Not sure how to sell? Well stay tuned, because we’re going to go into one of the best approaches you can use to increase your sales. It’s called BANT, and it’s well worth your while to learn it!
What is BANT?
BANT stands for:
- Budget
- Authority
- Need
- Timing
Those are the four qualities your potential buyer needs to have in order for there to be a chance they will buy from you.
Let’s explain each of them first. Then we’ll take a look at how to use them.
Budget
First off, your potential customer has to have the budget to pay for what you are selling. While that may sound like a no-brainer, there’s a little more to it.
If they are an individual, then it comes down to whether or not they have the money. If they are an employee at a business, however, then it’s a little more complicated. First of all, the company needs to have enough money in their budget. But the employee you are speaking with needs to have it within their assigned budget. For example
Let’s say that you are trying to sell courier services to an employee who works at a law office. If that employee is a manager in charge of shipping and receiving, then they probably have a line in their budget for mail/shipping costs. Assuming there is still money in that budget for the current year, then they pass the budget test.
Authority
Authority is the right to purchase. If the person you are trying to sell to doesn’t have any authority to agree to the purchase, then you are talking to the wrong person.
This is one of the key aspects of selling. You want to be selling to someone who actually has the right to make the purchase. When at all possible, that means talking to the person who controls the budget strings.
Need
The third quality is that your potential customer has to be in need of what you are selling. Why spend your time talking to a lead that doesn’t need or want your product? You are just wasting your time, time that could be better spent talking to a lead that does need it!
Timing
Not only does your potential customer have to need your product, they have to need it now. If it’s something they might need, but only in a few years, that doesn’t do you any good today. The sooner you find out whether or not someone has a need/want for your product now, the sooner you can decide whether to spend any more time pursuing that lead.
How BANT works
Now that you understand what each of the qualities is, let’s talk about how to use them to your advantage.
When you are speaking with potential clients, you want to determine whether they have each of the BANT qualities. That means you need to engage them in conversation to find out more about them.
Ask them questions that help you figure out the following.
- Do they have the budget for my product/service?
- Do they have the authority to make a purchasing decision?
- Do they need my product/service?
- Do they need my product/service now?
This is why salespeople engage you in conversation—they are trying to get enough information to help them decide if you are “ready” to buy.
To a lot of new small business owners, this approach may sound cold. But it’s the nuts and bolts of selling—you need to spend your time trying to sell to people who might actually buy. Every hour you spend talking to a lead that isn’t read to buy from you is an hour you have wasted.
In a lot of ways, sales is like fishing.
- Would you fish in a pool of water that doesn’t have the type of fish you like to eat?
- Or with bait that is something the fish don’t eat?
No—you’re going to find a spot that gives you a good chance of actually catching the fish you like. And you’re going to use the kind of bait that fish likes to eat.
Now, what if feeding your family depended on you catching those fish? Then you’d be especially careful to fish where the fishing’s good. And that’s exactly the approach you need to take to run your business so that it makes a healthy profit.
And the way you do that is by using BANT. Basically, you want to make sure that your lead has all four of the BANT characteristics (I call it passing the BANT test).
If the person does have all four of the qualities, then they are a good lead and worth you trying to sell to. However, for each quality they don’t have, the chances of successfully selling to them goes down.
Professional salespeople are very good at quickly getting BANT information out of people. They also spend their efforts chasing leads that have all the four qualities, rather than leads that only have 3 or 2 or 1 or none.
And therein lies the art of sales. But how do you get all that information out of people? That’s what we’ll cover in next week’s article.
