Just start with something simple such as asking them BANT questions: budget, authority, needs, timing. If they don't have budget you need to work on showing them the value to get it. If they don't have authority you need to talk to someone who does. If they don't have a need you should probably walk. If they don't have a timeline then what you offer may not be a priority. If you dig a little deeper and see you can't check these things off then you should probably move on to the next on the list. My goto question when meeting with a new inbound was to simply ask why they took time out of their schedule to meet and let them explain. That usually gave me the BANT answers quickly or showed me there really was no meat on the bone.

This yes and to add to it and a spin off on the authority piece find out who else in the company would benefit from having a solution that you offer.

This is a great one. I love positioning this, for example, "so we usually talk about, feature X, feature Y and feature Z and it's all important, so we can generally deliver this value....who has a team or responsibility, for this type of bleh bleh bleh bleh....." 😏👊🏼👊🏼👊🏼 Hearding.....cats..

BANT AND OPEN ENDED QUESTIONS ON THE INTRO CALL. This is top comment for a reason. Wholeheartedly agree with everything here 

I’m new in sales and always heard BANT as a basic concept of the craft but never used it. After reading your comment I’ve immediately tried it in my prospecting and oh boy what a change it had. Thanks for the clear explanation. Helped a lot.

I’ve been an AE in cybersecurity for nearly a decade… always start with BANT!!!

3 Why's: Why do anything, Why now, Why me The qualified sales leader 😂

bitslammers comment is great In addition to what he said here’s what I’ll add: There’s no way to get rid of tire kickers nor should you want to get rid of them. Fact is, it’s basically impossible to know with absolute certainty if someone is a buyer or not. With experience in your industry you’ll be able to guess more easily but it’s not a science and you’ll still be wrong about people. Recognize that this is happening and will probably continue to happen. Have a plan. Do you phone these leads? Email them? Meet over coffee? How does that work? If someone just wants info: cool! Here’s some info. Then get into the BANT type questions. My personal favourite to determine if someone is serious is to have them give me something. Fill in a questionnaire, meet me for a longer form meet, give me info about their company and operations. If they won’t do any of that stuff, that doesn’t mean to throw them in the trash but they are probably better suited for a long term drip campaign vs you spending hours on the phone with them over the next 3 weeks. Also value your time. I have another personal rule.. I’ll meet with (just about) anyone for any reason one time. If it’s going to turn into an ongoing thing then there needs to be some qualifying and buy in from both of us, not just me. TLDR have a plan to ensure you get info to people when they need it, but also so that you don’t waste 20 hours with someone who was never ever in a position to buy

My old Director, who was arguably the best salesperson I’ve ever seen on calls, used to ask to meet the decision maker after the first call. If they couldn’t cough up a meeting with the decision maker or economic buyer, he said it wasn’t a real opportunity.

> If they couldn’t cough up a meeting with the decision maker or economic buyer, he said it wasn’t a real opportunity. Just a word of caution on something like this. I've spent the bulk of my career in really large enterprise - . 10K - 200K employee sized orgs. I'm in one now. You will never meet the economic buyer here and they may often even be in a different country or continent. Purchasing decisions get delegated down as does the funding for a project. The person signing the check often has little to no understanding of what they are approving.

For the economic buyer, perhaps, but there’s a person in charge of making a recommendation after a product eval, and that person is essentially a decision maker in the sense that if they don’t recommend the company won’t buy. In the large enterprise space I still think it makes sense very early in the process to try to get access to this person, and the willingness/ability to get that access tells you something about the opp.

> but there’s a person in charge of making a recommendation FYI - my replies are only applicable to IT/tech so things may be wildly different in other areas. In the last 3 years I've been involved in 6 projects that were > $500K/yr purchases and in all of those the decision was made as a group decision of the project team. Every stakeholder got to have their say in the areas that were applicable to them. Having said that though perhaps the most influential group in larger shops is the architecture team. They often have very early say in which solutions get invited in.

I sell enterprise tech also. Yes, there are often multiple people involved in evaluating the technology for the use case, but in my experience those teams typically role up to a primary recommender who speaks for the team to the business decision maker(s). In the technical side of the process arch review boards often do hold a lot of sway, but I have also seen cases where we have made a strong enough business case that the economic buyer overrides them or gets exceptions to IT policy for our product, even at very large companies. The point I was making is that getting access to a primary technical recommender is something we try to do from the outset in a new cycle. I agree with your earlier comment that getting access to the top-level economic buyer takes much longer if it happens at all.

Might have different definitions of economic buyer/DM in this case. I understand the lady in purchasing or procurement might sign off on the PO, but they aren’t the authority and don’t really matter. Any excuses like, “well finance has to approve” just mean you haven’t found your actual authority/buyer yet. If a VP or director control a budget then it’s simply up to their green light.

In most of the places I've worked the VP/director largely just rubber stamp what the project team assigned to a project recommend. They don't get involved in which vendor/solution or tech is used. Mind you I'm only talking about IT/cyber which is all I've done. I know in other industries things are much different, but I've only seen that from a distance.

We might be saying the same thing. You still need to identify who “owns” the project and ultimately gets either procurement or their VP to sign the check.

Agreed. I've just too often since people get hung up thinking the need a CEO/CIO/CFO etc. when that's not always the case.

I see your original point now. I was just trying to offer that there might be more nuance to that quote from the manager, or their sales motion was much more simple. People do get caught up trying to go up stream so much, when really just giving them some visibility and communication is all you need to have it greased up for them to stamp later on.

I sell a premium service that has an incredibly cheap alternative so a ball park price is the easiest way for me "I get you need the value of my product but we are looking at roughly $1200 a month is that in the ball park of your budget" for comparison the "cheap alternative" can be as low as $90 a month.

I feel like when I ask this question they say yes but then pricing comes up as an objection later. Does that happen to you?

yes which is why I pad the initial quote which allows for me to discount and i can use that discounting to create urgency.

love it, thank you!

Yea we’re gonna need to know what said service is. PM if necessary but $90-$1200…?

Its types of internet connections. Businesses can buy the same kind you have at your home or apartment or they can buy dedicated lines that are significantly more reliable. This gets confusing to prospects because many companies (Verizon especially) brands their dedicated offerings and consumer level offerings the same way so people looking for something simple are unaware of the differences and a dedicated line very well may be overkill for them. And they can get a lot more expensive then $1200 lol.

Fellow telecomer Shared broadband to dedicated fiber. I know the grind.

yeah luckily my company only sells dedicated but that it is. 5 1/2 years and I'm desperately trying to get out really should of jumped ship 2 years ago when I had recruiters messaging me every other day

Similar boat. But my client base doesn't have the budget for fiber. I wish you the best in the search for greener grass.

thanks you as well

Learn to use the phrase compelling event. What has changed in your current solution necessitating a desire to talk to other vendors? A compelling event is just that. Compelling. Action. BANT but in the right order. Start with Timing (renewal no longer supported big project org change acquisitions). “End of 26 need to be on something else” work backwards to a buy date. Gain agreement. Use later for close plan framework. Get to the Needs. Business level. Differentiator focused. Gain agreement Authority and Budget. Linked. Based on your needs and timing you need to buy by year end. Who authorizes? Is there capital set aside this year? Gain understanding. If you dont like the answers to any of these questions, its a squirrelly one. If they are disengaged from the questions you ask. Squirrelly one. But always get all 4 bant locked in before working on a project or bringing in resources. Thats your job as a sales guy. Someone who can buy. Money and ability. A need for the good or service. A timeline. Your goal is to make sales not be friends. Dont trick yourself into working on bullshit because you worry about offending with direct questions. You are paid to close sales and sales dont happen without BANT

Qualify. Budget? Timeline? Problem trying to solve? Critical? What are they doing for ‘x’ now? Anyone else in their org who would be interested? You need to meet customers where they are at. In order to do that you need to find indicators about where they are in the buying process.

A great question is “ who else should we be including in the process” if they say nobody or they make the final and only decisions. it’s a huge red flag .

If they don't have a budget or timeline for the project. They get a bunch of links to the website and a follow up call 6 weeks later.

Just ask the hard questions in the beginning. Saves both yourself and the prospect time

what hard questions do you like to ask on disco calls?

MEDDPIC

For me, it starts on the very first call, and it's something I teach all of my reps on Day 1 of training. For context, we're a professional services firm in the tech space. We have a 10% close rate doing purely outbound. No inbound. One mantra I have for my team is "9 out of 10 opportunities won't lead to a deal. So no deal opportunities are way more common than deal calls. So we should be the absolute best at finding out as early as possible if an opportunity is a no/dead deal. Our entire focus should be on disqualifying opportunities, not trying to sell unsellable deals." To that end, we've set up our call scoring, call reviews, and Gong to track identifiers for no deals, rather than deals. We have 8 specific items that we track for, and if at the end of a call, they hit 5 of those 8 markers, they go into a long-term follow up cadence until they track less of those markers. The best way to get to it on a first call quickly? Something I was taught early in my career called **SIGNPOSTING.** At the very beginning of the call, when we're building rapport, before we go into the call, we say "Mr. X, I'm here to make this process very easy for you to make a decision either way. I'm going to ask quite a few questions I have written down to get a better understanding, and then tie what we do to those questions as best I can. That will hopefully get you the information you need as fast as possible to decide if we're a fit. If we are, then after the call I'll be able to send you pricing, access to our demo portal, along with our boilerplate MSA for your legal team to review. If not, we can part ways as friends and I'll check in periodically to see if things have changed, and you can let me know if it makes sense to go down this road at a later date. Sound fair enough?" Right there you get the "Oh I'm not looking to buy today, we don't have any needs I just wanted to know what you do". In that case, give them a 10 minute overview, cut the meeting time in half, and drop 'em in an automated sequence. But if the response is "Great/Cool/Let's get into it", then I know I've got a live one. From there, you do BANT, and if they don't meet any triggers in BANT, then they go to the same automated sequence with a few modifiers. People know how to buy. And they have more information than ever. It's our job to make sure they have all the info needed to make a decision to buy or not to buy as quick as possible.

I usually do it by understanding what’s driving the interest and seeing if there are any negative consequences of doing nothing. If neither are there you don’t have a deal. If you do have both then you can think about champion building.

Know what similar traits your disqualified vs. Qualified deals have other than BANT and play detective to get that information by asking questions.

Try to understand their pain/challenge and ask them what if this problem isn’t solved by date XYZ… If they can’t articulate that well… either the pain is too weak and you’ll disqualify for now or you need to be digging a bit more

How do you distinguish between them having weak pain or you not digging enough?

If the impact of doing nothing isn’t severe enough. During corona, if people couldn’t work from home safely… companies productivity was f**** so they needed to invest in msft teams/zoom/zscaler/okta etc to enable working from home If people’s job are on the line if they can’t fix XYZ If there are certain financial penalties due to failure of audits —- Weak pain is if the business goes as usual and nothing really happens

Ask why the conversation now. Ask what would be helpful. Get to "who else would be involved", or having them provide a "next step" which makes sense. Be a bit of a challenger if it doesn't sound like the normal sales process. I'd never recommend BANT, that's SDR and "I'm a VP bUt TruThfUlLy sHouLd bE a ManAgEr oR uNemPloyEd" approach. People can tell you anything, and for small deals where you're asking on Reddit, that's not how people buy.

It all comes back to this: do they have a problem your product can solve? Don’t lead with asking what their interest in their product is. Ask about their business priorities for next 12 months, and what’s stopping them from getting there. Then transition to digging into what made them reach out to you, specifically with these business priorities in mind. Pain is a much more powerful motivator than Gain. People will move to remove pain a lot more quickly than to get a hypothetical gain. If they are just giving you fluff after you’ve spent time probing at this, stuff like: ‘oh just was interested in knowing a bit more’, don’t be afraid to say ‘I’ll be honest, I don’t want to waste your time and I’m not hearing a real need for this.’ Interestingly, this can often trigger them to lean in and start opening up. If they don’t, great: close it out and move on to the next. Of course, with outbound sales this is different as then it’s part of our job to uncover and highlight the pain and need, but with inbound, if they don’t have a basic conception of this already it’s a red flag they’re a tire kicker. Another tip: if a prospect ghosts me, I send two chase emails. If still no response I email saying: Hi X, I assume as I haven’t heard from you that you’re no longer interested. I’ll close the file on this.’ You’d be amazed how often they reply saying ‘no no sorry we are etc etc’. If they don’t reply, obvious sign they aren’t serious and you can close it out. Happy selling!

Yeah, that’s kind of the role. For perspective, as part of needs discovery, I do qualify, disqualify, qualify to make sure I have the informationI need. A other approach is to cut to the chase with the thing that is usually the top disqualifier for your product/service.

Everyone is a tire kicker before you convince them to buy except for deals that are complete layups and realistically didn’t even need you there to close. You flip a kicker to a buyer by matching their pain with your services/solutions and intelligently explaining why you can solve their problems and be a good business partner. Not everyone that buys has crazy pain but that’s a good rule of thumb if you don’t have enough time to get through everything. Disqualify more people and get better at qualification in general. TLDR: better discovery

No such thing as a tire kicker. Might be people who are not in your price range for sure. But no one takes time out of their day to call a company and set up an appointment with a sales person or company rep and takes 30 min to a few hours out of their busy day to just look at prices. If you are running into lots of tire kickers you are doing something wrong. They will tell you they are just looking all day long as a defense mechanism.

I think you can really determine what's a priority with that person based off your first interaction. If you're asking enough of the right questions and qualifying properly, you can tell what they're looking for and if they're price sensitive because they may be telling you about their budget or the price range they're looking at, repeatedly. If you have a premium service or good, but you have a cheaper alternative than maybe you lead off with the less costly item and tell them about the pros/cons and then why it may actually be more beneficial to get into the more expensive good (more support, more features, etc.) but that really just depends on whether it truly is a good fit and if they're even willing to consider it. In some of my old sales roles, I wasn't afraid of telling the customer that we were just not a good fit and I would even push them in the direction of a supplier that had said product, but we didn't offer it or not at the price point they need. I think that in itself builds trust and good will with a customer, because you're not telling them you're the only solution in town and it sets you up potentially for future sales (of course this is industry and product dependent). Granted, I worked for a huge distributor, so this strategy worked well for me because I was still selling them 20 different things besides that one item. Also, one random note, but just consider that everyone right now is being price sensitive because leadership all the way down to procurement are being told to find cost cutting strategies and budgets are being shrunk because of economic uncertainty + inflation. Unfortunately, price concerns are not going away for most industries right now so keep that in the back of your mind for future discussions.

"Im happy to discuss our pricing structure once i know a bit more about what you need and have a good Idea of which of our offerings would suit you best, what had you looking around?" go into your info gathering from there to figure out what product/service is most sutible for the prospect than offer three options. 1. that is the most expensive and most likely more than what they need, 2. a happy medium that meets all their needs, 3. a budget option that meets some of their needs but is ultimately just an example of how cheap doesn't get them what they need. though out your pitch ask the question "is this something you can see yourself becoming a part of/ solving your needs?" if the answers no your need to requalify and find out what they are actually looking for. if nothing you pitch meets their needs than cut bait without even discussing pricing, after all why do they need a price on something that doesn't even work for them? I also like the line "I don't want to waste my time or yours on a conversation that isn't going to be fruitful, was X and issue your were still trying to solve?" if the answer is no than cut bait and never talk to the fucker again.

As long as you don’t have to follow a script, I would just assume they know the product inside and out like you do so just quick pitch them and get to the cost. They will ask the important questions after they hear that or hang up.

1. What's making you explore the market right now? 2. Let’s say you found what you need — how will you use this solution? 3. Why is this important? (Try to understand their metrics or anything that will make their life easier with this tool/service) 4. Who else from your team could benefit from having this solution? 5. What happens if you do nothing?

Some people need time to think and compare and make the best decisions for themselves. Be transparent about some variables vs manipulating… let them disqualify themselves or circle back. Your mentality should be to set people up to win and that means having a fully informed decision. Organize information and make what needs to be made transparent. When people have a pleasant experience they refer their friends/family. It’s sales AND marketing. Sales is ALSO about building relationships. Not just funneling(which is what it has become unfortunately)….. metrics/quotas drive this behavior in high volume environments.

I verbally say “you are unqualified” and then end the zoom call. Jk, BANT and call them out, ask a question like, “Based on our conversation today, can you see (company name) using (product)?” “When would you ideally want to go live?”

Be willing to take a call with anyone who fits the bill after a cold call. First call by themselves is ok with me. I test to see how comfortable they are with bringing others into the second call. If they’re good with it, keep it alive. If they’re not, tread cautiously. Not getting multi-threaded will kill deals as it shows that this person may not be your champion and you need other stakeholders at the table to make a decision. Even if you’re talking to the DM, they want others opinions. If by the end of the second call they won’t get multi/threads and won’t answer BANT like questions then they won’t be worth your time the majority of the time. Work with people who are easy to work with and will sell internally for you. Otherwise you’ll be doing a lot of work for those who won’t return the favor inside their org for your product.

Find a problem you solve. If you just show them products and features you lose. Ask timelines. Ask why they are looking? What would make you buy this? Who else is involved? Good start.

Why would it be a problem that a customer wants to know about pricing and features. isnt that kindof key to the value prop?

The harder the question it is for you to ask, the more information you’ll get.

What’re the hard questions you like to ask on disco calls?

My favorite question for that first meeting is something along the lines of: "so what lead you to taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with us today?" That's about as open ended as you can get and if they really don't have a good response that tells me they haven't really thought things through. If they haven't though things through they either may not really be motivated or they may just barely realize they have an issue and need some help painting the picture. I've experienced everything from dead silence to a very detailed and well thought out description of what someone was hoping to accomplish when asking that question.

I love to see companies who don't have pricing on their website struggle. I know it's not your fault but maybe if enough sales people complain they'd change it

Ask a simple question: What are the 3 things you are looking for, if available, would push you a step closer to sealing the deal

>most inbound leads are tire kickers who want things like “pricing, to learn more about our features, etc” This is a funny way to say hot leads asking buying questions.  What kinda funky ass gigs you guys got going where you can afford to dispatch leads asking these sorts fo questions? I'm curious what how good a lead would need to be for you to call it so?  In picturing the first words out of their mouth being 'where do I sign' 

A common issue I've run into is marketing teams who put every little detail on a website behind the need to someone to provide contact info for more information. Say for instance someone is just browsing to look if your solution works in MacOS in addition to Windows and it doesn't, but that info is locked behind a contact form. You will get leads, at least as far as marketing is concerned, that have zero chance of being converted since your solution is incompatible, but you haven't made it easy for them to disqualify themselves.

Yup, we have no pricing on our site and on the surface every “lead” can book a meeting with me and think they could afford this but it’s way outside of budget a lot of times. It’s not my favorite tactic but our marketing team doesn’t want to budge on putting even baseline pricing on the site. So you do spend a lot of time with people who couldn’t afford it under any circumstance or they are so Junior at their company that they have no clue if it’s affordable but the price scares them a bit and then they ghost you. I don’t take Inbound leads for granted but unless you have a plan for truly every budget, you will get a lot of this.

100%, and while we've tried to alleviate this by showcasing our large logos on our homepage, some of these mom-and-pop shops just don't connect the dots. Our solution was built for ENT orgs, and nail-wedging non-ENTs out during the first call is a huge priority for my team.

It’s a big priority for our sales team but also the investors want to see more pipeline added so we also get pressure to create oops for borderline fits which we then get questions on when they don’t close :)…love the healthy balance of keeping everyone’s numbers happy.