Is BANT a Sales Process or a Man-Made Disaster?

Do you ever circle back, repurpose slide decks and proposals, become nostalgic, rewatch movies or TV series?

When my son was small, he loved watching the same movies and shows over and over again.  We watched The Lion King with him around one hundred times and Brother Bear another fifty times.  When he got older, we watched Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, Elf, School of Rock, and Grown Ups every year.  He’ll be 23 in four months, will complete his Masters Degree program in December, and has really gotten into a TV Series that my wife and I watched in 2018.  I believe the TV series, 24, is one of the best shows ever (as ranked by episode ending cliff hangers and the need to continue watching) for sleep depravation, and more than 20 years later, it’s still a great show.  This is a 2018 article about 24 and how you can double your revenue.

Circling back again, another topic I tackled in the past was this 2018 article about BANT.

Last week, I noticed that people are still using this archaic and overly simplistic sales qualifying process, and too many are still writing about the benefits of BANT (Acronym for Budget, Authority, Need, Timing).  The first page of this Google search reveals 10 articles written about BANT in 2024 alone.

How is it that in 2024, people are still hailing BANT as some kind of relevant and beneficial sales tool?  Here are three reasons why they keep at it and my response to them:

1. Some suggest that it’s great as a lead scoring tool.  If you enjoy burning through leads because the leads don’t meet the requirements of BANT, then please, go right ahead and use it to score your leads.  As I’ve written before, MOST attempts to qualify an opportunity, prior to uncovering a compelling reason to buy from you, will result in disqualification.  Why?  Until there is an agreed upon compelling to buy, the prospect has no incentive to enter into any qualification conversation. Period.
2. Some suggest that it’s a great qualifying process.  If you’re among those who think that the existence of those four things qualifies an opportunity then your salespeople probably have win rates below 20%.  There are at least ten additional qualification criteria that aren’t represented by BANT!
3. Some suggest that it’s a sufficient sales process.  In what world would four steps be sufficient to accomplish the primary intent of a sales process as a framework which, when followed, achieves consistent and repeatable results.  Further, a sales process has a minimum of four stages EACH with anywhere from a handful to a dozen milestones.  But sure, proceed with four.

The recent articles about BANT generally fall into two categories:

1. Uninformed: The typical proponents of BANT are non-sales experts, often marketing people or marketers of a software application, who have little to no real-world sales experience or expertise beyond a general understanding of inbound/outbound.  Today, everyone has a platform and those people/platforms create a tremendous amount of noise.  It’s important to understand the experience and context of every writer, blogger, podcaster and author you read and if they have the depth and breadth of expertise and experience in sales, sales management, sales leadership, and sales consulting in order to determine whether their message is reliable.
2. Informed: These are written by bonafide sales experts who know that BANT is as outdated as a horse-drawn carriage and a manual typewriter.  You won’t find any legit sales experts who will urge you to adopt BANT for your sales organization.

There is a time and place for nostalgia, reruns, repurposing and revisiting.  BANT should never be in that category.  Need help?

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