I had some work done on my home recently. While he was there, I
asked the bricklayer how business was for him at the moment. He told me
he was incredibly busy doing quotations for jobs, visiting two
prospective customers every night of the week and then spending all day
Saturday and Sunday evening pricing the work up in detail and producing
formal quotations..
But despite running himself ragged and using virtually all his spare time on this sales work, only a small proportion of the quotes were actually converting to real business.
So what is his problem? It's not the quality of his work (he did a great job for me), it's not his references (he is well up on the top page of the independent Check-a-Trade site) and it's not his prices, he seems quite competitive.
No, his problem is one of qualification. Or rather his problem is one of a lack of qualification - leading, leading him to waste his precious time on people who are never going to buy and starving his prospects who might well buy of his attention.
So what is qualification?
Qualification is sales speak for the process of identifying the prospects that are really serious about committing to a purchase within a relatively short space of time. It sorts the wheat from the chaff, the genuine purchasers from the tyre kickers. It is a process which will save you time (by not spending it on people who aren't going to buy) and improve your sales (because you have more time to devote to the people who will buy).
Ever bought a car?
The term 'tyre kicker' (or tire, depending on where you are from) emanates from the motor trade and describes the sort of person who would come around frequently and 'kick the tyres' on a car they liked, ask a whole bunch of questions, get the sales person to jump through numerous hoops, but never actually make a decision to buy.
The more experienced sales people don't get caught up in this game though; they are happy letting a more junior colleague or indeed even a competitive car lot look after them. They know these types of people will waste their time and can distract them from spending time with the people who are more likely to buy.
But I don't sell cars, I sell serious B2B stuff!
It actually doesn't make much difference whether we are selling B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer). In fact, the more complex the product or service and the longer the sales cycle, the more important qualification becomes. The cost of presales activities can rapidly mount up - customer meetings, responding to requirements documents, writing proposals, doing demonstrations and trials etc.
Try working out the 'all in' cost of a day of your time and that of your colleagues who work with you on presales activities (i.e. salary, benefits, holidays etc) then multiply that by all the activities you do as part of a typical presales cycle on a single opportunity - the numbers very quickly get quite scary.
Even for small bids this can easily run into thousands of dollars/pounds/euros and for larger bids it can run into tens or hundreds of thousands (or indeed millions). This is why larger organisations will normally have very strict qualification criteria that are applied when determining the resources that get allocated to big bids.
So how do we get started with this qualification business?
Fortunately the qualification process doesn't need to be particularly complex. In fact to start with, there are just four basic things we need to know in order to get an initial idea of how viable our prospect is.
And as with many business techniques, we take a key word from each of the steps then create an easy to remember acronym. In this case, the acronym is BANT.
Qualification, BANT style
So what does BANT stand for? Let's take a look.
B is for Budget. Does the prospect have a budget established for this project, or are they just at the fact-finding stage? The key thing to remember here is that No Budget=No Sale.
A is for Authority. Who is the budget holder? Who has the authority to make decisions? Is the person we are dealing with at this level or can they provide with access to the someone with this level of authority? If we can't access the decision maker/budget holder, our chances of selling are much reduced.
N is for Need. What is the driving force behind the project, what is the need? This is also sometimes referred to as the pain or the compelling event. Without a painful need it is hard to sell.
T is for Timescale. Where is the prospect in their decision making process and when do they anticipate making a purchase? Ideally we would like prospects where there is a defined closure timetable and with there being sufficient time for us to influence the decision.
So now we have the basic criteria for qualification, but how do we find out the answers to the questions?
I can't just ask them can I?
This is something that people new to sales can get a bit hung up over. There can be a tendency just to respond to the prospects questions and to think that it is too direct or too 'salesy' to ask the questions that help us to establish their position on each of the BANT elements.
It would of course be a bit odd if we just launched in with "have you got a budget, do you make the decisions, what is your need, when are you making a decision etc", we need to be a bit more subtle than this. Spending some time learning and implementing a questioning skills methodology will reap enormous dividends and is something that highly recommended. Having effective questioning skills is one of the biggest differentiators between highly successful sales people and their peers.
So let's assume we have found our way of asking the right questions and we have established where our prospect is against the BANT criteria. But, either answer isn't clear, or is in the negative, what do we do then?
What happens if they fail the BANT test?
The answer to this is, it depends! We will explore this in greater detail in a future article, but in brief our options are:
So what have learnt here?
But despite running himself ragged and using virtually all his spare time on this sales work, only a small proportion of the quotes were actually converting to real business.
So what is his problem? It's not the quality of his work (he did a great job for me), it's not his references (he is well up on the top page of the independent Check-a-Trade site) and it's not his prices, he seems quite competitive.
No, his problem is one of qualification. Or rather his problem is one of a lack of qualification - leading, leading him to waste his precious time on people who are never going to buy and starving his prospects who might well buy of his attention.
So what is qualification?
Qualification is sales speak for the process of identifying the prospects that are really serious about committing to a purchase within a relatively short space of time. It sorts the wheat from the chaff, the genuine purchasers from the tyre kickers. It is a process which will save you time (by not spending it on people who aren't going to buy) and improve your sales (because you have more time to devote to the people who will buy).
Ever bought a car?
The term 'tyre kicker' (or tire, depending on where you are from) emanates from the motor trade and describes the sort of person who would come around frequently and 'kick the tyres' on a car they liked, ask a whole bunch of questions, get the sales person to jump through numerous hoops, but never actually make a decision to buy.
The more experienced sales people don't get caught up in this game though; they are happy letting a more junior colleague or indeed even a competitive car lot look after them. They know these types of people will waste their time and can distract them from spending time with the people who are more likely to buy.
But I don't sell cars, I sell serious B2B stuff!
It actually doesn't make much difference whether we are selling B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer). In fact, the more complex the product or service and the longer the sales cycle, the more important qualification becomes. The cost of presales activities can rapidly mount up - customer meetings, responding to requirements documents, writing proposals, doing demonstrations and trials etc.
Try working out the 'all in' cost of a day of your time and that of your colleagues who work with you on presales activities (i.e. salary, benefits, holidays etc) then multiply that by all the activities you do as part of a typical presales cycle on a single opportunity - the numbers very quickly get quite scary.
Even for small bids this can easily run into thousands of dollars/pounds/euros and for larger bids it can run into tens or hundreds of thousands (or indeed millions). This is why larger organisations will normally have very strict qualification criteria that are applied when determining the resources that get allocated to big bids.
So how do we get started with this qualification business?
Fortunately the qualification process doesn't need to be particularly complex. In fact to start with, there are just four basic things we need to know in order to get an initial idea of how viable our prospect is.
And as with many business techniques, we take a key word from each of the steps then create an easy to remember acronym. In this case, the acronym is BANT.
Qualification, BANT style
So what does BANT stand for? Let's take a look.
B is for Budget. Does the prospect have a budget established for this project, or are they just at the fact-finding stage? The key thing to remember here is that No Budget=No Sale.
A is for Authority. Who is the budget holder? Who has the authority to make decisions? Is the person we are dealing with at this level or can they provide with access to the someone with this level of authority? If we can't access the decision maker/budget holder, our chances of selling are much reduced.
N is for Need. What is the driving force behind the project, what is the need? This is also sometimes referred to as the pain or the compelling event. Without a painful need it is hard to sell.
T is for Timescale. Where is the prospect in their decision making process and when do they anticipate making a purchase? Ideally we would like prospects where there is a defined closure timetable and with there being sufficient time for us to influence the decision.
So now we have the basic criteria for qualification, but how do we find out the answers to the questions?
I can't just ask them can I?
This is something that people new to sales can get a bit hung up over. There can be a tendency just to respond to the prospects questions and to think that it is too direct or too 'salesy' to ask the questions that help us to establish their position on each of the BANT elements.
It would of course be a bit odd if we just launched in with "have you got a budget, do you make the decisions, what is your need, when are you making a decision etc", we need to be a bit more subtle than this. Spending some time learning and implementing a questioning skills methodology will reap enormous dividends and is something that highly recommended. Having effective questioning skills is one of the biggest differentiators between highly successful sales people and their peers.
So let's assume we have found our way of asking the right questions and we have established where our prospect is against the BANT criteria. But, either answer isn't clear, or is in the negative, what do we do then?
What happens if they fail the BANT test?
The answer to this is, it depends! We will explore this in greater detail in a future article, but in brief our options are:
- Stop now - this isn't going to go anywhere
- Put it on hold - wait until either the prospect can get more information or the situation changes
- Proceed with caution - despite not meeting the BANT criteria, we may decide to proceed anyway, on the basis that it will meet the criteria in due course.
So what have learnt here?
- If we don't qualify our opportunities, we can spend a lot of time and energy on activities that are going nowhere. This will limit the number of deals we close and therefore restrict our income.
- There is a simple formula to help us qualify opportunities known as BANT - Budget, Authority, Need and Timescale.
- We need to know how to effectively ask questions that provide us with the information we need to qualify.
- Failing the BANT criteria doesn't necessarily mean we stop working with our prospect, but we need to be cautious.
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By Philip_J_Moore
http://sellevation.com/squeeze-page-10-lead-gen-tactics/
By Philip_J_Moore
http://sellevation.com/squeeze-page-10-lead-gen-tactics/
