Opportunities and BANT

The sales pipeline is one of few forward-looking business planning tools available to business leaders. In order to develop the most accurate sales forecast possible, it is important to fully understand the nature of the opportunities reflected in the pipeline. Opportunities are little more than wishful thinking if your salespeople don’t have a good handle on BANT – Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing.

For me, everything starts with understanding the Need. I coach exploring Need by asking open-ended questions such as:

• What do you see as your three biggest opportunities in this fiscal year?
• What are the three largest problems you are currently facing?  What would it mean if you could solve them?
• How has business been?
• What keeps you up at night?

Once the core problems or opportunities are identified, ask your prospect to ballpark the value of solving the problem or taking advantage of the opportunity. This helps salespeople provide context for the next topic – Budget.  Some of my favorite questions around budget are:

• You mentioned problem “X” costs the company “$X” each year. What resources in terms of staff time and money have you set aside to solve this problem?
• Do you have budget set aside for this issue already, or do you need to allocate budget?

Once Need and Budget are understood, timing and authority are easy, quick conversations. I tend to handle the Timing question as an assumption: “I assume you want to handle this problem as quickly as possible. What is your timeline to begin work on it?”

For me, the Authority question is really a purchasing process question. So, I tend to approach that by asking simply: “What is your purchasing process and who else needs to be involved?”. Another good approach here is to say something like “I think I understand the issues and urgency, how about if I put together a scope, schedule, and level of effort for us to begin a discussion around?”

A sales team that has a good handle on BANT is able to more accurately forecast opportunities and close more sales. that leads to a pipeline that business leaders can count on to make investment decisions, increased revenue, and ultimately a stronger bottom line.

Qualifying opportunities is obviously a huge topic – one I intend to cover it from a number of angles. If you have a more immediate need, feel free to contact me here and I am happy to help.  If you are up for some additional reading, check out Customer Centric Selling by Michael Bosworth & John Holland.