What is BANT (Sales)?

BANT refers to a sales qualification framework that is used to determine and evaluate prospects based on authority, needs, timeline, and budget.

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How does BANT Work? 

The concept of BANT was developed by IBM to identify prospect opportunity. According to the IBM website, the following has been discovered. BANT opportunity identification criteria: The BANT opportunities are identified through extensive communication to clients or prospects to determine the business and solutions to the problems that may face the business According to BANT framework, a validated opportunity occurs when the prospect has three out of four BANT items. The decision of the framework lies on the ISR or sales representative which can either choose a tighter or looser BANT form.

• Budget  What is the budget for the prospect?
• Authority Does the prospect an influencer or have the decision-making authority?
• Need  What is the business need for the prospects?
• Timeframe  Within what the prospect will implement timeframe solutions?
• Modern Challenges with BANT applied to SaaS Sales
• Budget  currently, the SaaS subscription model draws from OpEx budgets. However, traditionally, the purchases were from a CapEx budget. Does this imply any change?
• Authority  Do organizations still currently make decisions of purchases on a one senior authoritative voice enforcing choice?
• Need  This involves determining What is a Need vs. a Must and a Want? Does it further determine how SaaS address a Need or are a greater portion of the services just a Nice-to-have?
• Timeframe  This seeks to determine whether the concept of framework differs from SaaS deal with measurement of sales cycle taking place after some time and the implementation of a single click?

Above all, does the current world still based on sales-centric where individuals look for clients budgets that support sales solution? Or have changes occurred to the situation that the current world is based on more customer-centric in which individuals assist customers in determining, diagnosing, and resolving a problem? If changes have occurred, what changes are they? And in light of this shift, how does individual qualify for SaaS deal? After considering all these, it was found that, when BANT is used in traditional SaaS sales qualifications, few changes are realized:

• The problem for SDRs: SDRs backfires when assigned to BANT to qualify a deal since they start selling when the client is still receiving information.
• The problem for AEs: When AEs executes BANT to qualify a deal, they are affirmatively answered even before the deal is not yet qualified.