decision-makers, the need of the customer, or time? Let me know in the comments which one you personally feel is most important. And if you want to see more videos on how to sell or if you want to generate more leads, make sure you check out my other videos on this screen. And so with that said, my name is Patrick Dang. Hope you guys enjoyed this video and I am going to see you guys in the next one.