Extend Lead Qualification Process Beyond BANT

We have written and published a number of articles about BANT and other methods of qualification. This is a guest post from Bud Hyler with insights on taking lead qualification to another level.

Extend the lead qualification process beyond BANT to include qualification based on the prospects probable valuation of your specific product’s advantages. BANT only qualifies the prospect to the level of probability of buying a product in the same product category as the firm’s product using the qualification criteria of:

• Are the decision maker?
• When do you intend to buy?
• Do you have budget?

That is the expectation of purchase for any product in the category, not the expectation of purchasing your product with your differentiating capabilities.

BANT qualifies a prospect to the level of “likely to buy a car”, but not to the level of likely to buy a specific car e.g. Porsche. For example if you went into a Porsche dealership with $250,000 in cash and announced that you were going to buy a car today, all of the salespeople would immediately come to help you.…….. until you add the qualifier “based on trunk size”. Then the Porsche salespeople would not waste their time talking with you because they know you are not going to buy a Porsche. By knowing the product advantage, the lead qualification process could be extended to identify customers that are expecting to buy a product with your capabilities.

Firms should add the same product differentiation based lead qualification to the lead generation process that is currently used by the sales channels to reduce wasting time with prospects that are not “winnable”.

Many leads are less useful than they could be for a sales channel because the salesperson has to determine the level of value the prospect has for the specific product advantages…i.e. are they a qualified prospect for the products/services that the salesperson is selling. Unless the prospects are qualified for the specific product, they stay in the sales pipeline until the end stages of the buying/selling process. This approach is based on the identification of the advantage and resultant customer value, and improved alignment with the sales channels requirements.

Implementing the approach:

1 – Review the current BANT lead qualification text/script, looking for any existing advantage or customer value statements.

2 – Identify how these statements can be improved

• in terms of calibration to make them more compelling
• In terms of the direct linkage to advantage and resultant customer value. For example a feature is two steps removed from having a customer value statement
• In terms of supporting evidence to make them more believable
• In terms of identifying the customer problem being addressed

3 – For each product identify the advantage, resultant customer advantage, and evidence that should be used.

Does your sales process work effectively? Contact us to learn from veterans like Bud Hyler on the Revenue Architects team.