Episode 20: How BANT Could Optimise Your Sales Process

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Please note: Whilst all transcripts are double checked for accuracy, they are transcribed via Otter.AI so may contain errors.

David Parry 01:55

Hello, and welcome again to The SME Growth Podcast from Wellmeadow. I'm Dave Parry. And with me as ever is Richard Buckle. Drumroll please,

Richard Buckle 02:12

Who's just had a slurp of coffee just at the right time there. 

David Parry 02:17

I did that deliberately. And the exciting news is this is episode 20. Now that is significant, because when we started this journey, you looked up some stats

Richard Buckle 02:31

Some stats. Yep, so apparently 90% of podcasts make it to three episodes. So we smashed through that. 

David Parry 02:39

Surely you can do three. I think nine out of 10 people fail before three?

Richard Buckle 02:44

Something like of the remainder, only 90% make it's 21 episodes.

David Parry 02:50

So we're down to the last 1%. If we do one more, We're on the cusp of the 99th percentile. 

Richard Buckle 02:56

Yeah, so one more. So I think our next episode, we're going to talk about our journey, how we got here

David Parry 03:00

I think that'll be good? Well, for those listening may be interested in this or not. But some people lots of people actually who've listened to this and have fed back to us have said that we're doing a great thing. And they like the content a lot like the style. And they're feeling guilty that they're not doing it themselves.

Richard Buckle 03:15

Hearing quite a few people want to start doing podcasts. We're inspiring people to podcast 

David Parry 03:21

That's the point, they want to do it as well. Buy some kit, audio kit isn't that expensive. You can go to town a bit on the video stuff. But we'll talk all about that. Yeah, next month and give you a few tips from our experience. We've had some good bits, and it's definitely improved through the way it's not been perfect all the way through.

Richard Buckle 03:40

Might be employing some artificial intelligence to enhance our vocals.

David Parry 03:45

And we need to do another AI podcast soon. Because that's already moved on so much that our last podcast now seems ridiculous.So what we're gonna talk about today, now, this cropped up in the last couple of weeks working from a client, and it's a subject close our own heart anyway, because we do end up getting involved a bit in sales, coaching and business processes beyond just the marketing. So we thought we'd talk today about the sales qualification process. And before everybody turns off, falls off to sleep, your there's actually a bit more to it than maybe meets the eye. So yeah. So how to rate an opportunity to decide what to do with it and how to behave with it, and all that sort of thing.

Richard Buckle 04:29

And as this is something I suppose many businesses probably grapple with, its

David Parry 04:35

Do you think? Do you think they actually grapple with it or they think they should do? I think they should

Richard Buckle 04:41

It probably depends on, we're just having a discussion before we started with me. Who does who who should be doing this? What kind of product what kind of services? Yeah, should employ some kind of sales qualification?

David Parry 04:54

Yeah I don't think many people do it that shouldn't. It obvious, isn't it? If you're high volume transactions. It's reasonably transaction, all this short sales cycle, all that sort of thing, you wouldn't bother with this sort of thing. But for certainly capital goods, like most business to business type transactions, certainly reasonable deal value, complex sales, I would say it should be done. There's an awful lot more people out there, that if you're a salesperson worth your salt, you probably know that this area exists as a topic, you might have read a lot about it, I read loads of sales books on it, but you may not be doing it. And maybe there's this problem with getting the rest of your team to buy into doing the same thing. And you don't wanna do it on your own. Or you've tried it and you find it a bit too cumbersome. It could be all sorts of reasons. Just too busy, perhaps

Richard Buckle 05:39

too busy. Because there is a reasonable amount of effort that has to go into the sales qualification process to do it 

David Parry 05:45

There is yes is to do it properly. I think it probably the more you do, though, like anything, the easier it gets, becomes more second nature we took the stuff doesn't really. So yeah. So I think it's probably a lot of lot of companies out there that could be listening to this thinking, Oh, this is making me feel a bit guilty. Would I'd like to say to my boss or to my shareholders that we do have a good sales qualification process, but we don't. But why would you need one? Why would someone necessarily feel guilty about not having one?

Richard Buckle 06:13

I think one of the main main drivers is around efficiency

David Parry 06:18

of salesperson, sales team

Richard Buckle 06:20

Or sales team, and the business as a whole. So I mean, I guess it's just fairly wide ranging, but you could, you've obviously got the salespersons time, there's been a number of studies done with how much time does a salesperson actually spend selling versus, I guess, back in the old days, travel was a lot more of a component of a salespersons day 

David Parry 06:44

And prospecting, which can be regarded as an element of selling, but you could also argue that's a bit of what marketing do. 

Richard Buckle 06:51

So suppose there's efficiency in terms of just, you know, time management, but maybe taking that a step further of what actually should be the focus what which, which deal should you focus on, if you've got more than enough more than you can handle just by if you've obviously got two or three deals in your pipeline will maybe not make a salesperson? 

David Parry 07:10

Well, or you're in a market where each of those can represent whole year's income?

Richard Buckle 07:16

Yeah, I think, working at prioritisation, efficiency, but also what we're seeing at the moment is around like looking at the cost. What does it actually cost to prospect and to enter qualify a lead?

David Parry 07:27

The cost of acquisition formula we've had before? Does the cost of acquisition is it's less or more than the lifetime value of the new customer? And then I think beyond we touched on it just there. It's not just the cost from the salespersons point of view, but lots of companies have a reasonable amount of cost involved in helping to put a proposal together and getting a deal over the line outside of the sales team. And certainly, for technical sales, you know, as soon as you're starting to get engineering involved or technical involved, to be able to help architect a solution. Quite often companies will do that for free, just in regard it as cost of doing business. But if you as soon as you press the start button on that resource, there's you can't sort of half do it. Can you once a customer talks about their potential need, it's going to cost pretty much what it costs. So you got to be very careful going into that process with your eyes open?

Richard Buckle 08:15

Because I think maybe that's where you've got almost done back a bit, haven't you and look at it, because you could probably get a bit of a deal fever, can't you? Someone that's interested. They want to, you know, maybe buy our product or service. Let's get everyone involved. We gotta get this proposal out, get over the line. All that. Yeah, everyone gets that kind of finish line fever,

David Parry 08:35

The white line fever summit fever. Yeah. And arguably, that's made worse by the remuneration models that we have, generally in sales teams where there's usually an element of commission or bonus or something, which doesn't really distinguish between one type of deal and another type of deal it might do on gross margin, perhaps, but even then, I've seen most of them being based on sales numbers, rather than margin numbers. But Let's even say it was a bit more than that. You're not necessarily deciding which type of deal the business wants, as long as it's made it into the pipeline. Now, the qualification process we'll talk most about today doesn't include an element of that. But you could do could have a dimension for is this a good strategic fit for where we're trying to take the business? So yeah, I think there's a bit of efficiency in time management. The other thing that may be a benefit of having this sort of process is standardisation. If everybody in the sales team are doing the same thing, yeah, you can see that of benefit

Richard Buckle 09:28

if you want to scale and grow in that moment, you know, building this process into playbooks, etc, 

David Parry 09:33

while handing off leads to someone else on the team as you get bigger. And also there's something in the CRM that everyone knows we use the HubSpot CRM, there's an automatic process for deal rotation. And some companies do deal rotation as a matter of course, you knew that a salesman work a deal for a while but if they can't get over the line, it gets handed off to somebody else. Well, if you're going to do that, you need a certain degree of standardisation and good note keeping to otherwise you got to start from scratch So yeah, some good benefits there. So what type of processes are there out there then? Now they range from they're usually acronyms, aren't they to start with kind of a mnemonic or an acronym or abbreviation, whatever which one this is, and they can be quite long. So, so the one we're gonna focus on today is BANT, which people may have heard of: Budget, Authority Needs and Timing. Nice and easy. Even I can remember that. But there's loads of them. And I can't help this the cynical brain in me thinking, I wonder if there's so many of them. Because if you could come up with a new one, then there's a book in that. And there's probably a whole consulting thing about it

Richard Buckle 10:40

The Wellmeadow version.... Working... Engage.

David Parry 10:47

Yeah. I'm struggling with the two L's We'll come up with the Wellmeadow sales qualification process. But so BANT is quite easy, but there's, there's all sorts out there. There's MEDDIC, there's SCOTSMAN, there's I wrote this one down, because it's I'm never gonna remember this, but GPCTBA/C&I. Remember that omne? Learnt that in sales training school. But I'm sure there's some very strong advocates of it that would absolutely swear by it. And none of these wrong, are they flipping heck, they're just ways of remembering different dimensions of a deal. I mean, getting all your team to do the same thing and think about it the same way. But surely, there's some merit and simplicity here. 

Richard Buckle 10:51

Tune in next week! I felt like I was on episode of countdown then, can I have a vowel please, Carol But yeah, I mean, what we'll do is we'll put a list of all these on the blog for the podcast. 

David Parry 11:37

That's a good idea. So yeah, let's make sure that's in the blog list of the top ones, you're really interested you can if you'd rather use FAINT or NEAT rather than BANT or CHAMP? 

Richard Buckle 11:38

Well, I think in fairness, in fairness, there is there is some not accusation, but some of the comments around the BANT model is that it is simplistic. And maybe there's some that's that's some of its appeal. And some of his beauty is is a simplicity. But depending on your business that may be more nuanced, you know, regulatory environments or whatever, then that may be one of these other models fits. 

David Parry 12:10

Yeah, no, I would agree with that. And if you're going to think long and deep and hard about this, and you really want to put one of these in and go that route. My advice, I think would be don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And in your search for the absolutely best ever. If you don't get something in place for fear of failing to change, then when you know better

Richard Buckle 12:27

You can definitely spend more time developing a system that actually developing the pipeline.

David Parry 12:33

Now there's someone we know that does like doing that, because I think some people in in some of these roles, like developing systems. So so let's talk about BANT a bit more than so let's just go over the four dimensions. They sound obvious, budget authority needs and timing. But it's probably worth just dwelling on each one just to make sure we understand quite what the nuances are. So budget, you know, have they got the budget? That's the kind of basic question, but it's still a bit simplistic, isn't it? You can expand on that a little bit.

Richard Buckle 13:03

Yep. So I think, you know, obviously, have they got the who is the budget holder? Are you speaking to the budget holder? Those sorts of things?

David Parry 13:13

they may say the other budget, but they're not the budget holder? So yeah, how do they know?

Richard Buckle 13:16

So? And then things like have they have they got? I'm trying to think what were the examples that we came across the other day?

David Parry 13:24

Or someone was asked, Have you got a half million pound budget? It was a global company and the answer was a laugh. Yes. I think we can find that. Yeah. So that's a good point, actually. Because it's not necessarily about have you got the money? It's would you be prepared to spend your money on this? So so B you could expand out a little bit more and think about have you understood the value? Does your value perception exceed what we're quoting as a price? You know, is it does it seem like good value is a value proposition to you? So, so you can put all that under budget and talk about money things? Yeah. And that's why we've maybe want to standardise the question so that you didn't just someone doesn't just say, Well, I have the budget and someone else says yes, but that good value. So that's B It's the money bit. And at its very simplest it's can they afford it? Yep. But maybe also, do they want to afford it? A authority. Not as simple as it sounds again, because who does have authority on a deal? 

Richard Buckle 14:20

Yeah. Well, this is going to be context specific, isn't it? So it could well be that you're talking to the decision maker. And it's no, I guess we were in a meeting earlier this week, where we pretty much were speaking to a decision maker and yeah, that could have been handshaking. Yeah, it could be that you've got five or six different stakeholders involved that you need all of them to sign off on it.

David Parry 14:46

Yeah. And there's always a surprise one at the end. You think you've got all your stakeholders lined up everybody's given authority and then suddenly, someone comes out of the blue that you didn't realise they'll have to get the rubber stamp of

Richard Buckle 14:57

And does every stakeholder have equal weight?

David Parry 15:00

Almost certainly not, but how do you judge the critical ones. So certainly the budget holder there, the person responsible for implementing it, they're going to be pretty key, finance may do, you might have some other health and safety, for example, might have signed up for environmental or IT for security. So exactly understand who they all are. But that doesn't mean list them all. And wait till you've got every one of them as a green light before you proceed. It's just on a scale of whatever you choose one to five, one to 10. Have we got authority people generally moving towards the Yes, I will approve. But bear in mind as well. A negative is probably a greater weight than three or four positives. Yeah, if you've got a blocker. Yeah, no number of you know, they've got power of veto. Doesn't matter how many people you've got saying yes, one person with Power of Veto is all you need to stop it. And you've got to understand who has powers of veto. So authority once again, more complex than you think at its simplest, it's a yes, no. Does this person I'm talking to appear to have authority. But if you're asking about the deal, and the whole of a company that's going to be having to agree, lots of elements within. Okay, N for needs, to they have a need for what we're selling. Yeah, that'd be simplistic again, couldn't it? We're selling this do you want it? But there are elements, there are layers, aren't they and what people sell? You know, we do it all the time with what we're selling, you know, we're providing a layered service, we are they helping people with their CRM and HubSpot implementation, we might be helping them with content as well, which is the mainstay of what we do, we might be giving them more advice on marketing strategy than they've had before, which then can lead into business strategy and even business processes. So it may well be that they've got a need for one of those things. 

Richard Buckle 16:45

And I suppose maybe you're into the unknown unknowns, or knowns or whatever, The Rumsfield matrix Often times, you come across someone who has maybe a need, but it's not the real need. And when you start talking to them, you uncover other needs, perceived needs. And yeah, so that's, that's, you know, something that I suppose that you can, we see that reasonably regularly, you start scratching beneath the surface. 

David Parry 17:16

So if you're going to score needs, then it's almost worth saying, What's the score of each of the needs that you uncover? Even if you bring that up in conversation, and it was an unknown unknown, and you make it a known thing within the customer? And then they like it,

Richard Buckle 17:31

maybe who should be scoring it as well? Who is the right person to evaluate a need? Yeah. It may not be the salesperson.

David Parry 17:39

That's a tricky, isn't it? But you're right, you may want to get someone more technical involved, for example, or somehow engage the customer in helping you come up with a an agreed score between Do you need this? Some people I know try and anti sell their products as a really, as a way of testing this, try and talk the customer out of needing to take them to the point. And then try and back away and see whether the customer comes back. Yeah, that's an interesting one. So that's needs, and then timing or timeline or whatever time. Once sounds pretty simple, but it's as ever, there's a bit of complexity in it. You know, have they got a timeline is different from saying, Does it fit our timeline? Ones that I think relate to me quite a lot is around the budget cycle, especially if it's a larger item, and it's going to need to be included in the budget. Well, it matters then when is their new financial year? And are they having to wait until that starts to get included in the budget? Yeah. But you could include concepts of urgency in here rather than just known timing. Is this a burning platform? Is this something they've got to deal with quickly? Or is this a hygiene factor? That would be nice to fix one day? 

Richard Buckle 18:49

And if it's, you know, I guess, is it too urgent, as well as another thing. If someone says, I need this implemented by next week? And it's just not possible to do it? 

David Parry 19:01

Do you walk away, then we'll sell them something different maybe. And you need a different solution for that problem. But let's do our solution to stop the next one. So that's a bit of a more exhaustive discussion on what everybody thought was a simplistic, Oh it's just BANTS , four simple things. Actually, there's, you can have layers within that subsets. So I suppose the next question is, well, having got those four general areas, what can do with them. You just got to think about and write something down under the b bit of your deal, record, whatever it is, and then something else Don't you have a bit of free text? Or you're going to try to come up with a score? Or, you know, how do you use it? 

Richard Buckle 19:43

I suppose. Interesting point. Have you even got BANT on your deal record? So first, you know, if you're recording information about a deal, does that even include some element of A BANT qualification 

David Parry 19:57

or one of the many equivalents equivalents? So that's or are you just relying on the salesman putting something free text or

Richard Buckle 20:03

free text or notes? Or yeah, I spoke to so and so and they're happy to go ahead or whatever. So.

David Parry 20:08

So we would certainly advocate building that into the properties or fields or what have you call them in your CRM, for against the deal record?

Richard Buckle 20:15

I suppose there's a balance here, isn't there between that a lot of what we're trying to get the balance between sort of quantitative, how can we score BANT? And there's also an element of qualitative because sales is a relationship driven?

David Parry 20:29

Yes, people, people are messy. So it's a subjective thing. But ultimately, at the end of it, you want to better say, How are we doing on BANT on that? Or just forget the acronym? How well qualified is this deal?

Richard Buckle 20:40

Or to be able to look at the aggregate of all of the deals and say, right, where are we at with 30 deals at this stage of the pipeline? Which ones? Do we think we should focus on 

David Parry 20:49

that 30, low quality deals? Or 30, high quality deals?

Richard Buckle 20:53

Where where's that and BANT can be quite a quantification of a BANT can be a way of analysing those deals.

David Parry 21:02

Yeah. And of course, it's not the only way. But in organisations that don't have anything at all, it's, it's as good as any we've found a starting this this journey, even if you change it later. So I would say move it away from free text, and build it into your standard deal record in some way back to your standardisation argument, if you're gonna hand it on, you want someone else to know where to go, and, and in the aggregate, how do you add it up? If it's all in lots of different places? So that's true. We've worked from the free text, but even if you had dropped down options of standard text, so let's say under your budget, so yes, they got a budget, or yes, they got a budget, but it's not applicable for the next fight for a year or in four or five different nuances of Yes. That's still just radio buttons being ticked on a list. What do you do with that? So you've got to how do you then turn to a number if you want to enumerate this in some way?

Richard Buckle 21:53

Well, you could put some numbers against the text, in its simplistic form. Now, you could think looking at almost suppose almost go back to a blank sheet of paper a little bit and say, right, How do we want to categorise our budget? Our budget responses, criteria or material? Okay, against each of those? Can we put score against them?

David Parry 22:18

And it simplest, it might be 0 and 1? Very binary? I got one. I haven't got one. I think I'd prefer a bit more nuanced than that. And then maybe have a sliding scale. But there's an argument for making that nonlinear as well, you know, why just have 123? Or 12345? Why not have 125? Once it reaches a threshold point of sounds exciting, well, bring it up to the maximum you can further dimension and have something where I really good solid answer on the b for BANT outweighs a mediocre answer on the needs, let's say or vice versa. 

Richard Buckle 22:52

Yeah, I think that's important as well, if we're looking at if you're looking at all of the deals in the pipeline, to really have that if you've got something that's maybe a little bit exponential in terms of its scoring criteria, it does help deals standout, you know, or maybe within within a particular deal. You've got the various elements of BANT that may be, you know, really strong on the budget, but the timings wrong or something, or whatever it is, we're not scoring as high. So yeah, having that kind of scoring system 

David Parry 23:19

and weighting between the four dimensions, or yeah, they don't have to all be scored out the same number. They know you could say that. If the needs are high enough. They'll find a way

Richard Buckle 23:30

Yeah, exactly. where there's a will, there's a way. So yeah, so there's quite a lot to think about, I think, probably before jumping into whatever CRM you're using. I mean, obviously, we're using HubSpot to do these things. Having that blank sheet of paper or whiteboard exercise, think it through and design, you know, design what's right for your business, isn't it?

David Parry 23:50

Yeah think about it. But don't think about it too long. Don't do something that works. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That one again. Okay, so you've got some sort of scoring system. We use the automation within HubSpot called workflows, which will pick up your selected drop down and give it a number and multiply or add it together type of thing. So you come up with a score. So let's say you've got to the point, then we've got a score, which represents how well qualified this deal is at this point in time. Now that could evolve over time. So it's quite useful to be able to see if you rescore that, you know, a month later or assuming happens to see whether that's continuously going up, or does it take a step back? Or is it never get above 20%? That type of that's useful to know. But what are you going to use that number for few things we could trigger with that. Isn't there?

Richard Buckle 24:36

Yeah, just an interesting thought just popped into my head again, on the criteria do you do you put a decay into it as well? Because that another

David Parry 24:45

If they haven't got back to you recently, Oh, yes. Six months old deal,

Richard Buckle 24:49

which often happens, isn't it? But yeah, so that's just another thing to think about. But I suppose what can you use it for? So there's, there's various bits depending on how suppose you want to automate your pipeline, there are different views on this in terms of what we've been discussing recently. Is it should your pipeline be overly automated, how much of an automation does it need in it versus the human interaction. So I guess that's more kind of any maybe sales philosophy. But it can, you can use the automation to trigger certain actions. So maybe there's a, you know, the MD wants to know, when a certain deal has got to a certain number of points or something. So yeah, just fire off an email, or the sales director, whoever, whoever needs to know, there's, there's ways of doing that there's ways of maybe, you know, kind of, like I say, deal rotation, it could be if it's stuck at a certain point for a certain amount of time and certain number of points, rotate the deal

David Parry 25:45

could go into your forecast or a different level of forecast, once it reaches a certain point, you can stop doing certain things as well. We talked earlier about the cost of say engineering getting involved in the quotation process, maybe they're not allowed to, until the qualification score reaches whatever your threshold is 30% for them. 

Richard Buckle 26:02

You can't move it along the pipeline.

David Parry 26:03

You have gateways gateways can't go beyond Yeah,

Richard Buckle 26:07

so I mean, I suppose really, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty flexible in terms of,

David Parry 26:12

once you've got the number, if you were given the number today for free, you'd think of loads of ways to do it. And especially even those people that say, we don't have enough deals, we work every deal, well, maybe you shouldn't be maybe if something is up 5% on sales qualification score, rather than putting effort into it, because at least it looks good, being busy. Leave it to have its own life, don't kill it off, let it have its own life. And it meant they may come back, but focus your attention on getting another deal to that find that level or beyond Yeah, go do a bit of prospecting or research or tap up your network or do something else that might be more worthwhile. So that may be good to do.

Richard Buckle 26:45

It's amazing. Really think like, what you can drive off a number. And that's maybe an interesting exercise people to think about, think about what if you had a band score or score for each element of band? What would you then do? If you if you had a way of quantifying that opportunity?

David Parry 27:01

This is this almost goes back to our vision podcast, probably 10 podcasts ago, you have a very vivid description of what the future state might look like, then you're more compelled to try and get there. So imagine a state now where all of your deals had a perfect qualification score against them. And you were able to stop time being wasted on boards. You know, you you think, Oh, that yeah, that sounds quite attractive. Yeah, I might go for that. And then you want to put it in another part of that sort of description of the future, if you had one for me. And it came up in a meeting I was in recently. We were looking at the one lost analysis. Lots of businesses do that, don't they? They look at all the deals that have closed either successfully or not in a period. And you have this one lost, and there's always that third category of project didn't go ahead. And there's a suspicion well is that were the last ones had been been hidden. Did they really not go ahead? But anyway, imagine if again, vivid description of the future, if every one of those deals in each of the columns for the one or the lost and the closed? And that sort of cancelled? What was their qualification score? Do we tend to win all the deals that are qualified over 50%? Or 70%? All the ones that are below 30? Do we tend to lose them? You know, is that that's what you'd expect? Yeah. Or actually, are we finding that there's several in there with qualified at 10%. And we win them? And they make us rich, you know, you need I would want to know that. Just to sort of give that feedback loop. Otherwise, you're just putting a score on it, and then feeding the machine for the sake of it. But if you as the sales director or salesman had that feedback loop, to say, let's just, you know, experience has told us when they don't get to 30% by three months in or three weeks in or whatever, it really isn't likely to go ahead. It might there's still a one in 10 chance. But we're better off spending our time on these other deals over here, rather than switching this one.

Richard Buckle 28:44

Absolutely. I think that they're as important points isn't that continuous improvement as it moves rather than just gets to the end of the pipeline? And it sort of drops off like lemmings type of thing? Actually, well, how do we build that back into the process? So it's not a you know, sit down and do A BANT Criteria? And then carry on is know maybe every three months? Six months, build it into your review? Yep. Are we asking the right questions here? Are the other you know, do we need to tweak our qualification? Scoring or?

David Parry 29:15

Good. So that's just a round robin of BANT amongst all the others of CHAMP or Scotsman. 

Richard Buckle 29:22

And you could say that we've had a good bit of BANT-er

David Parry 29:24

I was going to avoid that.

Richard Buckle 29:28

Couldn't resist couldn't resist. 

David Parry 29:30

Good. Excellent. Well, thanks very much for that because summary. And as Rich said at the beginning, we will put a list of all of the other ones on the blog. If you go to wellmeadow.co.uk and look for the blog. You'll be able to find them all on there. And we'll link them through to authoritative articles talking a bit more about them if you want to go that route. And as we said at the beginning, this is episode 20. So next time it being our 21st which apparently marks us out as being the 1% of podcasts to get this far. We'll do a little bit of a retrospective of how we got to 20 and some of the learning points we've had on the way. So if you're interested in doing your own podcast, you can pick up from that. And just a bit of preview, I think the one after that, we're going to do a little bit of a summary of all the subjects we've talked about in these first 2021 podcasts just to give a bit of a highlights. best of album. We'll do that. And then I think the one after that, if you're really starting to look ahead, we've got a little treat coming up around Shakespeare's birthday, where we've been a little bit silly just to try and tie in a serious business subject around around Shakespeare when we get to that point in April

Richard Buckle 30:36

Plenty to Look forward to look forward to then

David Parry 30:39

Good. So you've been listening to The SME Growth podcast. Thank you very much for listening. Please subscribe to us, follow us and share us and thank you if you already have. But more importantly, please tell people you know in your business and in other businesses that might be interested in in hearing some of this material and tell them to Google for SME Growth podcast and we'll come up number one. In the meantime, good luck with your businesses and see you next week.

Further resources

An SME using a sales qualification processes can help sales representatives identify high-potential prospects and allocate resources efficiently. Some of the top used sales qualifying methods are:

1. BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline): Evaluates prospects based on their budget, decision-making authority, needs, and purchasing timeline.

2. CHAMP (CHallenges, Authority, Money, Prioritisation): Focuses on identifying the prospect's challenges, decision-makers, budget, and priority level for addressing their challenges.

3. ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money): Prioritises prospects based on their decision-making authority, need for your product or service, urgency, and available budget.

4. FAINT (Funds, Authority, Interest, Need, Timing): Similar to BANT, but emphasizes the prospect's interest level and assumes the budget can be found if the solution is valuable enough.

5. GPCTBA/C&I (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority, Negative Consequences, Positive Implications): A comprehensive approach that considers various factors like goals, challenges, and potential outcomes to qualify prospects.

6. SCOTSMAN (Solution, Competition, Originality, Timescales, Size, Money, Authority, Need): A broad qualification framework that considers the uniqueness of your solution, the compZetitive landscape, and other factors to identify potential prospects.

7. NEAT (Needs, Economic Impact, Access to Authority, Timeline): Focuses on qualifying prospects based on their critical needs, the economic impact of your solution, decision-making authority, and purchase timeline.

8. SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-Payoff): Focuses on uncovering customer needs and offering tailored solutions through a structured questioning process

Whatever methodology you pick, you need a CRM behind it, throughout this episode we discuss our CRM of choice HubSpot. If you'd like to know more about HubSpot, click the banner below.