The Case For Moving From Scripted To Conversational Qualifying
( 7 minute read )
How many of your current business processes or systems are 70 years old? How many are 30 years old?
My guess is the answer is a combination of “zero” and “these are dumb questions”. I would agree, however many of B2B sales operations are still using BANT ( 70 years old ) and call scripts ( at least 30 years old ).
In a world that is desperate for data, isn’t it time to modernize the most important stage of your sale?
Let’s start with the premise that deals are won or lost at the Qualifying and Discovery phases. A deal improperly qualified wastes time and inflates forecasts. A deal with either no discovery or one poorly conducted will not enable sellers to properly establish value or, even if there is a business problem, that it can be solved. Deals that languish for months past your average sales cycle duration, deals that end in “no decision”, or where the prospect goes silent will invariably tie back to Qualification and Discovery.
In this article we will focus on Qualifying because Keenan has already written the gold standard for Discovery with “Gap Selling”.
Many businesses today use one of the following methods for qualifying a prospect:
- BANT ( Budget, Authority, Need, Timing )
- ANUM ( Authority, Need, Urgency, Money )
- MEDDIC ( Metrics, Executive, Decision Maker, Decision Process, Identified Pain, Champion )
- SOTP ( Seat Of The Pants )
None of these actually tell you if the opportunity is QUALIFIED or if the business is at a point where a change must be made, meaning that a sale will occur. There are numerous flaws in these models. Let’s start with the bottom two- MEDDIC and SOTP- as the most obviously flawed. SOTP gives no consistency, no data and relies on a salesperson’s gut to say the deal is qualified. Any happy-eared salesperson will qualify almost everyone they talk to in this scenario. The problem here is obvious. When we consider MEDDIC, we see a flaw in the amount of data that must be gathered to determine if the opportunity is qualified. In order to gather all of the information in one or two calls, you need to conduct an inquisition. The other term for that is “pissing off your prospect”.
That leaves us with BANT and ANUM. If I ask someone of they have the authority to make the decision, or who has the authority, what we usually get back is some variation of “it’s my decision”, or that the person we are talking to makes the recommendation to leadership. Invariably, these people rarely have the actual authority to do much more than to gather information. Don’t be fooled by title, unless you are selling SMB there will be few occasions where you are speaking to the “A” in your first or second call. Then we get to “Budget” or “Money”. What happens when we ask questions about money? We get told, “I’m not allowed to tell you that” or we get some bogus number because the prospect fears the price being equal to their budget.
Perhaps the worst part of these methodologies is that you will almost always come across as scripted. You will not be a human engaging another human. It won’t be a conversation and you won’t have the information you really need to decide if you should invest any time in a sales process versus holding the lead in the pipeline stage (MQL) or to realize it is not at all qualified.
A quick story about why I moved my teams off BANT. Several years ago I was CRO at a company where we recorded BDR calls for coaching purposes. I was listening to a call where our BDR was doing a fine job of following our script and the prospect suddenly stopped him and said, “are you BANTing me?”. The tone of the call immediately changed for the worse. As I listened to other calls I started to listen differently and hear the reluctance to answer questions from prospects. Our BDRs were working to pull the information out and many of the answers were as rote as the questions. As we dug deeper into the recordings we realized that our best BDRs were getting better information when they had conversations with prospects. They would joke around, they would ask about where the prospect was geographically, what they did for their company and basically made friends.
It took some time to comprehend the data, understand what we were actually hearing versus what we thought we were hearing and to develop a different approach. What we developed has been honed over the years and across several companies and sales teams into “The 4 W’s” ( if someone can come up with a better name, please do so! )
What this does is to create a natural conversation between the buyer and seller. It is neither confrontational or scripted. Consider when we ourselves engage a salesperson that we are on the defense. Doesn’t it stand to reason that our prospects are as just like us and that we crave human interaction?
Therefore the first thing we have to do then is to create a pattern interrupt that forces the buyer to pay attention and drop their guard. This has to be genuine. Here are the questions to use to guide a conversation with an inbound lead:
- What Happened that you reached out XYZ company?
- Why do you need to solve the problem now?
- Who owns this project?
- When you need to be in production?
(There is a variation for outbound or referred leads that is simply this- “Knowing how packed everyone’s calendars are these days, What Happened that you agreed to this meeting?”)
The prospect is expecting sales questions around their budget, what product are they interested in and when are they buying. Defenses and their theoretical fists are up. They are not prepared for the very human question of being asked what happened and by asking that question ( and then shutting up so they can answer ), you will start to get a wealth of valuable information.
To be clear, we are looking for the business CATALYST and not the business problem because in a B2B sale there is always a catalyst. That means there is a realization at the most senior level that a business problem has moved from PAIN to an UNTENABLE SITUATION, or is headed for an untenable situation. The reason this is so important is that we have been taught to sell to pain, however that is not why people or businesses change. We can endure pain for a long time. What we can’t endure and must rectify is an untenable situation ( more on this in my next article ).
The remaining three questions can be asked in any order during the conversation in whatever manner flows smoothly, so long as they each are asked and answered.
The WHY is your business problem and should have some financial component that is either obvious from the prospects’ description or easy to determine the severity by the rep. In the Discovery phase we will work to determine if the problem is big enough to solve or can be solved by your solution.
WHO owns the project must be a senior executive, meaning “CxO”, “SVP”, “GM” or similar. In today’s world, if there is no senior executive with a mandate then you are heading to no decision or chasing a ghost.
Finally, WHEN is the approximate date they must be in production and returning value. This is not the decision date or when they are buying. We back into those dates from their answer by working a reverse timeline with the prospect. If they need to be in production in 4 months, implementation is 30 days and their internal buy process takes 45-60 days, then both sides need to agree to move quickly and what that entails.
Run a few calls with this methodology and see the difference.
Create text fields in your CRM system so that reps can freeform put in the information they get so that sales leaders and RevOps can dial into patterns for wins and losses.
More critically, run these 4 Ws against your current forecasted deals and see what your confidence is and where there is work to be done.
