A lead is a company or person that might buy. Most leads never will: they do not need the product, cannot pay for it, or are not ready yet. Qualification means finding this out early, so the sales team spends its time where a purchase is realistic, and does not pester people who have no use for the product.
BANT in four questions
BANT is one of the oldest and best-known qualification schemes; it is often traced back to IBM. It checks four things:
Letter | Stands for | The question behind it | Asked politely, for example |
|---|---|---|---|
B | Budget | Can they pay for it? | "How do you usually fund projects like this?" |
A | Authority | Who decides? | "Who else will be involved in choosing a solution?" |
N | Need | Do they have a problem we solve? | "What happens today when a route changes at short notice?" |
T | Timeline | When do they want a solution? | "Is there a date by which this needs to work?" |
After qualifying, a lead usually ends up in one of three places:
Qualified: need, authority, money and timing are there or clearly on their way. The next step is a meeting or an offer.
Nurture: the lead fits, but not now, for example because the budget comes next year. To nurture a lead means staying in touch with useful information until the timing is right, and only as far as the lead has agreed to hear from you.
Disqualify: the lead does not fit and will not fit soon. Active selling stops. That is a good result, not a failure: it saves time on both sides.
Two alternatives
CHAMP puts the customer's problems first: Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritisation. Asking about money before understanding the problem can feel pushy, and the size of the problem often decides whether money is found. Prioritisation asks how important the project is compared with everything else the company is planning.
MEDDIC is used for large, complex deals with many people involved: Metrics (the measurable result the customer expects), Economic buyer (who controls the money), Decision criteria (what the options are judged on), Decision process (the steps and approvals until a signature), Identify pain (the problem behind the purchase) and Champion (who argues for it inside the company). Some teams use longer versions with extra letters.
All three are frameworks, not scripts. Good salespeople ask open questions in a normal conversation and fill in the letters afterwards.
The exercise
The notes in tasks 2 and 4 are about Contoso, a fictional company that sells route planning software to delivery and service companies with at least 10 vehicles, for about 300 euros a month. All companies and people are invented.
Teacher notes
How to run it (about 25 minutes)
10 minutes: read the BANT table and the alternatives together. Ask learners for one example sentence per letter from their own working life.
10 minutes: learners do the four tasks alone. To collect results, open "Use it with a class", copy the class link and read the result codes in the class results page.
5 minutes: discuss the cases where learners disagreed, especially in task 2.
Common mistakes
Putting "Our purchasing department and the head of IT decide together" under budget because purchasing sounds like money. It answers who decides, so it is authority.
Treating "We have no problem with our current system" as an objection to be overcome. For qualification it is information: no need, at least for now.
Sorting Adventure Works under disqualify. They fit well and like the idea; only the timing is wrong because of a new contract. Two years is long, but it is still nurture, with a note to come back before the contract ends.
Seeing the competitor's demo request as a lead. It is not a buying interest. Many companies decline such requests politely.
Follow-up questions
Which of the nine Contoso leads would you call first, and why?
Rewrite one BANT question so it sounds like a normal conversation, not an interview.
What could make a nurture lead qualified tomorrow? (A trigger event, such as a new manager, a new site or an expiring contract: see the buying signals exercise.)
Qualification decides where to spend time. How could points help with that? Try the lead scoring worksheet.