BANT

There was a time when every inbound inquiry got the same treatment. Anyone who replied with interest got a deck, a meeting, a written proposal, and an engineer on the call. Ten hours per deal was a conservative estimate, and chasing twenty of them produced one or two contracts by the end of the quarter.

The eighteen that didn't close weren't near misses. Most of them could never have bought in the first place. The budget wasn't set until the following year, the person on the call couldn't put a purchase through, or the company simply didn't have the problem the product solved.

Pipeline reviews ended the same way every time. Someone would ask how a deal was going, hear that the customer seemed enthusiastic, and two months later learn it had been turned down upstairs. Enthusiasm isn't a number, so it couldn't go into next month's plan, and it left no record of what should have been asked.

BANT — budget, authority, need, timing — pins down what should have been asked and fixes it in four slots. It came out of IBM's sales organization in the 1960s and is the oldest and simplest of the qualification frameworks. It replaced a judgment each rep made by feel with four questions everyone asks the same way.

Fill in the four slots, then look at the empty ones rather than the full ones to decide what to do next.

1. Budget — check whether money is set aside for solving this problem. Instead of asking for a number outright, ask which budget line something like this usually comes out of. If the contract runs $9,000 a year and the buyer had $800 in mind, negotiation won't close that gap.
2. Authority — find out who signs at the end. The person on the call usually isn't the decision maker, and that by itself is fine. The trouble is spending weeks without knowing who that person is.
3. Need — check whether the customer actually has the problem you solve. Interest and need are different things. It counts as need once you know how many hours a week the problem costs them and what happens if it goes unfixed.
4. Timing — ask when it has to be resolved. Deals move when the deadline has a reason behind it: a contract expiring in June, a new team starting in September, an audit at year end. "Sometime this year" is not timing.

The checking happens on the first call. That call — listening to the customer's situation and problems instead of presenting the product — is a discovery call. Reading the four items out in order sounds like an interrogation, so the answers get folded into questions about how the team works today.

After the call the four slots go into the record, and a deal with all four filled moves to the next stage of the sales pipeline — the list of open deals arranged by stage, and the source of the sales forecast for the coming period.

Setting a deal down because it doesn't fit under current conditions is disqualification. Write down which of the four slots was empty when you set it down.

BANT fits short deals with a simple approval chain: a month or less from first call to contract, with the people who use the product and the people who buy it being roughly the same. A collaboration tool billed monthly per team is the typical case.

Three situations don't fit.

1. The customer doesn't yet see the problem as a problem. BANT is a sieve for customers who already know what they need. An empty need slot sends the deal to the bottom of the list, when often the need exists and simply hasn't been added up. SPIN selling suits that spot better: questions that get the customer to say out loud how large the problem is.
2. Several departments are involved in approval. One authority slot can't hold "security review takes two months and procurement runs its own assessment." Enterprise sales cycles that take months to sign call for something like MEDDIC, which asks about decision criteria and the decision process as well.
3. The product is a new category. In a market where having no budget line is normal, treating no budget as grounds for dropping a deal filters out the ones that would have closed.

There's one more limit: all four slots are things the seller wants to know. What the customer compares vendors on, and whether anyone inside is willing to push for you, have no place in BANT.

"Budget and need check out, but the authority slot is empty. I'll ask whether their department head can join the next call."

One slot is blank, so the next move is to fill it rather than drop the deal.

"On BANT this one times out at March next year. I'm taking it out of the quarter."

They could buy, but not soon enough to count in this quarter's number.

"Don't read BANT out in order on a first call — it sounds like an interrogation. Work it into the situation questions."

The checklist is something you fill in after the call, not a script you read during it.

At Pagedeck, Sofia brings up the four letters in Monday's pipeline review. Running last week's twenty inquiries through the slots usually leaves five with no timing and three with no authority. She puts a date to reopen on the ones missing timing, and slips a question about the approval chain into the next email on the ones missing authority.

When Grace asks how many deals can close this month, Sofia counts only the ones with all four slots filled. Enthusiastic deals went into that number once, the hiring plan was built on it, and the company lost a quarter.

The most common mistake is reading an empty slot as a rejection. A checklist looks like a pass-fail test, so that reading comes naturally. An empty slot is not a reason to drop a deal; it's the next question to ask. Not knowing the budget far more often means nobody has asked than that the money isn't there. Treat blanks as failures and every customer who holds back on a first call gets filtered out.

Reading it as a form you fill in once is the other one. Qualification is a record rather than a verdict, so the answers change when the conditions change. A company with no budget in March opens a new fiscal year in July and the same person shows up with the same problem. Leave the three-month-old record alone and nobody reopens the deal, and a competitor gets in first.