Welcome

Thanks for visiting the Superfluity blog - we'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts so do feel free to comment.

Thursday 5 June 2014

Sorry To Break The Bad News But BANT is Dead...

Remember how fashionable the acronym BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timescale) became a few years back in sales and lead generation?

Remember how everyone jumped onto it as the saviour of lead gen?

Well, after a long and painful illness, it’s dead. It's deceased. It's non-living. 


Sorry. 


If you’re still relying on the BANT acronym then you’re essentially like the people who still say “wazzaaaaaaaap?” off the back of the annoying Budweiser adverts from about 10 years ago [tweet this]. Despite this, most lead generation providers - including half those agencies now desperately trying to superficially reposition themselves as marketing automation providers - are still trying to peddle BANT as the paragon of virtue behind the scenes. At best, they’re possibly using a bit of basic marketing automation to maybe add in some lead scoring but that’s about it - BANT remains the lead gen mantra. In today’s multi-device, always-on, connected world - a world where different buying behaviours and non-linear purchase journeys are the norm - they’re selling something antiquated that just doesn’t work anymore and we're unsure if it ever really did (although it was better than nothing).

It is true to say that if you or your lead gen agency fortuitously stumble into one of those needle in a haystack situations where you/they just happen to catch someone who is ready to buy - and who is also prepared to answer honestly - then BANT probably still has some latent ability to at least identify that a prospect is in buying mode. It’s more by fault than by design though. In reality; most BANT responses provided by prospects - who usually only squeal because they’ve been cornered and browbeated into providing answers to leading questions - is inaccurate, misleading and frequently incorrect.

So what are the biggest problems with BANT? 

Well, BANT generally presupposes that you physically speak to the prospect but with salespeople today having just a 9% chance of even getting a prospect on the phone - let alone “pitching them” - then it’s excruciatingly limited. Besides, in today’s digital landscape, assuming your prospects even want to be sold to over the phone is at best nostalgic and incredibly assumptive. 


Secondly, aside from just not being an engaging, contemporary or even sustainable approach; BANT completely ignores behaviours. That's the sword to the heart right there folks. There’s a hell of a lot more to qualifying leads and opportunities than just kettling potential prospects into answering abstract and leading questions. Observing and stitching together granular, observable and multi-channel behaviours and interactions of prospects is what really matters and it’s this (coupled with the fact that it’s almost impossible to get genuine answers from telemarketing-led lead generation) which holes BANT under the waterline. As way of an example on just how tenuous and counter-productive BANT really can be, let us give you a true example of how an agency we consulted with not so long ago were happy to class a lead they’d generated for a CRM company (which they actually then sold to several other CRM companies too at around £350 a pop) as being sales ready based on the BANT scale.

We’ll paraphrase the call recording for you: 


Agent: Are you the budget holder?
Prospect: No
Agent: Ok, does the business have a budget for things like this?
Prospect: No
Agent: Well, if everything stacked up then I’m sure it’s fair to say you would somehow find the budget yes?
Prospect: Yes I guess so.
Agent: So you’d at least be able to speak with the budget holder for us, great. Now are you the decision maker for this type of thing?
Prospect: No, that would be the MD
Agent: But you’re a decision making stakeholder right?
Prospect: What does that even mean?
Agent: Well, I mean it’s fair to say that you must talk to the MD and can make recommendations?
Prospect: Yes
Agent: Brilliant so you are a stakeholder in the decision making process. Now we’ve talked about the fact that you, at sometime in the future, may potentially be interested in maybe implementing a CRM platform for your business. Would you thus say you have an active CRM project in place?
Prospect: Errr, no.
Agent: Uh, well, ok, but can we say that you’d be happy to at least look at the solutions that are available - even if it’s just to satisfy your curiosity and see how it could help you?
Prospect: Yes
Agent: So there’s definitely a potential project there, that's good...
Prospect: Ah well I didn't say...
Agent: Let's just move on as I know you're busy...if everything stacked-up in terms of price and suitability for your business and if at the appropriate juncture you decided as a business that you did want to buy it then is CRM something you could feasibly make a decision on within say the next 3 months?

Prospect: It’d have to blow our minds but yes, feasibly. 
Agent: Fantastic, that’s great news.


And, incredibly, this (and many others of a similar nature) was classed as a "sales ready lead"! They said “the guy sounded really positive and polite” and they argued that the vague responses he was coerced into providing following their leading questions still checked all the boxes in terms of the clients minimum criteria (even though that was clearly because they coralled him into saying yes to certain things). They knew full well that even if their client accepted their well positioned lead pack and their "abridged" call recording" that the lead was highly unlikely to actually buy but they still felt like they’d done their bit. More importantly, because they sell pay-as-you-go style leads (and they thus don't get paid until they get a prospect over the line as a qualified opportunity) then they look to shoehorn everything into becoming a lead because the onus is always on them to do so. Once they do, they can then charge £350 for the lead (and then secretly spin it to 3 or 4 other CRM companies). It’s no wonder they spend half their business lives sat round a table with clients arguing over what was and wasn’t a lead - and constantly trying to collect payments!

As professional users of marketing automation and orchestration then for us this would simply never happen. If buyers aren’t ready – based on their actual empirical behaviours and not misleading sales tactics – then there’s no need for us to ever force square pegs into round holes. We simply put them into back into then nurturing pot and strategically drip and nurture them until they are ready to buy.


People often can’t (or more often won’t) answer BANT questions accurately or honestly which is a major flaw in the lead generation/interruption marketing model. Prospects often don’t know the right answers to BANT because they are either too early in the buying process (in which case drip marketing and lead nurturing becomes essential) or because, like most businesses, they are fluid by nature and have constantly changing timelines and budget priorities. Only 20% to 30% of purchases are now pre-budgeted* and 70% to 80% of buyers obtain approval for their expenditure after they have evaluated whatever it is they are purchasing*.  Worse, if the prospect is indeed in buying mode then insisting they state the obvious to BANT questions simply irritates them! 

*DemandGen

Sticking too closely to the BANT formula can have additional negative effects. It can cause you to ignore other potentially high impact leads, especially if you are overly conditional and prescriptive with the qualification criteria. Things like budget, need and timeline can and do change dramatically at any given moment so being reliant on a prospects responses from one single moment in time – while ignoring (or not even seeking to observe) their actual behaviours before or after – is acutely short-sighted. Any salesperson worth their salt will prefer to be engaged with a prospect before they’ve become too fixated and rigid on things like budgets and timescales because they want the opportunity to influence and guide those areas (and help their client establish buying criteria which is favourable to them). Remember too that it often takes a fair period of time and multiple interactions for a lead to even qualify on the BANT scale and if you (or your agency) are ignoring all those targets who are genuine buyers but who are just not ready to buy on the spot then you really are being short-sighted. Prospects no longer follow a linear buying path and you have to nurture them and respond to their needs. Being too prescriptive with things like BANT only serves to actually extend your sales process and worse still; if your competitors are working parallel to you they may have much easier criteria. While you ignore an opportunity because it didn’t meet your inflexible criteria, they swoop in. BANT is almost an anti-sales strategy designed to stop you speaking to anyone who doesn’t represent the dream customer [tweet this].


Modern tools and techniques like marketing automation considerably mitigate the limitations of BANT and traditional lead generation because it incorporates buying behaviour. Rather than someone giving you incorrect or misleading BANT information off the back of interruption marketing (usually done to avoid being inundated with further sales calls), they are far more inclined to engage with you and provide accurate information when they are trying to access content that they are interested in - especially when they feel like they have sought it out themselves. Inbound marketing will always trump outbound. The simple fact of the matter is that until a prospect chooses to engage with you then decision makers will always care more about their own problems and challenges than they will ever care about you. Bashing them over the head with BANT criteria just because it suits you is doomed to failure because prospects who aren’t truly engaged with your brand could really care less about ticking your BANT boxes. Why on earth should they? It is essential therefore that, using content marketing among other things, you first crystallise your expertise in a unique way – a way that actually helps your potential customers do their jobs. In doing so you will respond to their business problems and earn the attention of your audience (instead of assuming you will just get it through a traditional, scattergun, interruption marketing approach). Once you better align the modern buyer journey then you will quickly find that BANT just isn’t necessary because you will clearly observe from their behaviours and interactions when they are ready to buy and customers will naturally open up to you with honest responses.

In summary, we think it’s time to change the acronym of BANT to the following:

Behavioural tracking
Automated marketing & orchestration
No interruption marketing
Triggered communication 

No comments:

Post a Comment