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Hey Sales People, Discovery Calls & BANT Aren’t Good Enough. Do This Instead.

You should look to move the needle for customers, not ask questions like a survey.

Questions related to budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT) in discovery calls are undisputedly essential information that every sales rep needs to accumulate. Any SDR needs to pass this information to an Account Executive if the account has any hope of being closed.

Unfortunately, BANT often causes salespeople to stick to a memorized list. And there’s nothing worse for a prospect than to feel like they’re being surveyed in a standard survey. People are emotional creatures so salespeople must create an amazing buyer’s journey when they’re looking for problems to solve.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that BANT is not useful. All I’m saying is that BANT tends to create a robotized sales process that won’t move the needle for decision-makers who are exploring ways to solve a problem. So if you’re a rep or leader looking for amazing sales conversations, then here’s a way to craft one.

Emotions, Banks, and Solutions.

Buyers know that they need to answer questions when they’re booked for a meeting with a rep. As a consequence of BANT homogenizing of sales meetings, and the juniorfication of the SDR role, we can reasonably assume that buyers have some expectation of what’s to come (i.e. a drain survey of questions).

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So right out of the get-go, salespeople looking to distinguish themselves from the competition have a strong opportunity by not going full-out with questions. I achieve these outcomes by leveraging what I like to call the “emotional bank account”. Think of the emotional bank account as a simple game of giving and receiving in a conversation. The main benefit is that both parties have a more engaged discussion.

The end-goal of the game is to achieve balance in accounts — that is that of appropriate balance information flowing between both parties. The rules are as follows:

Every time a salesperson asks a question, they withdraw money from the buyer’s account to their own account. Conversely, and this is critical, every time the buyer gets informed on critical information on solving their problem then we have a deposit to the buyer’s account.

People have Google to look-up information, so it’s so critical we guide them to their solution.

The worst thing that can happen is to waste a meeting and have the customer confused on what your product does.

Evidence from Gong.io is consistent with this narrative. The AI company revealed from 39,000 sales calls that typical discovery questions, especially with C-Level executives, has a “strong negative correlation” with the chance of the deal closing. Essentially, what such demonstrates is that buyers need to be given something on these calls. After all, they did book the meeting to find something out. And here’s precisely where “deposits” come into play.

Depositing

Depositing to the buyer, in short, fundamentally means informing the buyer on what problem your solution fixes. So framing the discussion from a solution-oriented perspective gets the buyer to start thinking about how they can use your solution in their own organization.

Deposits can take shape through:

1. Informing the buyer on movements shaping the market.
2. Demonstrating use-cases of how other companies solved a similar problem.
3. Showing them the vision and path your product can take them.

Getting all three points forms of questions over to the potential buyer educates them on the issue they’re looking to solve, gives you credibility as an expert, and helps them visualize how they can start solving their issues.

But before we get there, salespeople really to have some introspection concerning their product and ask themselves some tough questions. No one has ever improved in comfort so you must check yourself before you wreck yourself. Salespeople need to honestly reflect ask questions like:

1. What is the problem(s) that your product solves?
2. How does implementing your product affect how organizations and people function?
3. Where does your solution fit in the context of a changing market and world?

Answering these questions and being cognizant of potential downsides help shape sales conversations is what’s really going to elevate your buyer’s experience. In the end, they’re buying because they need something, so you must get the information they need from the first second of your meeting.

Presenting Solutions

By far the easiest way to process and encapsulate all 3 of the above comes through telling a story. That’s because stories allow you to deposit information into their account and sets yourself up to ask questions.

Andy Raskin, a sales consultant, presents a beautiful way to present a story through a sales-deck (link to article). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asserting that such elaborate presentations are necessary for initial qualification calls, but I am saying is that you need to give to receive, and stories work best. The beauty of Raskin’s approach of presenting stories encapsulates all 3 essential forms of deposit — market movements that are shaping their respective industries, use-cases from similar companies, and your product’s vision and future path towards addressing the challenges of a changing world.

And if you think about it, stories are essentially a series of continuously changing events that have a start and end-point. What a change of events does to the human brain is it grabs attention. So if the salesperson can educate the buyer while grabbing their attention, then the salesperson has a stronger claim for asking questions that pertain to the BANT criteria.

These stories and narratives that you create to educate your buyers ultimately serve to create stronger buyer’s journeys and help them align with your companies strategic brand and story. In essence, what an excellent story does is blend BANT into a balanced exchange of ideas and insights for the buyer, while gaining critical qualification intelligence for the SDR. The result of such an initial exchange is that your buyer knows who you are, where your product comes from, how you’re currently doing it, and where you want to in the future (the vision). Ultimately, such information helps to create a narrative that drives urgency so the buyer could decide if this is a journey they want to be on. You have to create that sort of dialogue to get them to think about solutions.

You as a salesperson need to be their guide to the market and to the problem you solve with your product. There’s just no other way around it. So frame the story subject matter from your product’s solution.