BANT
Budget, Authority, Need, Timing
What is BANT?
- Qualify leads by budget, authority, need, and timing
- Quickly check whether a lead is worth pursuing now
- A classic, simple qualification framework
What BANT changes is not the number of questions but how sales time is allocated. Meetings that used to be booked in the order inquiries arrived, or in the order of whoever was friendliest, now depend on how many of the four items have been confirmed. What you confirm goes into the CRM one line at a time, and at next week’s pipeline meeting the talk shifts from “it feels like it’ll close” to whether the budget is confirmed and the title of the person in the approval chain.
The four items don’t carry equal weight. What actually determines when a contract is signed is Need and Timing, and Budget should be read not as “is there a budget?” but as “is there a reason to create a new one?” For items like training or consulting, which are budgeted annually, next year’s budget is usually finalized between September and November, so a lead you meet in this window deserves high priority even if the Budget box is empty right now. The later frameworks, MEDDIC and CHAMP, put the customer’s challenge first for the same reason.
Pinning conversion criteria to numbers cuts down on arguments between departments. For example, promote a lead to SQL once Need is confirmed and at least two of the other three are filled; if there’s Need but the timeline is more than six months out, move it to a nurture list and follow up once a quarter. With the criteria documented, marketing and sales stop trading blame over “poor MQL quality” and instead discuss which item is missing.
The most common mistake is grilling the prospect on all four items in the first call. If you ask “What budget have you set aside?” as your second question, right after the greeting, the prospect gives you a number to compare quotes and ends the conversation. Another is the misconception that “if they aren’t the decision-maker, there’s nothing to pursue.” At most Korean companies, training and solution purchases are drafted by a working-level employee and approved from above, so if you miss the drafter, you lose your only path to the approval chain. Disqualifying every lead that fails a BANT criterion also tends to leave the pipeline empty six months later. Use it as a checklist for spotting gaps, not as a sieve for screening people out, and carry each gap over as an agenda item for the next meeting.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Jaehyuk ParkHands-on instructor in B2B technical sales and AI-driven sales strategyA framework said to have been developed at IBM for qualifying sales leads. The name comes from the initials of Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing.
Let’s walk through a hypothetical case. The HR team at Company A, an auto-parts manufacturer with 320 employees, received a website inquiry asking for leadership training materials for team leaders. The consulting firm’s sales rep was juggling 12 similar inquiries at once, with six weeks left before quarter-end. In a 30-minute first call, they had to decide where to concentrate their time.
- When the sales rep asked, “Is this year’s training budget already confirmed?”, the HR associate said that of the annual KRW 40 (≈ US$1) million, KRW 12 million (≈ US$8,980) was left for the first half, and anything beyond that would need a separate approval request.
- Asked, “Who submits the approval request, and how far up does sign-off go?”, the assistant manager said they draft it themselves, the HR director reviews it, and the Head of Management Support gives final approval. The person on the call wasn’t the decision-maker but the drafter.
- The surface request was for leadership training, but about 20 minutes into the call it emerged that the real background was a team-leader feedback score of 2.8 out of 5 in last year’s organizational survey and nine newly promoted team leaders appointed all at once.
- Asked, “When are you looking to start?”, they answered that it had to be wrapped up before the regular October personnel reshuffle. Working backward, the approval request had to be submitted by mid-August.
- The sales rep promoted this lead, with three of four items confirmed, to SQL and booked a diagnostic meeting for the third week of July, on the condition that the division head attend. The result was a KRW 18 million (≈ US$13,500) contract within three weeks of the proposal, and the average time spent per lead fell from 4.2 hours to 2.5 hours.